iSocial Guest Blog at the Wonderblog

On behalf of the iSocial project team, I was approached to write a guest blog entry for Project Wonderland's Wonderblog. The team at Sun Microsystems recently published the iSocial entry.

You can read it by clicking the following link:

Wonderblog

iSocial Prototype Walkthrough

I took a few minutes today to put together a brief introductory video of our prototype iSocial learning environment. We will be conducting trials with this learning environment beginning this Friday. This represents three months of hard work, and we're proud of what we have to show!

Wonderland's World Builder

How did I go from this


to this?


With the Wonderland World Builder of course.

The world builder is a simple browser-based application that makes it possible to create Wonderland worlds. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, one simply drags tiles onto a 2D grid and positions them. After saving the world, it can be easily accessed from the Wonderland client.

The software itself comes with a set of very functional tiles. It is also possible to create tiles using Blender and the Gimp.

The world builder has been discussed at the Wonderblog.

It would be disingenuous to say that it was easy to set everything up on my development machine. However, the Wonderland Community is refreshingly fast at providing solutions when one gets stuck.

Initial Forays into Sun's Wonderland

Due to a number of technical problems that our team has experienced with the Cobalt build of OpenCroquet, it became apparent to us that it may be in our best interests to investigate an alternative software platform for building the iSocial prototype. Although Cobalt would appear to have a more elegant design, we are unfortunately bound by time constraints, limited manpower and deadlines. Cobalt just isn't mature enough at this point for us to continue building on top of it. Sigh.

We have to consider that our project will be used to teach individuals with Autism social skills. A buggy platform that is overly prone to crashing is not facilitative of this goal - especially with our user population.

The only alternative was obvious - Sun's Wonderland.

I began to look into it last week. I began working with it and setting up a development environment this week. I have to admit that I am impressed. Extremely impressed. I was able to get the client and server software running on multiple platforms (WinXP and Ubuntu 8.04) in no time at all. I was able to install and configure a development environment on Ubuntu in an evening and completely build the source myself by midnight.

The developer community appears to be bigger and more active than with the Cobalt/Croquet project. My questions got answered sometimes in a matter of minutes, sometimes in a few hours. But it never took months like some issues I've posted to the Cobalt/Croquet mailing list. And, gasp, Wonderland actually has forums. It's incomprehensible to me that Cobalt/Croquet still relies on a mailing list.

So after building the source from the latest code contributions that I pulled from CVS, I took the software for a spin and was extremely pleased with what I found. Here's a video:

Update: iSocial Funded!

I haven't posted in quite a while - basically since the Cobalt build was released.

I just wanted to assure everyone that I am indeed very much alive and still working with Croquet/Cobalt. I've just been very busy writing my dissertation proposal (which I defended May 9 and have had accepted - hooray!) and ramping up for full-on development of the iSocial project.

The major news is that iSocial has received a small amount of start-up funds to design and develop a functional prototype. This week is the first week of me working in my official position as project manager for this endeavor. First steps are to create a "generic" Cobalt world that supports all of the functional requirements of the iSocial system and to build a visual design that supports the social skills curriculum we are using. This is an exciting time for us, as things are finally starting to move forward.

We are 100% committed to Open Source. Although our project may not be able to contribute code to the project, we will contribute experience and provide assistance. Our developer will be helping out on the IRC channel, and I'll be putting together the occasional how-to. We are looking in to donating our models and avatars to the project. Stay tuned, as more details are certain to follow.

Two Croquet-Specific Blender Tutorials

Croqueteer Waufrepi has created two tutorials to complement the DMU guides. These are focused on Blender, but are specific to Croquet and will show you how to set up your Croquet exporter in Blender and how to export a Blender 3D model in a format that is compatible with Croquet. Cool!

http://www.youtube.com/user/waufrepi

Cobalt released!

For those of you who have been drooling over this release, it is finally available for download. Be aware that this is a very early build, so you can expect some buggy-funkyness.

Information on Cobalt can be found here: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Cobalt

A direct link to the image is here: http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/cobalt-base-current-build.zip

For the purists, the Monticello repository is here: http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu:8886/

And the bug tracker (you'll need it!): http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/mantis/login_page.php

Tutorial for Building a Simple Croquet World, Part 1: Setting Up a Croquet World

I am working on putting together a tutorial on how to build your own Croquet world. The entire tutorial will consist of 1.) setting up a Croquet world 2.) customizing a Croquet world and 3.) connecting to other Croquet worlds.

