Blue Mars beta

And that has been my experience in 5 years of rental management.

Rock

So why do you need to enable build for any of your tenants at all?

I said I allow my tenants to build and do custoization of their homes, the covenant does not allow building in the common areas. However, it is their friends that do not read the covenant that do it, not frequently, but from time to time. The biggest problem are those who just teleport into the sims, build, then leave.

I also tried letting them manage their own groups, creating roles, assigning powers, adding and deleting friends to the group, etc. All that did was to create a ton of more work for me as most just pleaded ignorance 'can you do that for me Rock?'.

But for goodness sake, don't let bias get in the way of experience.

And as for your last point, about my tenants not being in BM, I really don't know why you keep making up these 'facts'. Several of my tenants (in fact, all that I have spoken to so far) have all been knocked out by the videos of BM, and have urged me to create a city in BM, so they can lease there too (and maybe switch completely, if they like the experience).

In my 5 years of experience of rental management in SL, and speaking to countless tenants (the majority of whom were female) I can tell you absolutely that main attraction for the vast majority of them was shopping (which is worlds ahead in BM), followed by relationships, social activities like dancing, then exploring. The ability to build or script was way, way down the list, I would say around 1%. Unless you are including the creation of skins, clothes and hair as 'building', for which the proportion was more like 5%, but not many continued that after giving it a go.

Rock

So why do you enable building in the common areas?

So why not just say "I'm not going to let your friends build". I mean, if you were a city owner in Blue Mars, and renting out space to people, and they said "I want my friend to build here as well" would you allow their friends to build? Would you go to the trouble of adding their friends to the list of people allowed to build in your city?

That was an "inference", not a "fact". You understand the difference? I "inferred" that since you claimed your tenants needed to build badly enough for you to put yourself to some inconvenience to permit it, they would probably not be interested in a VR environment where they couldn't do that... at least not for very long.

Now it's certainly possible that you've inadvertently mislead me by harping on the difficulties you've had with your tenants and their friends building all over the place, especially since getting rid of those difficulties seemed to be an advantage for Blue Mars for you.

I'm sure you're right. I'm not saying "if Blue Mars isn't a virtual world it's doomed" or anything like that. I'm simply saying that it doesn't appear to have the characteristics of a real "virtual world", like Second Life. Virtual worlds may always be a niche product among all the 3d chat rooms like IMVU or the Blue Mars that you've described, and 3d MMOGs like Warcraft and Project Entropia. That's fine.

As I said, because all my homes are SkyHomes. All the ground level (the full sim is composed of landscaped beaches) are common areas.


This has also been tried, and found not to work. Often a friend would take over a home while the renter was on vacation or whatever. Sometimes friends became partners. It just was not worth the effort of group management (compared with cleaning up after litterers). As for who can build in BM, whether it is solely confined to city owners and their immediate tenants, or whether his could be extended or not, is as yet unclear to me. Though I have added this to my list of questions.



Sorry, wrong again. An inference is usually denoted by the use of such words as:

Probably...
I'll bet....
Then it follows that...
That leads me to beleve...
etc

What you said, which is very different to your rejoinder above was:



'because they won't be there' is not an inference, it is stated as a fact. 'because I believe they won't be there' is an opinion, inferred from what I claimed. Now, do you know the difference?




I never knowingly try to mislead, and when I discover an error on my part I try to put it right as soon as possible.

All I can tell you right now is what I have learned through setting up an interview with an official from BM, and further clarifications. I can also tell you that BM is as stunning as the trailers. What I cannot say yet is that the claims made by BM as to how the world will work, in terms of commerce, restrictions, if any, on social interactions, etc are as yet verified. What I have stated all along, is that if I find any discrepancies between the claims, (positive by AR themselves, or negative by some posters in forums), I will post those discrepencies on my blog.

Contrary to what you might think, I am not a BM advertising exec. I visit a great many Virtual Worlds (whether you agree or not with that term is besides the point) and write about what I find. I am currently in SL, Openlife, OpenSimulator Project (for which I wrote tutorials and the User Manual), OSGrid, Vast Parks (standalone), Twinity, Metaplace, Entropia, 3rd Rock, HiPiHi, and I am currently beta testing for BM and FreeRealms. I visit the various gaming conferences and shows and write about what is emerging.

