Guides
Welcome
What is Sirikata?
Sirikata is a BSD-licensed platform for virtual world applications. Virtual worlds are shared, online, 3D, interactive spaces. They have a lot of applications -- from games and entertainment, to education, to social applications. Sirikata makes creating virtual worlds easy.
How do I use Sirikata?
Sirikata provides all the tools for creating a virtual world, but it isn't a single world that you can log into. Instead, you use Sirikata to create your own world or an application in a Sirikata-based world.
There are two types of users of Sirikata:
Application Developers
A user that participates in a Sirikata-based world created by a world developer and adds content to it, for instance adding objects, their associated appearance, and adding behavior to them to bring the world to life.
World Developers
A user that takes components of Sirikata, configures them, and ties them together to create their own, unique world.
While application developers might be end-users, generally this guide is not for end-users. The world developer is responsible for providing documentation for them since Sirikata is highly customizable -- clients for different worlds may look different, respond differently to interaction, and permit different actions in the world.
Both types of users should start out by understanding the :ref:`general-architecture`: you need to understand the components of the system at a high level and how they work together to create the world before you can understand how to setup a world or build within a world.
Application developers should proceed to the :ref:`app-guide`, and will likely want to begin with the :ref:`emerson-tutorials`. World developers should then read about the :ref:`ecosystem` to understand their options when constructing a world and then proceed to the :ref:`world-guide`.
For a complete list of available documentation, see the :doc:`contents`. Or :ref:`search` for a particular topic.
How do I help develop the Sirikata platform?
Found a bug and want to try fixing it? Need functionality that isn't built into Sirikata? If you want to dig into the Sirikata platform code (rather than building on it), check out the :ref:`platform-guide`.