On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 9:14 AM, David Faught <dave.faught at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been playing the game Portal
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_(video_game)) for the last few months
> and it has to be one of the best 3D games I have seen, right up there with
> Spore as far as I am concerned.  One of the things that intrigues me about
> this game is that it looks like it could have been inspired by Croquet,
> although it wasn't.  So now in the next few weeks, a new collaborative
> version of Portal is coming out, which should prove to be lots of fun.
>
> I would think that it would be almost trivial to build the basis of this
> game in Cobalt/Croquet and thereby have multiplayer capability right in the
> first iteration.  But what kind of puzzles of this type would be interesting
> for an undetermined number of players greater than 1?  This project sounds
> interesting enough to me that it could be worthwhile to get back into the
> Croquet/Cobalt community.  My concern is that the Cobalt/Croquet base still
> may not be up to the performance and stability standards that would be
> needed for a project like this.
>
> Unfortunately I recently lost all the Croquet stuff that I had locally, so
> whatever is out there on SqueakMap and such is all there is of my work.  The
> biggest loss as far as I am concerned is the work I had done on making Tweak
> the main development environment so that Morphic wasn't needed anymore.  It
> was never finished and so never released.
>
> So why am I writing this?  I'm not exactly sure, but maybe it has something
> to do with finding collaborators to build a new Portal-like game in
> Cobalt/Croquet and a little inspiration for puzzles.  Convince me this
> sounds like a good idea!
>

I am extremely interested in Open Cobalt in an educational setting.
Games are the best way to drive development and anything useful to
games has potential for educational software. My concern about Open
Cobalt -- probably due to ignorence -- is that objects lack the
programing properties of morphs. What makes Squeak so attractive seems
to be lost by the time you start walking around an Open Cobalt world.
Where is the halo? How do I change the mass of this ball? Or it's
elasticity? How easy is it to create my own ball and give it some
unique properties? I love the ides of kids exploring a huge 3d world
full of wonderful objects and other kids. I just want the option of
user defined objects, something that goes beyond the "it is what it
is" aspect of World of Warcraft.

-- 
Gary Dunn
Honolulu