I will admit this, nothing has impressed me so much as Blue Mars in a long, long while.

Yours Sincerely,

Rock

Sorry, couldn't resist,



as opposed to a virtual "Virtual World"?

Come on, admit it, that was funny


Rock

Ah, so you chose to build the sim in a way that makes it un-necessarily hard for you to use the tools LL provides to automate the process. That's not Linden Labs' fault.
But from what you have stated, you will not have the option of cleaning up after them in Blue Mars, you will have to deal with the group management problems, or tell people "tough".
Usually, but not always. That one wasn't. It was denoted by context. Deal with it.

I mean, really, what are you trying to say, that I was pretending to be reading your tenant's minds? If an interpretation of someone's words implies they're claiming mystical powers, it's just barely possible that you might have misinterpreted them. Consider the possibility. Maybe they expressed themselves less clearly than possible. Going off at them and accusing them of sundry crimes and misdemeanors is not really super-productive.
I thought you said you were in the beta.
That was in inference, I hope, because I haven't implied that I think you are.
Well, I've been "Argent" in virtual worlds since the early '80s, and I've visited most of the systems you've listed, in addition to There and ActiveWorlds, and text based worlds like Sociopolitical Ramifications, and I've run my own way back into the mists of time, so I can list lots of impressive names too.

No, I chose to build it that way as I believed my tenants would like it like that, and they did, and it has been successful ever since.



I do not want the option of cleaning up after people in BM, the problem won't arise.

I did deal with it, it is you that hasn't. Your redefining of both the meaning of words and now of grammar while in squirm mode is most demeaning. You stated a fact, you got it wrong (again), so let's just redefine grammar, yeah, whatever.


I neither said nor implied any such thing. If you simply refrain from making assumptions and statements of facts that are simply incorrect, there is no problem.


Correct, I did, and I am. If you hadn't omitted y very next sentence, thus taking things out of contect, you would have seen. "I can also tell you that BM is as stunning as the trailers." I can tell you this because I am in the beta.



I wasn't attempting to list 'impressive' names, some of those listed are far from impressive. I listed them just so that you don't think that I am inexperienced when it comes to Virtual Worlds and making subjective observations about them. I try to write my experiences as honestly and factually as I can, leaving speculation to others. You, on the other hand, claim to have visited even more Virtual Worlds than myself, so you should know better than to have written a great deal in this thread about Blue Mars, without ever having set foot inside the place.

Rock

So why don't you do the same thing in SL?

On to the Beta. I was not attempting to quote you out of context, rather I was asking you a leading question. Yes, I know that's a naughty thing to do, but I did it anyway... and was clearly too indirect about it.

So let me try the same leading question, less subtly.
So why can't you tell us what you have learned from the Beta? NDA?

That's an inference, expressed as a fact, but I have not actually made that claim. I can see how you might have been led to that inference, but I did not intend to imply anything more than "my experience is also broad".

Yes! Shoes! *Does the happy dance.

There is a NDA for BM, but it relates to intellectual property, rather than forbidding descriptions and opinions on its merits/demerits.

The current beta is for the SDK, not for Blue Mars itself, but the two should be an identical experience (they have promised it is a true WYSIWYG). I will certainly let people know if they are not.

If you wish to experience Blue Mars yourself you can do so using the Sandbox editor that is included with every copy of Crysis, only the avatars will be different, as the BM SDK has modified that a great deal. BM will also launch a cut-down editor on their website shortly (says the man).

The SDK currently only affords a look of what the avatar will experience within Blue Mars, in terms of presence and aesthetics, and the ability to build and script. Not until the beta in June will we start to play with the mechanics of BM, e.g the detail of how the commerce will work, how teleporting will work, whether there will be an 'estate' concept as in SL, where if you own more than one city, will it be possible to apply certain settings (eg fly no fly) to all of them simultaneously, or not, etc.

I will be providing details of what I find, when I find it, on my blog, and in the SL Universe forum (where I hope the other beta testers will share their experiences). Right now, I am trying to get to grips with Lua, which is a steep learning curve for someone who is not an experienced scripter (I would only describe myself as intermediate, at least as far as LSL goes).

