Movie is an ilusion...Television is an ilusion...The walk of Alice in the Croquet world is an ilusion too...
I will tell to you the truth. What we have is a rapid replacement of static images (frames) at some velocity. We call this velocity of replacement (re-renderization): framerate and its unit of mesure is FPS (frames per second).
Bigger the area to re-render, more time to do it.If you have an old machine (we have tested our "basic empty world" at a Pentium2, 400Mhz, videocard 8Mb and it works!) you need to have a very little window for your world or you will have a jerky walk for Alice - or nothing.
3D applications are furious eaters of CPU, cache and memory of videocards. Try to have the best your money can buy.
You can see some values of FPS for Croquet on some machine configurations: clicking here. If you have some values for your machine you can add it on this page (it's a wiki).
Croquet is not HalfLife - don't try to use arrow keys to walk in the world. You need (at this betatime) to RIGHTclick&mantain the pointer in different areas of the image to go to different directions. More near the "central cross", less the velocity.
If you put the pointer in the inferior area, will go up the "Dock". We will talk about the Dock later. Avoid to go with the pointer there - the Dock can be disconfortable on little windows.
If you LEFTclick the space, will appear a misterious new plane window inside it. We will talk about it soon. Click again and it will disapear.
If you are walking fast at the 3D space having the dimensions we have defined in the script of the previous lesson (300x150 pixels) , put the pointer at the right-bottom corner of the window until to appear a symbol (it's not easy to find the "right" point). Drag and drop a little.
Try to walk. If all is OK for you again, enlarge it a little more, test again etc. etc. until to find the best size of a space for your machine.
TIP: Developing, using Squeak-Croquet, applications to be available for the general public, remember that only a few guys have powerfull machines with powerfull videocards today (2004). If your "niche of market" is not only in USA or EU, the problem is bigger. I know that you have the brillant idea to recreate a real 3D version of Myst using Croquet. But forget this until sometime in the future. Try to be simple! The world is not your office or your university! There are many poor internet users out there, having old primitive machines.
You can change the position of the "camera" clicking in Ctrl+Shift+a, having, alternatively, the 3 types of point-of-views of the figure:
In the top part of the 2D window (in Squeak-Croquet we have 2D windows and 3D windows) you have some buttons that will: to colapse it, make it fullscreen (not the full screen of your dreams...), to close it and to open a menu having some options. You can also drag the window like a "normal" window.
OBSERVATION: What is the use of the Dock? It will have 2D representations - a tree - of 3D windows that are not too much useful for you to be always in the 3D space. When you need to use one of this you drag its image to the space and it will be re-created there. You can close it when you don't need it more using the "X signal" in the "3D ToolBar". We will talk better about 3D windows in the next lesson..
About the telephone and the photomachine, fixed over the view of the 3D space, we will talk later.
To look up and down press the Shift key and drag the pointer pressing the mouse's right button.
Try to do a little trainning about "walk-in-the-space". Like all the things we do for the first time , it can be not be very confortable. It's possible that , in the future , we will have the easy (but without velocity control) "HalfLife style" - using the arrow keys - for walk. Or both options...
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