David Faught <dave.faught <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> 
> 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!
> 
>  
> Cheers,
> Dave
>  
That's the first thing I thought of as well when I saw Portal. You should really 
have a look at the latest release of Cobalt: http://bit.ly/ij60bP

John and Matthew have done yeoman's work with the elbow grease and polish 
recently. This latest release includes a "Collaboratory" space that supports 
collision detection (with walls and objects at least). And it's quite stable and 
responsive even on my old Dell D620 laptop under XP.