Blue Mars Blows

Oh really? I find that hard to believe...



It comes down to a simple choice:


Streaming via centralized servers isn't the cause of all the lag, 25 avatars wearing 25 attachments with hundreds, even thousands of scripts is the main reason for lag. When I teleport to a sim with no one in it, one that has alot of content rezzed, it takes very little time for everything to load.



... and new objects... Do you have any idea how many new objects of data are added to SL each month? It's quite alot. No one has a desktop at home that could possibly hold everything that SL's thousands of servers holds. It seems to me that the way BM works is you essentially have to download the who 'city' in one shot.


What purpose would there be behind having thousands of avatars chasing blue cones trying to figure out who's who because the avatar's name isn't above their head, their user ID is. I don't quite see why lag is such a big issue for people in SL. If you go somewhere and it's laggy, leave. It's that simple. It was that simple 3 years ago when I started (to find a sim with less people in it), and it's just as easy today. Just look at the map, there's more empty sims than full ones.

Oh, cool, just like there.com, have to use a web browser just to get around. And waiting overnight to visit a place? That seems silly. I find a place in SL, (without browsing web portals), click Teleport, about 3-5 seconds later, I'm there, and about 1 minute later, everything's rezzed unless I'm in a sim with a boat load of blingtards lagging the sim down.


OnLive Technologies missed the boat. They had developed 3D voice back in the mid 90's using dial up connections, and some of their techs built OnLive Traveler, a full 3D environment, with 3D voice, Avatars that were talking heads who's mouth moved when you spoke, and all this before 3D video cards or high speed internet access. The powers that be at OnLive seemed to think there wasn't a future in it and shelved the project, which stagnated for years and continues (I'm guessing still in it's stagnant non upgraded state) as digital space traveler. http://www.digitalspace.com/traveler/ If the peeps at OL Tech had any brains, they'd be 5 or 6 years ahead of SL today.

As far as the technology is concerned. There's no other way to have a dynamic environment like Second Life unless you have centralized servers streaming the information to the client. Rock, I just don't get your logic. On the one hand, you defend BM's clunky system of massive 'overnight' downloads, and on the other you say they're plan is to start streaming info similar to how SL does, and, on top of that, you seem to have some sort of magical knowledge that when (and if) it ever does happen, which I seriously doubt because it's difficult to redo such a core part of the system, that it will be done more efficiently than SL does it. Really? How does SL do it, and how does BM or OnLive plan on doing it? I'm all ears.

If BM's your gig, go for it, but I don't see it going anywhere. A review I read sums it up the best....

via http://virtualunderworld.net/wordpress/?p=867...

Bottom Line – The makers of Blue Mars seem to have taken an off the shelf graphics engine, an off the shelf gaming engine, and off the shelf avatars, put them all together in hopes of being the next Second Life.

Now my quote...

If BM ever has 10 percent of the concurrency that SL has I'll eat my prim hair.

That's like comparing apples to some strange fruit found on a distant planet in a distant galaxy.

I have both a basic and premium account and really there is no difference in regards to the SL experience for each account. My basic can do everything my premium can except own land (although I could still own estate land with my basic) and contact support which i've never needed to do in my time in SL.

What can a concierge do that I can't? (in regards to gameplay or contetn creation).

BM is supposed to "open" (as in, be ready for the masses) at the beginning of 2010...

anyone got a flying pig avi for me?

I will never, repeat never, play a virtual world that takes over an hour to download.

It's got a few ears to catch up, but has a great graphics engine, so it depends what direction they go.
I would miss being able to watch myself and others building stuff inworld.

Really? A 2 hour download is peanuts compared to how much of your limit you can use in SL just exploring.

WoW, Fallen Earth & CoH & BM might have taken hours to download but they use bugger all bandwitdth to play compared to SL. It's not hard to leave the computer downloading while you watch TV or do some other stuff

There is nothing 'clunky' about downloading data to your HD or installing it from DVD or BlueRay. If that was the case then every piece of software on your HD will have got there in a 'clunky' manner, and we should all have no software on our HD and stream in everything we need. That may happen in the future, but not just yet.