Rock

Ah. That makes a LOT of things clearer and I apologize for inferring that you were withholding information.

First one is always the roughest. Different names and some new functions but you can carry a lot of concepts over to new languages. For example; You know all the ways to manipulate a string in LSL. Even thou it may be a different command name or better ways to manipulate the strings such as trim left or right, you at least know that you do need to change the string and it is easy to find the appropriate command.

It was probably about 6 months of serious work to wrap my brain around LSL. After using LSL for a couple of years I tried AutoIt and it only took a couple of weeks to create a much more complex program. After that I was able to create a couple of programs that we all use at work using C# in a couple of weeks also. I could use C# for the next 10 years and never really master it, there is just so much you can do and so many commands. But I can use it to create what I need.

WooHoo and then Yikes!!!!!
Finally rcvd SDK link! Yay!

1.4 gig compressed..................................

Good, you can send me a copy on the sly.

oh that's gonna suck when I go to DL it on my line... my isp went to hell after the telcom company took over... I think they confused bit with bytes, decided I was getting 8 times my payed for speed and cut me by a multiple of 8 (on good days)... guess who won't be having a cable bill this month though?

The SDK is in beta.

And yup, I am in the beta. And yup, I haz my SDK.

Can't say much more, but its not vapor

don't discount the netbooks and televisions, as Cryengine based games and worlds will very likely run in environments like OnLive.

http://www.onlive.com/about.html

Which lowers the minimum hardware dramatically, and is another reason why I am interested. That is a huge currently untapped market, and none of them are really creators. They can't be, the hardware limits them.

SL is geared heavily to creators, but they're not the only users out there. What I want is a world that is balanced between creators and users. Creators need audiences, audiences need creators.

Congrats, please do share your experience with the rest of us over at SL Universe.

Thanks also for the encouraging words about changing languages. I just noticed that the command set for Lua is much greater than the LSL command set. I also tried AutoIt, but had too many problems with timing to get my projects to work, so in the end I switched to Visual Basic, and everything was fine from then on. I wrote a Windows front end for OpenSim using VB, and enjoyed it.

Rock

Excellent news, the more feedback the better. Hope to see you swapping experiences over at SL Universe.

Rock

I have just watched quite a long videoclip of Blue Mars - entitled something like 'Beach City'. It might have been linked earlier on here.

Anyway after watching that I conclude that SL might have less to worry about than I thought beforehand. The graphics are not up to the standard of the original Blue Mars publicity taster video. Apart from shadows and some good scuplts, the graphics on BM don't even look as good as SL. The sky looks like the pre-WindLight one we used to have here. Avatar animation was certainly no better, nor is avatar realism except perhaps in joint smoothness.

With Second Life, you get what it says on the box. The in-world experience is as good as the publicity screenshots, unless you end up in a sandbox or the remnants of an ad farm.

Amen..

The CryEngine is technically superior to SL's 3D engine. But a virtual world is only ever gonna be as good as its content.

Content creators are very important. This is something the Blue Mars creators don't seem to grasp. They should be giving content creators free hosting. Even then I personally wouldn't entertain them with my time. I need an audience and a guarantee of hard cash in my hand after a week's hard work.

rolls eyes. I can compare the editor to SL, and no, its not the same... DirectX 10 based Cryengine 2 is far nicer graphically than the homebrew stuff in SL.

When I get HDR lighting, a full Windlight solution that's not half baked (that means, I can set the way the weather looks and you'll see it - that CAN be done in a game engine, yup, Cryengine2 and Blue Mars also), meshes in game, ability to rig meshes and import them, well, maybe I will believe SL is equal.

SL is actually very different in most ways from Blue Mars... both have strengths and weaknesses due to their different heritages, but going into the future, I see potential in Blue Mars I am unsure if SL will ever achieve. Not because it can't... because LL doesn't seem to want to take it that direction.

When SL starts catering to us artists again, let me know. I am tired of LL beating me with that AO stick, when they start doling out carrots I'll be happier. Till then, I will continue playing with toys that let me have meshes and more control.