Island Creator/Introduction
From Croquet Consortium
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Introduction
This manual is a WORK IN PROGRESS and being developed by the Cobalt community. The initial text is being wrote by Americo Damasceno (author of the old "Unauthorized Croquet Tutorials"), receiving modifications by some others guys, like it's usual at all wiki. The Manual presents related videos created by John Manfredi III. This "work in progress" is intended to teach the basics of Smalltalk programming, the basics of creating of 3D models for Cobalt using Blender, the basics of Squeak (for the development of embedded shared applications), and the basics of creating interactive content within Cobalt virtual environments. Soon, the manual will contain links to many examples that you can download and play with. Questions about the lessons in this manual should be directed to the croquet-user list where Americo, Waufrepi and some other members of the Cobalt community will be available to answer them.
A use case scenario
The year is 2010 and the country is San Seriffe, an ex French colony. Two students, Gisele and Mary, who attend the private high school "Ecole Mere Thereze" are doing a home work assignment on Napoleon Bonaparte. Gisele is working with an old black Mac laptop and Mary is using the new XO-2, a product of the OLPC Foundation, received free at her previous public school. Both machines have a 32 Mb video card, and are running Cobalt on Linux.
The school has a WiFi network connected to the Internet, but the velocity of communication is not good enough to support broad use by the students. As a result, each student is given a limited monthly access to the internet (enough for limited research, downloads (lees than 50 Mb/month), and limited email access. Access to web games, music downloads, web-chats, and applications such as Second Life is not practical or possible.
Gisele is a good writer and Mary has excellent artistic skills. So, they have decided to divide their work. Gisele did research at the Wikipedia and Mary has downloaded some images about the Napoleon's life.
Now they are accessing, using Cobalt, the same "island" (a 3D space) that has, inside, a very useful 2D application: a text editor. Gisele writes the text and Mary includes the images and does the final assemblage of the pages of the work.
Gisele was defined to be the "owner" of the copy of "island" and Mary is a "visitor". Their final "island", having the work, will be "saved" at the Gisele's laptop and will be put available, by herself, for the visit of the teacher (that can save a copy at his computer, to be analyzed later) and their classmates (that can save copies too).
To achieve this functionality we need only make some adjustments to the present day Cobalt code. As Cobalt becomes built-out and the UI is further developed, this functionality will be a mouse-click away. Until then, the following parts of this manual will show you how to create Cobalt "islands". But before that, you need to learn the basics of the Smalltalk programming language and how to create basic 3D environments and objects using the free and open-source software called Blender.
