How Croquet is Different

In recent months, more and more people have been asking me how Croquet is different from Second Life - thanks to all the media buzz around Second Life. Let me break it down this way: Croquet, as a software development environment, is more extensible than the development environments used to create collaborative worlds such as those in Second Life, and before that the unified metaverse of ViOS. These early server-based commercial approaches to establishing large-scale metaverses do not create computational environments that users/programmers can actually control - instead they must rely on constrained server-based computational environments to capture eyeballs for a variety of schemes to derive revenue for those who run the servers.

By contrast, Croquet makes it possible to develop any number of interlinked metaverses that can be deployed independently of a commercial authority or the constraints imposed by server-imposed resource limitations. The less cyberlibertarian of you may find value in the fact that Croquet can also be used by institutions to implement far more capable and flexible and controllable commercial systems than those of Second Life and before that ViOS.

Here are some additional points that distinguish Croquet from its predecessors/cohorts:

• Croquet's users/developers may freely share, modify and view the source code of the entire system.
• Croquet is platform and device independent.
• Croquet's users/developers may freely share, modify and view the source code of the entire system.
• Croquet provides a complete professional programming language, integrated development environment, and class library in every distributed, running participant’s copy.
• Croquet-based worlds can be updated while the system is live and running.