Cobalt | Google Groups

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
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

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
identifying areas of functionality to address
'hooking up' those functionalities
identify additional functionalities that can further enhance Cobalt
help to add functionality where needed

Croquet is an open source software development environment for

creating and deploying deeply collaborative, multi-user online applications
multiple operating systems and devices

Derived from Squeak, it features

peer-based network architecture
communication
collaboration
resource sharing
synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices
multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations
making possible the distributed deployment of very large scale
richly featured
interlinked virtual environments
real-time
identical interactions between groups of users

The architecture of Croquet actually makes it quite easy to develop collaborative applications without having to spend a lot of effort and expertise in understanding how replicated applications work. There are a number of simple patterns and rules to remember, but otherwise, it is quite simple to quickly develop very powerful systems.

Click here for more detailed information on the technology.

The public facing home page is now at http://www.opencobalt.org/

Google Groups

http://groups.google.com/group/cobaltcroquet/

Duke resources

http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/cobalt.html

Project page at the Consortium

http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Cobalt

Monticello Code Database

http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu:8886/

Mantis Bug DB

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel(s)

The squeak irc portal has info on how to access the irc network: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/IRCPortal
just substitute #squeak with #croquet and the instructions still apply