Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. A pre-alpha build of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community by Duke University and its partners under the Croquet license. We hope that by doing so, we will foster a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research.
The
current build of Cobalt is located
here.
The
Monticello source code repository for Cobalt is located
here.
The Cobalt-specific
Mantis bug tracker is located
here.
Software testing and bug reporting is a very important contribution to the effort. Doing so will help the Cobalt development community to identify areas in need of programming and re-engineering. Well-written bug reports can be an especially useful contribution by non-developers who are interested in advancing this effort during these early stages of Cobalt development. We hope that many of the community's software developers will consider taking on bug fixes.
Mark McCahill will be coordinating updates and code contributions to Cobalt to ensure compatibility with the base classes within the present Croquet SDK. In this way we can ensure that Cobalt development does not create a fork from the Croquet SDK. The goal here is to build a Croquet-based application that end-users can really use and then to contribute the application back to the Croquet Consortium for distribution as part of a future Croquet release. We hope that by making the pre-alpha available we can tap into the creative potential of the broader community as a way of advancing something that all of us can freely use to create deeply collaborative, greatly featured, and widely interlinked virtual environments on a very large scale. Lets do it!