There will be several options open to Blue Mars residents. Each City will be around 250MB to 500MB in size. The current beta download has 6 cities included (but three of those are very light in content), and is 1.3GB in size. However, once Blue Mars launches the initial download will have just one city included, the welcome area, and this place will blow your socks off! (It will be NOTHING like the current beta welcome area, at all).

I have been involved in designing a contender Welcome Area for Blue Mars. It is located on Phobos, the main moon of Mars, and consists of of a huge atrium hall, where the mentors and the meet & greeters will welcome new arrivals and guide them to their areas of interest. Incredible elevators (that fly rather than go up and down) will take arrivees to one of 16 levels where their language of choice will be available. On each level they can choose flash video tutorials from everything from the basics of movement, teleporting, friending, communications, etc., to object creation, animation editing, clothing editing, sound editing, texture editing, avatar editing, scripting, city building, etc etc. Think Orientation Island, plus The Ivory Tower, plus the Particle Lab, plus, plus, plus, all in one place, with real people there to help, in multiple languages. The top level is a huge Belvedere, to view the awesome Mars as it apparently transits across the sky, which it largely fills.

If you then wish to explore outside, you can get into your moon buggy, open the airlocks, and go exploring the surface of phobos. It is an exact replica, including the famous Stickney Crater. And get this, really, get this, it is FULL-SIZE!! Yes, it is over 20Km in diameter! (makes the 10m prim size limit in SL look a bit constrained doesn't it? Even megaprims come nowhere close). An object in Blue Mars is not constrained by the size of the map. And this is just one of the contenders for the new Welcome Area (I hope we get it).

The main way to plan an exploration of Blue Mars will be via a web portal (though there is nothing stopping you from random exploring, as in SL). The portal will show every City, with descriptions and pics. You can quickly find all the Cities that tick your boxes, and choose which ones you want to visit. I plan to download mine overnight, as my connection speed means I can only download one city every 5 mins, and I want to explore a lot. I got a 1 Terabyte drive for $85 just for the purpose (should hold around 3,000 - 4,000 cities. Huge HDs are hardly bank-breaking nowadays. And I prefer having all this data on my HD, as it means it all appears, instantly. Goodbye texture lag. Goodbye watching a sim slowly rezz all its objects. I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising individuals start offering a DVD/Blue Ray service, where you pick the cities you are interested in, and the DVD/BlueRay with them all on is delivered next day. Yes, you can choose a region at random from the SL world map (no descriptions), and teleport there blind, and when it has all rezzed start exploring. But you will have to do the same everytime you visit. I don't think the SL cached textures on your HD have ever worked properly, I find I still have to wait for all the textures to reload every time I visit my favourite store.

However, you do not have to do large downloads all at once. You can download as many as you like, enter the first one to complete downloading, and while you are exploring one the others can download in background (and to emphasise, this is all once Blue Mars comes out of beta).

As for streaming (which I do not like personally, but which I mentioned as it seems to be the preference for many (especially those with poor download speeds, and those who wish to enjoy VWs on the move on their mobile phones). Blue Mars have been vigorously exploring On Live, which officially launched in March 2009. Read about the details of how they do it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive. The main move is away from high-end gaming PCs and graphics cards, to a simple browser, as they use state of the art compression techniques, providing you have a good broadband speed (1.5Mbps for SDTV and 4-5Mbps for HDTV). Basically, if you can stream a movie with your current PC/broadband setup, you can play any game, or use any virtual world, regardless of Operating System, regardless of graphics chip/card. They also have a console available if you do not have a PC.

Most of the major games companies have signed up to On Live, and Blue Mars may be the first Virtual World to follow.

Exciting times ahead, for sure.




Get the salt and pepper ready. In tests, they got 10,000 avatars into a single Blue Mars City, and no lag. However, if you are talking about gross instant concurrency for the entire Virtual World, that remains to be seen. The platform is overwhelming in its functionality (don't worry about movement, about camera mode, about blue cones and beeps, etc, we will have all we want from Blue Mars and more by launch). What will determine its appeal will be the Cities the City devs create, the rules they impose, and the specs of the PCs needed to access it. There was always the risk that Cities may be out of the reach of the pockets of the developers who could create Cities that current inhabitants of virtual worlds would find appealing (and only be within range of the Corporates), but when you see the prices coming out shortly you will see that those fears were ill-founded.

