Blue Mars beta

Precisely. At least half of my sales are from products that I sell full permission. They're sold on the honor system. And people buy them.

The idea that you need unbreakable DRM to succeed is foolish and dangerous.

*nod* But getting onto that loop is much harder - it takes a lot higher quality product, and a lot more marketing, to get that first sale than it did in 2005. And that fact is leading less people to become casual builders, because there's such a big cliff looming over you when you start. The basis for starting, nowadays, has to be that you enjoy building per se, not that you want to achieve something by doing it. And that in itself changes the character of it for people who haven't tried it yet.

Let me quote it because it is right.

You cannot hide your digital work if you make it public in any viewer inside any environment for everyone. It is also not important to hide. It should be seen like you see things in real world.

You can learn from each other and you improve each other. The Internet is by far the worst thing if you try to hide anything.

*BUT
If you have a strong community of skilled builders (like Bluemars will have) who know how things are done - it is very difficult to hide any stolen idea. You can of course learn some tricks. I think everybody wants to learn and thats a happy thing.

A pro skin designer inside SL knows the ways how she/he made her/his skins. It is a master skill - its like a hard language you need to learn and understand. So skilled builders and designers do see the source - of course!


In fact! No question how old CopyBot really is. No question how hard it is to fight. Since 2008 it has become by far too easy to copy everything inside SL and create an exact copy without the need to be scared because no-one really cares anymore (it seems), which makes this world a sandbox for copy kids and not for skilled designers.

You are allowed to copy or qote my statement and send it to all people in SL.

blue mars doesnt necessarily need to have a technical solution. it sounds to me as if 'developers' is no more than a fancy word for 'builders'. perhaps people are thinking that becoming a registered developer is harder than it actually will be. maybe the whole developer concept is merely a means to eliminate anonymous creation and trading. maybe the solution is to have rl info for anyone with the ability to build, and to bring down the hammer of god on those that abuse their developer status.

its hard to know, but i certainly havent written off blue mars. ive been waiting for something to come along and kick LL in the ass. i hope this is finally it.

The same is true in Second Life. What really made copied products such a problem in SL wasn't any technical change, it was the growth of SL. If SL had stayed a relatively small and tight-knit community, it wouldn't have the same degree of copying... but contrariwise, if it was smaller people wouldn't be able to make as much money from sales. If Blue Mars gets to the size of SL, without significantly restricting the size of the development community, it will have just as many problems as SL.

It seems that BM's intention is to do exactly that... to severely restrict the size of the developer community. Initially they're accepting most people (but not all), but over time their requirements will become more stringent.

I don't want to be part of any such exclusive club.

It may sounds exclusive and selective at this time. All you should do now is asking a lot of questions, listening, comparing facts without to judge.

In 2010, maybe you will be one of those exclusive club members looking back and say - damn I was wrong.

The same goes for me - of course

Amazing crystal ball you have there Argent.

Facebook restricts account creation to actual people willing to give real information about themselves. Facebook doesnt seem to be suffering from restricting account creation this way.

If BM decides to restrict developer status to people willing to provide actual information about themselves I would applaude. That's just my opinioin... I think the greatest folly LL has made with SL was to push for number of accounts rather then quality of accounts. Maybe that's just my perspective because I had to verify my account within a week of creating it or it would have been canceled.

You don't want to be part of such an exclusive club, that's fine. Maybe they don't want you either. Just the same way LL didn't want you as an un-verified account in 2004.

As Argent points out, there are already additional restrictions on developing for BM and they will only get worse.

I think this is true -- the registration step will help, and introduce a layer of control that doesn't exist in SL. Whether this ends up being "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" remains to be seen.

I have been waiting, too -- perhaps 'fearing' is a better word, in my case. It seems inevitable, unless there is a mechanism for SL to introduce really new graphical technology (meshes, etc.) over time. If there is no way to make a platform both scalable and fungible, then any platform is doomed to obsolescence. Only ones that can be profoundly changed with available technology will grow with the times.

I wouldn't know, the only reason I'm on Facebook is to send the occasional message to someone who doesn't want to use any of the other chat systems I'm on, so I have no idea how good or bad Facebook's development tools are and I have no interest in finding out.

Yumi says her application was rejected, so they are NOT simply limiting themselves to verified accounts.

If Blue Mars required that every user verify themselves, but let every user build, that would be fine by me. If Second Life went back to requiring verification as they did when I signed up, that would be fine by me. What I object to is restricting building to some subset of the in-world population.

Sometimes I wonder that because so little gets done with beefing up Second Life as we know it now, with all the new technical staff coming into SL, isn't there a possibility that a completely 'new' SL is being developed in the background, something with similar aspects to what is being offered in Blue Mars, or is that just so pie in the sky thinking?

