[HN Gopher] Open Cobalt: open-source virtual world browser and t...
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Open Cobalt: open-source virtual world browser and toolkit
Author : chriswarbo
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-10-30 10:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| pacifika wrote:
| SecondLife cracked this 15 years ago.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Before that (in the 90s): Blaxxun Interactive.
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| Not really. SecondLife is a closed, centralized platform. I
| know the client is open source and that Open Simulator exists,
| but it's not quite the same thing. The Croquet Project[1] (what
| Open Cobalt is built on) allowed P2P virtual worlds that users
| could travel between.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project
| chriswarbo wrote:
| OpenCobalt has been around even longer than SecondLife, if we
| count the various forks/renames (Croquet/OpenCroquet/Qwak/etc.)
|
| Edit: It seems SecondLife is slightly older than I though
| (2003, versus Croquet's 2005)
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Their Web site seems to have disappeared last year, but seems
| very relevant to the current "metaverse" hype. In particular,
| OpenCobalt is easily programmable, supports a bunch of standards
| like XMPP (chat) and VNC (virtual desktop). It's also
| decentralised: users can navigate from one server to another by
| moving through portals (hyperlinks).
| mindcrime wrote:
| Archive.org really are "doing god's work" (so to speak). How
| many sites and how much knowledge would be lost from the 'net
| forever without them?
| appleflaxen wrote:
| Knowledge lost and prior art put under patent.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Exactly! And its not just we pages - a lot of digital
| heritage is being lost, even though we now have the
| technology to digitally preserve about anything.
|
| Flash games that one can't play without a flash player,
| online games that can no longer be played without company run
| servers, modern arcade machines that will no longer run
| without a backend server, etc.
|
| I would really welcome if more people though about how to
| preserve out current digital culture for the long run...
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| > Flash games
|
| Just in case you hadn't come across Flashpoint:
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ Since
| early 2018, Flashpoint has saved more than 100,000 games
| and 10,000 animations running on 35 different platforms.
| jdougan wrote:
| I've been busy and hadn't paid attention to google sites'
| "upgrade". It is on my to do list now.
| hedgewitch wrote:
| Just a note, since a lot of people will probably miss it: this
| was made in the Squeak dialect of Smalltalk.
| kaetemi wrote:
| A lot of these projects seem to emit a depressing virtual office
| building aura. Where's the fun in that?
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| I think there is a trend of virtual world projects pivoting to
| virtual office meeting/collaboration software when it doesn't
| do well.
| jdougan wrote:
| Because that is where the grant money was. Also, the start
| space was a giant room so it had plenty of "space" to demo.
| justin66 wrote:
| The only evolution of this software that anyone is currently
| working on is at
|
| https://croquet.io/
| chriswarbo wrote:
| I came across that, but it seems to have lost the
| open/p2p/distributed/no-permission-necessary nature that I find
| appealing.
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(page generated 2021-10-31 23:01 UTC)