Croquet Doodles

A wonderful collection of older and more recent Croquet demos created by David Faught.

Saving and Loading Spaces

A new build of Cobalt has just been made available download. Added functionality includes the ability to save and load spaces from web or local directories. This means that you can now make your custom Cobalt spaces available to others as a kind of template virtual world over the web!

Contributing to Cobalt

Right now there are four big ways you can contribute to Cobalt:

Software testing. The central place for tracking the state of Cobalt, feature additions, bug reports, and bugfixes is the Mantis bug tracker here. You'll first need to sign up here for a Mantis bug tracker account.

Content contributions. Contributions of artwork, motion capture files, meshes, textures, etc. should use the file upload feature of Mantis to include a files - or include a URL pointing to the contribution.

Code contributions. To contribute code, place a changeset in the monticello source code repository’s contributions area and then reference that changeset from an bug report in the Mantis bugtracker.

Hosting worlds. Given that Cobalt worlds are able to be saved as templates to ordinary web directories and then accessed by people using Cobalt from anywhere over the Internet, individuals can make an important contribution to the effort by either hosting world templates at their own URL, or by contributing .C3D templates to the project in the public domain. The very best worlds contributed to the Cobalt effort will be made available by Duke University through its Cobalt template directory (presently under development).

Please note that all software contributions to Cobalt must be made available under the Croquet license. All content contributions must be made available under either either the Croquet license or in the public domain. In submitting code or content, you are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Please do not submit copyrighted work without permission.

Cobalt Released

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!