Cobalt Updated!

John Dougan and Mark McCahill just announced the 2008-06-08 pre-alpha release of Cobalt that's downloadable here. Here's whats new in this release:

• Cobalt can now punch through the NAT firewalls.

• Cobalt now has an OpenAL null device class that will be used if the OpenAL libraries are not installed or if they have a startup problem (special thanks to Mike Klein for this code).

• Hitting the Esc key while the mouse is over the menubar no longer causes the menubar to disappear.

• A patch to make embedded applications work is now integrated into Cobalt.

• "Message not understood" no longer thrown when closing the 3D Painter tool in Cobalt.

• Cobalt's harness classes and their support are partially refactored.

• A race on quitting was removed by carefully timing the Tweak shutdown relative to the morph delete.

• Various packaging clean-ups were done.

• Minor fixes to the ASE import around some of the texture name handling code and more logging to aid in future fixes.

• New code to import a new mesh collection for the avatar (switch avatar functionality) has been updated to handle ASEs as well as the obsolete MDL format.