Croquet Gets Its Avatars On
Mark McCahill at the Croquet-Bento blog sends news that it’s now possible to import avatars and animations designed in the Poser modeling and animation package into Croquet, the open-source, collaborative workspace/OS/virtual world/thinget. McCahill even found some Second Life avatars for Poser and imported those into the space. This is actually a much more important development than simple cosmetics. The biggest complaint heard after the recent round of truly impressive demos of Croquet is echoed in McCahill’s post: “I’ll be very happy to stop looking at the rabbit, the chicken, and Alice” — the three crude and static avatars that Croquet has featured thus far. Having reasonable avatars in Croquet should help drive adoption. Now: Anyone else out there using this stuff? Drop us a line.
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That’s really exciting, thanks for the news, Mark. As Croquet gains features such as this I wonder if it will get some of the SL early adopters interested in it. That ‘tabula rasa’ feeling that Croquet now has certainly make my hacker-sense tingle in the same way that SL did back in beta.
Do they have land for sale there?
It’s free, Prok. You just download the app and go. Of course, it’s apparently a good deal more complicated than that at this point. But it’s all peer-to-peer, so there’s no central authority
I realize it’s free. I’ve been there a number of times to look at it, and even got on it once, but it’s horribly hard to work for the non-initiated. I’m just wondering if land sells there yet, probably not.
Yeah, I think it’s still pretty clunky as far as the non-tekkiwikki end-user goes. I haven’t heard of any land sales. Although I don’t think land is the same kind of limited resource there. I could see people charging to set up your land, though. But I think once you have your own copy of Croquet going, you have access to pretty much unlimited space, it’s just a matter of building something useful into it. I suppose you could build rental units or something and “sell” land that way?
How do people make a contiguous world if they each have their own copy on their own servers (if that’s the model). Where do they meet-up? How?
Also, the concept of land only having value if it is “value-add” beyond the land, i.e. theme, zoning, interesting houses, etc. is something the Lindens are always trying to drill in — since a year ago when they pushed this concept in a town hall.They want to stress content uber alles, and land as merely a substrate — nothing intrinsically valuable in the land itself, like RL.