Hi folks,
prompted by Martin Bleichner's request for more powerful networking in Etoys I had a look at NetMorph again. If you don't know it yet, see
Amazing collaborative stuff our Japanese friends did there!
I tried to load it into a current Etoys image. After some fiddling it kind-of works:
Here, I can control the Ellipse's movement locally. When I press the "warpOver" button it "warps" to a different machine but I can still control it from my local machine. Pressing the "warpHome" button brings it back.
That's so awesome! Making multi-player games with this is almost trivial :)
I had to code the warp-scripts textually because the "net morph" category in the viewer remains empty. Maybe someone else could figure out why. This appears to be the only major problem. Normally, all this can be done with tiles.
To install, first open the "SqueakMap package loader" and let it update itself. Close it. Then, file-in the attached NetMorphEtoys4a.st which will churn for quite a while installing lots of packages and end with an error when trying to add the japanese translations. At that point, I ran the remaining initialization steps by hand ;)
I put the resulting image here:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/etoysNetMorph.image.zip
If you duplicate that image you can run two instances on one machine which works fine. They find each other automagically.
Now, this adds about 1 MB to the regular image. If we could make it work reliably I'd say that's probably worth it. OTOH it pulls in a lot of stuff (e.g. the Komanche web server, SOAP client and server etc) that probably could be done more simply. In particular, under Sugar it should not use this home-grown infrastructure but the Telepathy framework.
In any case this would be a great addition to Etoys. Maybe someone knows a bright student who could make it work?
- Bert -
etoys-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org