I have finished the first installment of the tutorial series, which will instruct you on how to set up your own Croquet world. Because of the volume of the tutorial, it made sense to make it available as a PDF.

You can download the PDF here.

As always, your feedback and suggestions for improvement are welcome and encouraged.

How To Set Up VNC in a Croquet World

Introduction

I have witnessed quite a few folks asking how they can get VNC running within a Croquet world. Thanks to the excellent KCroquetParticipant subclass, getting VNC up and running within a Croquet world is a fairly easy task. However, to date, nobody has provided a reasonable explanation for non-technical users to perform this task. This tutorial will instruct you on how to do just this.

An explanation of what VNC is and why it is useful is beyond the scope of this tutorial. For more information on VNC, a good starting point is at the Wikipedia entry for VNC.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this tutorial, you will be able to run a VNC server on a host computer, and connect to that VNC server from within a Croquet world.

Prerequisites

In order to complete this tutorial, you will need the following software:

1. REQUIRED: A VNC server. Below are some options that are free of cost:

• Vine VNC Server (Mac): http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxvnc/
• TightVNC (Windows): http://www.tightvnc.com/
• Real VNC (Windows): http://www.realvnc.com/products/free/4.1/index.html
• For Linux, many distributions provide their own package of "vncserver." Check your particular distribution's documentation and man pages for information on installation and configuration.

2. REQUIRED: A second computer on which to run the VNC server. Although it is possible to run a VNC server and client on the same machine, the technical details involved in such a task are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

3. RECOMMENDED: The latest build of the Croquet SDK, available here.

Step by Step Guide

Mac OS X was used to create this tutorial. Much of the information herein should be readily transferable to other operating environments; however, your results may vary.

Part 1: Steps for VNC server computer

1. Open your VNC server software and configure it (in this case, we are using Vine Server).

The important values to note are:

• IP Address
• Display Number
• Port
• Password

Write these values down so that you can reference them later.

Note the values outlined in red, as
you will need them when you are
configuring the VNC client in Croquet.

2. Start the VNC server software

Select "Start Server" in Vine Server's connection
dialogue to start the server

You should be provided with some system feedback indicating that the server is running.

The Server Running message indicates that the VNC server
is indeed running.

The VNC server computer is now hosting a VNC session. We will connect to this VNC session from within Croquet in the next section.

Part 2: Steps for Croquet Computer

1. Launch Croquet and open the KAT Demo (this is the KCroquetParticipant subclass)

Locate the KAT Demo in the Objects browser.

Drag the KAT Demo icon from the Objects browser into the Squeak
project space (click image to enlarge).

You are presented with the above dialogue. Select "Cancel."

After a few moments of loading, you are presented with
the above Croquet world (click to enlarge).

2. Configure and start VNC from within the Croquet world.

2.1 From the menu, select "Admin-->New raw RFB"

2.2. Enter the IP address of your VNC server, followed by a colon, followed by the port number that the VNC server is running on. Then select "OK.
"

The structure of the VNC server's address should be the server's IP, followed by the server port.

2.3. Enter the VNC display number; then select "OK."

2.4. Enter the password; then select "OK."


2.5. You should be presented with a Croquet window showing the desktop of the computer on which you are running a VNC server.


You may want to spend some time playing with Croquet's VNC implementation, as it does have some quirks.

Congratulations! You've gotten VNC to work in a Croquet world.

Demo

Here is a video demonstrating VNC being used in a Croquet world.






Summary

In this tutorial, you learned how to start and configure a VNC server on one computer, and how to access that VNC server from within a Croquet world that is running on a separate computer.

New Croquet Builds Available

In case you haven't been following the developers' list-serv, Mark McCahill has put together a current build of the Croquet SDK.

Here's his post:

I added a link on this page

http://croquetproject.org/index.php/Downloads

to a current build of the SDK - I think we are at the point where
enough people
want to kick the tires without going through the patch experience
that it makes sense
to maintain a current build, so I'll do that going forward.

Everyone is still more than welcome to apply the changesets
themselves, of course ;-)

In addition to the new(er) build of Croquet, there are some interesting older builds there. Check out the Secondary Software Package Distributions section, where it looks like there is a Brie demo (w00t).