Aaron and Croqueteers,

I read with interest the mention of "authoring tool" in the included e-mail below. I was disappointed to see the intention was an external authoring tool and not something ala the oft-discussed 'Wicket' because the existing external content creation tool (Blender) has a prohibitive learning curve. Although Blender is about on-par with some of the commercial authoring suites, its lack of wizards and other tools that simplify the 3D authoring process are a huge detractor. Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing that Blender is technically infeasible. Rather, from a user perspective, I believe relying on Blender for content creation is untenable.

I've been working on building avatars and other model meshes in Blender. Is it possible? Yes. Is it user-friendly? No. By no means. I spoke with Peter at Univ. of Minn. about their experiences using Blender and they were also disappointed with the results. It is my understanding that they are using 3DS Max and/or Maya. My project is woefully under-funded, so I do not have the luxury of expensive commercial apps.

ASE import and export with Blender is iffy at best. OBJ is fairly well supported. I have not yet begun my experiments with OGRE/XML... that is next on the agenda. I believe that for most users, Blender will be a frustrating and unrewarding experience, and may do more harm than good when trying to attract users and developers. I base this conclusion on the assumption that most of the people who investigate the Croquet bundle will neither be open source hackers nor understand the difference between app and sdk. Although Blender is free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom, I believe that including it in a bundle will frankly be a detractor to Croquet adoption. Think about it from a management perspective - Smalltalk, Squeak, possibly Tweak, and top it off with Blender... I have a weekly argument with people who want to "just use Second Life" for this very reason.

On another note, I also did some experimenting with Google's "Sketchup" software. Sketchup is an excellent tool for authoring simple meshes such as buildings and furniture. It's very fast to learn and use. Unfortunately, the free version does not export in OBJ format. The licensed version exports OBJ, but requires some hacking in Croquet to actually parse the mesh. It is not open-source, but it is gratis.

There's one big problem with this software. The free version of Sketchup saves natively in KMZ format and does not save to any other format. Croquet does not currently have support for KMZ. However, the Qwaq Forums folks have a KMZ parser that works quite nicely (I tested it last summer). It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Particularly impressive was the ability to simply drag and drop a KMZ file. If we could convince (beg/grovel?) the Qwaq folks to release their KMZ parser into open source Croquet, we would have an ideal solution for creating content and importing it into Croquet, at least for the interim while an internal content creator is being developed. In addition to that, Croquet would then be able to leverage _all_ of the models in Google's 3D Warehouse. Those models are free for non-commercial use. Further, Sketchup is very well documented, with tons of tutorials, how-tos, and getting started guides. Compare that to Croquet's or Blender's documentation, which is woefully lacking. I believe that Sketchup and KMZ import would be an absolute *SLAM DUNK* as far as attracting users and developers. You've got simple content creation with a free-as-in-beer tool, good documentation, and boat loads of existing content with which to populate worlds. And there are always bragging rights like "models compatible with Google Earth" for whatever that's worth. I'm not sure how one would approach the Qwaq folks to discuss something like this though.

To summarize, I believe that, ultimately, Croquet will need an internal content creation mechanism. But thinking realistically, that could be years away. I do not believe that Blender is something we can rely on as a primary authoring tool solution. At best, I am considering it an intermediary until something (anything?) better comes along. Sketchup could also be an intermediary, but would likely be better perceived and received; yet it utilizes a format that Croquet does not understand. Which means that, currently, there are no feasible free-of-cost 3D authoring tools that I can recommend for the bundle.

And that's an Achille's heel if I ever saw one.

Hope this helps.

-Matt Schmidt