Cobalt
From Croquet Consortium
Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. This pre-alpha version of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community under the Croquet license as a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research. The idea behind releasing this technology is to tap into the creative potential of the broader community as a way of advancing something that all of us can use to create deeply collaborative, greatly featured, and widely interlinked virtual environments on a very large scale.
If we all work to contribute a part of this effort we can:
- make possible deep and powerful capabilities in the full release
- identify areas of functionality to address
- 'hook up' those functionalities
- identify additional functionalities that can further enhance Cobalt
- help to add functionality where needed
Contents |
Downloading Cobalt
The current pre-alpha build of Cobalt is located here: http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/cobalt.html
Contributing to Cobalt
Right now there are three big ways you can contribute to Cobalt:
- Contributions of code << VERY IMPORTANT AT THIS STAGE
- Software testing/debugging
- Contributions of open license artwork, motion capture files, meshes, textures
The central place for tracking the state of Cobalt development, feature additions, bug reports, and bugfixes is the Mantis bug tracker (go to http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/mantis/index.php ) There you'll findlots of details about what we have done and what we still need to do. To actively contribute to Cobalt via Mantis you will need a mantis account - sign up here: http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/mantis/signup_page.php
We also have a weekly Cobalt developer's conference on Wednesdays at 5:00 Eastern Time (US) via Skype. The call is usually hosted by either Darius Clarke (darius.in.time) or Julian Lombardi (julianlombardi). You should contact either one of us prior to the scheduled call to let us know you are interested in joining the conference. Agendas for these calls are often posted on the Cobalt Group site (see below) just prior to the call.
Many Stones Form an Arch
If we all work to contribute a part of this effort, we can then make possible deep and powerful capabilities within the full release of the Cobalt application. We hope that individual developers will rise to the challenge of identifying areas of functionality to address - and then 'hooking up' those functionalities for the benefit of the larger community. Better yet, we hope that developers will identify additional functionalities that can further enhance Cobalt! You can really help our emerging community by helping to add functionality where needed.
