Sirikata

We have been pretty excited about our embedded browser Berkelium and it was good to see Patrick pull the trigger on it. Within our group there is an emerging sense that this technology is going to mean something and I wanted to start sharing a few thoughts-in-progress on this.

Imagine two circles where one is the web and the other represents virtual worlds/immersive environments/3D spaces (this includes the game space). These circles overlap but only very little at this point. Basically Berkelium is an attempt to push these two circles closer together. Lets put the 2D vs. 3D discussions behind us and explore the synergy that lives in the overlap.

During the course of the work on the Sirikata platform I have become increasingly interested in what happens in the webspace. HTML5 looks exciting in large number of ways as does dramatically faster javascript. Both these are central to driving the emergence of rich internet applications. These used to mainly be converted from the desktop but now a new wave (pun intended) with a web native feel is emerging. These born are born in the cloud and works in real-time.

Whether you look at the underlying technology or the resulting apps there has never been a better time to explore the overlap. With Berkelium in place we have started to build the foundation that lets us leverage advances in the webspace. The ultimate goal is to figure out the ecology that takes collaborative 3D to web-scale.

We think that lots of smart thinking is needed to move this forward. For the same reason we choose to make the open source & cross platform Berkelium available as a standalone library so that other platforms may integrate and contribute to it as well. Think smaller piece of a larger pie.

To be continued (but feel free to join in now)

With the possible exception of Wikipedia there comes a time in every project’s life where it is time to say goodbye to having our wiki as a frontpage. That time has now come for our little Sirikata platform.

:)

Sirikata is slowly improving the infrastructure surrounding the project: we’ve had the mailing lists and a code repository since the project started, added the wiki soon after, we have an IRC channel, and most recently we added this blog.  Today, we’re making the new bug tracker public.  We’re using an instance of the excellent Trac software.  Calling it a bug tracker may be giving it too little credit: it also allows you to track milestones, versions, feature requests, commits to the source code repository, and much more.  A lot of the services we need are already provided by GitHub, so we’ve turned many of those features off and are focusing on using Trac specifically to handle bugs and feature requests, with just a little bit of milestone tracking thrown in for good measure.

We still need a bit more documentation on how to file good bug reports.  A short list of items to keep in mind:

• The version or revision number which the bug was discovered on. Bonus points if you can track down the revision that introduced the problem.
• The platform you are working on.
• The features you have turned on and/or plugins you have loaded.
• A minimal test case if applicable, or a minimal set of steps needed to reproduce the problem.
• A backtrace if you are reporting a crash and can obtain one.

So if you’ve encountered problems compiling or running Sirikata, please take the time to file a bug report on our new system.  It does require an account to avoid spam, but anybody can register.  And if you run into any problems, email me and/or the developer list for help.