Next major release this week.

Rock

that will be when... december 2110?

I might give it one more try later on. I would bet that if there aren no improvements on movement/camera, I will never be back.

Whats the point of making such a platform just to section it off, and have people move about akwardly. I see no point in exploring if I have to preplan an itenerary and DL the night before. I rarely plan where I explore in SL, and forget taking a friend to some cool place you found. I like opening up search and going someplace random. I dont mind that it takes a min to rez, I'm there. If I had to wait for a place to DL before visiting, I wouldnt bother. It sounds like the whole model of how you get around is lacking and canned. There are mentions of how not every sim doesnt have a pic and dicription on the website. No kidding! There are how many sims?

It all comes down to how easy it is to get around in Sl, without need to go outside Sl, to get around. Its amazing how big the place is, and it's neat that I could travel by a means of my choice across a large portion of that. Sl has a sense of community because of that.

Hmm that's probably still well before we get decent avatars in SL

i got power boost supoosed to speed up my connection when downloading large files it didnt take an hour but was long enough to piss me off.

That's tiny compared to SL mainland, even Dreamland and New Caledonia are much bigger.

Not according to the Blue Mars FAQ:

"Although there are some items and pieces of clothing that are city specific, many items can be carried with you everywhere you go."

Things like buildings need to be added by Block Developers. Are you saying that models created by one Block Developer and sold in world to a non-Developer can then be transferred to another Block Developer without the creator's consent? That's an interesting and possibly alarming piece of information if it's true.

Avatar Reality has stated that cities will be the size of several SL sims and will be priced similarly. That sounds like several thousand dollars plus at least several hundred per month. If they actually do release that information publicly it'll be very interesting, but so far I've seen no comments on any new releases, or really much else from Avatar Research, only from one person claiming a personal pipeline into the company.

That and the fact that ordinary users are completely dependent on the good will of their Block Developers who in turn are completely dependent on their City Developers. If you get annoyed with your estate owner in SL you can always just pick up your stuff and move back to the mainland. That won't be an option in Blue Mars so you'd better stay on the good side of your betters.

Presumably these technical people will be charging for the service. That's what I meant by "partners". It is still true that buying and developing a piece of land which isn't dependent on another player won't be practical for most players.

Again that's not what the Blue Mars FAQ says. Block Developers rent land about the size of a sim from City Developers and explicitly do not have terraforming permission.They will be able to upload geometry and textures, but it's still not clear who will be able to upload or install scripts.

There are tens of thousands of parcel owners in SL, there will be a handful of Block Developers in each city in Blue Mars so they are decidedly not equivalent. Anyway, you don't even have to own land in SL to create or modify objects.

Great, but these can't be scaled, re-textured or modified in world. Everything has to be loaded into an external editor, modified, then re-uploaded by a Block Developer.

How exactly can copy / mod / transfer permissions be dealt with in this environment? Once the 3D model is sold outside Blue Mars for use in an external editor, the creator has lost control of it. Either items will be sold externally with no protections, which a lot of creators and scripters will be reluctant to do, or internally as No Mod, which will turn off a lot of buyers.

To say the developer inventory and tools are basic is a pretty wild overstatement IMHO. To do anything with the tools is a complete science fair project. It took one developer weeks of tedious effort to get some very basic avatar movement such as running and jumping barely working. I was able to script much more complex controls in SL in a few days. If the current system is 60% of the final system they are in very deep trouble indeed. I'd place it at less than 20% of a viable system, so by that reckoning external developers are going to have to produce a huge amount of not just content but basic functionality.

Not having reasonable tools and documentation is bad enough, but not telling developers what the basic capabilities of the platform will be, what permissions will look like, how commerce will work, or really much else that is needed for planning seems to me to pretty much a killer. It is definitely not normal to go into Alpha, never mind Beta without any idea of how most of a system will work. So, do they not want developers to know, don't they know themselves, or is it just they can't be bothered explaining? None of those are good.

