[croquet-dev] Importing content into Croquet

It's always a good idea to try to get stuff "in" to Croquet so that  
it can be replicated, manipulated, copied, etc. like any other  
Croquet object.

All the demos support dragging textures into Croquet from your  
operating system desktop/finder. The KAT demo generalizes this to  
provide a framework for dragging in any media. The existing code  
handles most 2D still image formats, .mpeg 2D movies, .ase 3D still  
meshes, .mp3 sounds, and plain .txt.  It should be "just work" to  
support other formats of the same kinds of things. Look at  
CroquetParticipant>>dropFiles: and work your way down.

The basic operation here is that one user already has the media they  
want on their computer. They make a gesture that causes that content  
to be sent as an argument to a #future message to the replicated  
world. Now everyone in the replication has it.

(Aside: All the demos treat textures as immutable data that can be  
cached outside the world, and shared by all worlds that use it, keyed  
by a hash of the contents. The KAT media framework extends this to  
other media, but not all media is handled this way. For example,  
meshes and text are not at present.  But the idea is that this is a  
behind-the scenes optimizations that doesn't really change the basic  
ideas being discussed here.)

Everything else is a variation on that initial gesture to get stuff  
into the Croquet world.  For example, New->From File... in the KAT  
replaces the dragging with a file menu.  We used to (in WiscWorlds)  
have a New->From Web... in which you were prompted for a URL instead  
of a local filename. (We should bring it back.)  The important thing  
in all of these is that one user is really getting the media outside  
of Croquet and replicating it into Croquet.

You could imagine doing things differently as follows, though I  
haven't seen anyone do this. You could have, say, in in-world native-
Croquet Web browser (e.g., using Scamper) that was hard-coded to  
Google. When you followed some kinds of links to media, it would go  
and get the media and put it in-world. Just be careful not to have  
each replicated user getting the media and each putting in a new copy!

On Feb 9, 2007, at 5:39 AM, Kiran wrote: