On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> Stephen Pair wrote:
>
>> Also, how does Croquet deal with really large worlds?  Do you subdivide a
>> large world into hectares or something (or the 3D equivalent of
>> hectares...is there a word for that?) and do you just replicate the hectare
>> the avatar currently resides in and the immediately adjacent hectares...and
>> make the hectares sufficiently large that you would always have enough to
>> render sufficiently far into the distance?  What about objects that might
>> sit on the boundary of multiple hectares?
>
>
> Portals. Spaces can be seamlessly linked to each other by portals which we
> usually represent as doors etc. Each portal is also a potentially separate
> authentication domain meaning that you can protect your own spaces and only
> people with the proper permissions will be able to enter (replicate and
> join) them. It does get a bit weird when you see people vanishing into
> doorways that you can't open due to lack of permission but such is the
> strangeness of virtual spaces :-)
>

Wonderfully strange. ;)  Sorry for taking this thread down a Croquet
rathole...but I do have some additional curiosities.  Yes, I knew portals
were a solution to having to replicate vast spaces.  But, I certainly can
imagine wanting to be able to create vast plains and mountain ranges in a
virtual world where having to jump through portals every so often as one
roamed around would ruin the motif.  I gather this is just a problem that
Croquet has yet to address.  I can imagine subdividing a world, but I can
also imagine a lot of devilish details with that (ie. how do  you handle
objects straddling the boundaries, what about cases where someone zooms far
out so that many spaces are well within the field of view, etc).  Maybe you
could sub-divide into overlapping spaces where objects are replicated
between adjacent spaces...or even have spaces covering large areas,
overlapping many smaller spaces, but modeled in less detail in order to
support the "zoom out" scenario).

- Stephen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20091218/3fad5783/attachment.htm