Does a virtual world need to have evolved?

Which is fine if Blue Mars doesn't want to attract a global user base - dont overlook the fact that computers are cheaper in the US than just about anywhere else.

I had to spend the equivalent of $900 here in the UK, to get a laptop which only just copes with Second Life ...

That "average" includes laptops and professional workstations. The average home desktop price was already below 600 before the bottom dropped out of the market in 2008.

Nods, nods nods. BM will also be a good venue for movie and product launches with associated 3D immersion. A marketing dept. will be able to put together a pretty good offering without incurring full CGI studio costs - good enough for a short campaign. But the revenue from stuff like this will probably be swamped by game revenue.

I imagine that CryEngine machine requirements will remain constant for the next year or so, until BM really launches. By then, the hardware requirements will seem less stringent, tho of course still nontrivial.
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Focusing just on SL for a moment, mesh import is going to take a huge amount of content creation for SL quite offline, too.

It's going to be an interesting future, to see how all this unfolds.

I'm sorry Desmond, I usually have no trouble understanding you but what do you mean here? mesh import will break existing content? SL will be offline for upgrades? Content creation will become an offline activity with people using out of world tools more often?

The latter I assume? With of-world building tools like those currently available for BM?

Not sure that this makes an awful lot of difference in some ways: 80% of building now is creating textures, which is already done outside of the app.

In addition to hardware costs there are also tier costs. Who would think that people would spend $295 per month for their private island region, but they do, and the grid is littered with empty ones, or where there is only 1 or 2 avatars on them.

I think that now that AR have released their prices where they are currently offering 62 times as much land as in SL (2km x 2km), for almost 1/10 the monthly price, it makes the hardware costs look petty by comparison. I could lease a BM city and buy a new PC every 2 months, for the same price as a SL private island.

Rock

Holy sales pitch! I've seen the BM prices, discounting the 25% sales tax it's USD$275 for an area with 50 concurrent users, which is comparable in terms of concurrency with a sim in SL.

BM does have the nice concept of a 5 user concurrency area fpr USD$30 a month, which is an area LL aren't competing with them and they do have larger areas for a lot more money but the pricing models can be twisted and turned to say they're good or bad.

You're comparing apples and canneries. The people who own private estates are the tiniest fraction of SL users... and the money to pay for the majority of these estates comes in dribs and drabs from the 99.44% who don't have any such luxurious budgets.

I think that mesh import will make a big difference to amateur builders like me - I have a lot of fun piddling around making my own stuff, and do only the most primitive texture creation. My stuff is passable now, but with the ballooning of cheap excellent (though possibly kinda vanilla) content that mesh import will bring, it will make no sense for me to build at all anymore - stuff done with inworld tools will look crude.

I haz a sad about this. So much for custom building to fit the landscape, for dashing off cute little scripted toys or weird avatars. People just won't bother.

Of course, I would vastly prefer to be wrong about this, and if someone has reason to believe differently, I'd love to hear it!

Sculpties haven't done this so I'm not convinced mesh import will, there's still lost of room for cute little scripted toys, weird avatars and such like. We'll have to see how it pans out but I believe there will be plenty of room for all.

I think we'll see a lot of people spending hours in SketchUp and the (radically improved lately) Blender. Plus all the 3DS Max and Maya types will barely feel a bump. It's *less* work to make mesh than it is to make a sculptie.

Note that with those tools, it's not just the building, but also the build texturing process that is drawn out of the world. We are talking UV~mapped textures now, which can be done quite painlessly offline, but don't even imagine it as possible on any inworld client anywhere. This is bigger than sculpties ~ SketchUp is just as easy, if not far easier than inworld tools.

And regardless of Blue Mars' existence or not, this is going to change SL.

Nika, you'll be fine, these tools are ridiculously easy and powerful (well, SketchUp is).

You'll still be able to do custom landscape building and so forth. Just that you'll import the terrain to your proggy, and do the building there, or use tried~and~true prims for the basic foundation and go off that.

It's the future ~ and there's no reason to be scared of it. I expect a lot of us will stay logged in to chat while we are building away, just for inspiration's sake. I'm usually in a couple of worlds at once (hugs my 1Gb GTX285), plus a design program or two ~ who *isn't* in Photoshop while running around? It won't be so bad.