Avatar Research is completely dependent on external developers to build their environments, but at least so far have been unwilling to interact with them in meaningful ways. That attitude alone seems to me to be fatal.

wow sounds great rock

last time i checked it in summer i was a bit disappointed, but i am sure i will check back sometime!

I was unimpressed when I visited Blue Mars, too. That said, I haven't been there in a couple months.

yeah so sad -.-

I'm downloading the 1.3 gig installer now, but was a little concerned in the instructions by:

Tip: If you have installation trouble, temporarily turn off your antivirus software and any other software that might conflict with the installation.

Sorry... but my PC does NOTHING with antivirus software turned off!

"Already logged in. Try again later."

No I'm not... I shut it down from task manager because it was unresponsive....

For those who put off by the building tools, I know Google Sketchup works fairly well. I think Rock put together a tutorial for it.

Bottom line with Blue Mars-- it's a work in progress. If you log on and expect a fully developed world like Second Life circa 2009, you'll be disappointed. But the groundwork is intriguing, to say the least. If you like building things, it's well worth signing up as a developer. Hasn't cost me a dime, and I've had a terrific time playing about with stuffs.

Yeah, I never got through the monumentally long download.

I *did* register, though, to keep my name.



Maybe they could change it to that voice that says, "You've got mail!" He could say, "Hey! You made it! Good job!"

Hangs, crashes, unresponsive..... well 45 minutes after installing it I'm now uninstalling.. very unimpressed and way off what I would even consider a beta version.

Wake me up if it's ever turned into anything vaguely useable.

Don't care. It's the principle of the thing. Entropia took hours to download and then it sucked. I don't want to wait hours to find out something isn't even worth playing.

Checked it out too and am not impressed at all.

Like I said before, BM will never have the magic that SL has, and therefor will not be a replacement/competitor of SL.

The graphics might look fancy, but what I seen there so far, the builds are way way too profesional and lack any imagination.

I keep saying that the best content in SL is created by Residents rather than proffesional developers.

I am just your average Joe that doesn't know proffesional 3d software. Just someone with a great imagination that builds with inworld tools. BM will not offer that, therefor BM is uninteresting for me.

BM lacks any imagination.

My main issue is that, as bad as SL's hardware requirements are, Blue Mars are more demanding. I have run SL on an Intel 915 chipset. Not pretty, but it ran. Both SL and BM look great on my GTX 260m, but anything less would not cut it, and there is no option to directly adjust visual settings. And it's Windows only. For me, BM is visually appealing, the navigation sucks but can be fixed, but the entry cost is too high for most users and the windows-only environment locks out too many users.

BM doesn't lack imagination any more than SL has imagination. Both are nothing more than inanimate code.......it's the people who develop, use, create, see, or otherwise use the platform that has imagination. If you see no imagination then it's you who are lacking. Dispite Avatar Reality's very clear statements about BM not being a replacement, competitor, or extention for SL everyone still wants to diss the program with statements that totally irrelevant to what the platform is all about, linking SL to it.

What's your fear? It's not going to take SL away from anyone. You don't like it that's okay. You don't understand it that's okay too. For the people who do see the potential, or do have the imagination to use the platform for somthing they believe will be enjoyable to whoever their targeted niche might be it's very useful. I believe there is a market for BM......it's not what I thought it was but I can see where others would be excited about it.

So why all the hateful barbs at BM and the people who develop it or use it? Someday it may be the platform of choice for any real competition to SL........or someday it may be known as a huge failure. All I see are people without any knowledge what so ever about what BM is spouting petty nonsense about the size of the download, how the interface is, what the content is, how stupid the structure is. The people who do know are ignored, dismissed, or otherwise put off. Why not educate yourself about what it is........or at least read what AR as said their purpose is?

Yeah, I've been there a few times. No I don't really get it. Will I go back? Probably. Will I find a new home there? I don't know........time will tell. Is the download too big? Not for my HD it's not. Does the size of the download determine how good or bad the program is............I can't see that having any bearing at all.

No, it's not.