I keep thinking... and maybe this is because I don't know anything... but that somebody soon is going to figure out a new way to use SL. Something that it's not made to do, something interesting, maybe build a new client that doesn't work the way the ones we use now.

OK, now I see what you were aiming at. Yes, you can buy one of the Crysis games, which come with the full Sandbox 2 level editor and build your own games with that. That is optimized for combat type games. You can't *sell* games without getting a license from Crytek. With Blue Mars you get a modified version of the Sandbox2 editor which is less optimized for combat, and more optimized for content creation and virtual world making.
You can try to make some money by charging admission to your city, or at least show its something people want to play and hopefully interest a game publisher.

That's not the *only* market they are aiming at, private residences and shopping for clothes and hair are more VW than game components. But a lot of the Blue Mars features will work very well for roleplay areas, and I expect to see a lot of that.

Oh, I'll survive, thanks Des. One can say mesh import will be like sculpties, but I doubt it. Sculpties were still a uniquely SL thing; there weren't libraries full of sculpties waiting to be imported, as there are for meshes.

Also, with sculpties, it was easy for residents to get inworld kits including maps, so that they could still show as the creator, even if they never created a map themselves. I wonder if such kits will exist for meshes; I kinda doubt it.90% of grid residents.

*shrugs*

In any case, there is no stopping it. If LL doesn't have mesh imports, they end up with a comparatively dowdy world.
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NO, but the people in it must have. <~stays away from payment info not on file for anything deeper than hello

I'm not sure. What I saw a lot at that time was a very competitive society that was in denial about it, probably because the competitions were created accidentally - but they were still there. A mention of FIC still caused anger and upset for a while in 2005, whereas now it's considered either a joke or an inevitability.



But that's what I'm saying: ultimately SL _will_ be taken over by professional artists, because we cannot socially expect people to constantly engage with lower quality work when higher quality is available. Either that or social chaos replaces quality as the measure of engagement. Directing that statement to all was a mistake; it was not true (if it was, where is MY world?). But, it may have been a necessary mistake; it needed to be disproved by demonstration, not fiat.

You were looking in a mirror, perhaps? Or you were hanging around with the competitive types, while I was hanging around with the types who were just having a blast with the platform?

I didn't see competitions created accidentally. I saw Linden Lab deliberately trying to create a balanced "gaming" environment, and failing... because they weren't hardcore gamers themselves (people like that would never have created SL) and their core constituents were ignoring the games while a few high profile gamers were gaming the heck out of LL itself.

That's a perfect example. Yes, there were groups cooperating and having a blast with the platform. But the moment such a group forms, it accidentally creates a competition for "who gets to be in the group". That was the source of the original FIC concept (it originally had nothing to do with the Lindens being involved)



How can universality be achieved without balance?

That's a perfect example. Yes, there were groups cooperating and having a blast with the platform. But the moment such a group forms, it accidentally creates a competition for "who gets to be in the group". That was the source of the original FIC concept (it originally had nothing to do with the Lindens being involved)



How can universality be achieved without balance?

the makers of blue mars have no clue why people choose to use virtual worlds (hell the lindens hardly have a clue lmao). BM's people are targeting a market they PERCEIVE to be Linden Lab's market by watching LL and "learning" from LL's mistakes. If they HAD done so BM would be furthur along and more interesting that it it. waiting for the "it's closing" press release

Now you're just making stuff up.

By not trying to make it a "gaming environment" at all.

No I'm not. I can name several such groups that I was left out of because I wasn't good at the correct thing at the correct time. I'm sure that others found themselves in the same situation. It created a competition.



In which case you do not have universality.

And LL's "gamer" orientation made that happen, and when LL dropped the leader board it stopped happening? What you're talking about has NOTHING to do with the supposed "competitive atmosphere" that you were arguing was the norm in 2005.

No, LL's "gamer orientation" didn't make that happen. What _did_ make that happen - or at least, what made it distressing for users - was the promise of universality in "your world, your imagination" - something which BM and other worlds have, generally, not repeated. But, as I said, it seems that starting from scratch with no expectation of universality is actually a bigger mistake than offering it even though it cannot be delivered.