Not unless Linden Labs goes under AND OpenSim stops development, OR Blue Mars when it opens is unrecognizably different from the way it has been described so far.

This is the most interesting thread I ever seen on the Internet

Edit threat instead of thread would match perfectly too - guessed )

threat or thread?

edit both

I've been thinking about this allot lately especially as the Beta period for Blue Mars grows closer. I'm sure there is no way to upgrade the existing world to compete graphically with BM but I wouldn't be too surprised to see Second Life 2.0 or Third Life or whatever in the pipeline very soon.

Virtual worlds have come and gone over the last few years, Many have been promised, few have delivered and none worthy of competing with SL right now. I think BM will be different and it will only take one new World that gets enough things right to put SL out of business. It won’t happen overnight but if BM lives up to the hype I think this is the first true candidate we've seen so far.

I'm excited about BM! I've been playing in my sandbox and let’s just say it left a sticky stain in my underpants

I don't know about completely new, but I do believe there will be some big leaps in what content can be put into the world once they have the infrastructure hammered into a presentable shape.

Let me make this right:


This thread is the most interesting threat I ever seen on the Internet

Thats my last statement!

Now you guys can make an argument out of this

couldnt we be talking about simply a liberal 'verification required' system? non verifieds welcome, but only verifieds welcome to add content to the grid? to me it sounds like the greatest way to dissuade griefing and content theft.
i dont think anyone knows for certain that the developer system is as ficcy as some make it out to be.

Why not? SL gets upgrades all the time. New prim types, new meshes, client-side physics and shadows, they've even done optically credible reflections. There's no reason, for that matter, that you couldn't use the same rendering engine as Blue Mars to render Second Life... they've already done a forklift upgrade on the SL rendering engine and the server-side physics engine.

Why not? SL gets upgrades all the time. New prim types, new meshes, client-side physics and shadows, they've even done optically credible reflections. There's no reason, for that matter, that you couldn't use the same rendering engine as Blue Mars to render Second Life... they've already done a forklift upgrade on the SL rendering engine and the server-side physics engine.

Even that would be unacceptable as far as I'm concerned, and they're already being more discriminating than that.

Not that I am a software engeneer nor an expert but I do not see the easy chance to implement the same Engine as Cryengine2 as I said you cannot compare an apple with a lemon.Two total different worlds.

The trouble here is the existing work of many years inside SecondLife which cannot just be update installing new tools - not for the existing builds and objects. Textures work also a bit different inside Cryengine2. We do not know if BM offers everything that comes with the Cryengine2 like breakable and destroyable objects -the high end physic - but if they are there . WOW - bombastic Real feeling huh?

However, the new shader effects for another environment feeling also some of those "detail bending" could be implemented. Detail bending is a vertex color based method to get more natural bending for vegetation. I am still not happy of the local light effects inside SL also the shader look are really bad. So bad, I have to disable them inside SL.

.

No, let me be clear - I didn't apply because they stated they wanted "qualified developers". That's still a rejection because it was their action, in typing the word "qualified" there, that caused it - and from what others have said, in practice it was a lie. But you know, if you say that a party is for men only I would generally think it an antisocial move for me to show up anyway just in case it was a lie.

The meshes rendered by the client are not the same meshes as used by the Havok engine in SL. They're different in size and shape, and there's no reason that the client needs to use the procedural and geometric prims as anything more than the basis for a mesh.

I don't think the current platform could be upgraded to anything like BM, and major retrofits are usually more trouble than they are worth compared to a fresh start, but they could make the switch to the CryEngine2 (or indeed maybe even a better engine that comes along), which is the strategy that Entropia have taken, they are currently running two worlds, one based on the older platform, and one based on the CryEngine.

For sure, Crytek are not sitting still, the CryEngine3 is about to launch, and I am sure their gaming competitors are not sitting by idly either, and are watching the secondary use of their competitor's game engine as a virtual world engine with great interest.

I was somewhat disappointed by the consensus view in the OpenSim Developer's irc that there is simply too much tied up in the existing SL infrastructure, and so many technical limitations, to allow SL to make any kind of major overhaul to their platform. Opensim have recognised the major limitations now and have branched considerably from being a SL clone. They are even talking now about radically altering the permission systems (more options than copy/mod/transfer, more fields for creators when a build is a joint project, and fields for the names of the script writers, the animation creators, the texture authors, and a field for licensing info, are all currently being talked about).

It seemed strange to me (and to others in the opensim community) that the thing that is the easiest thing to make in a build, i.e. the prims (rather than the textures, the anims, or the scripts), is what determines who the 'Creator' is in the object description, composed of all these elements.

With regards to your objection to building being limited to a subset of the community, does that objection still hold, if SL were to restrict building to only those residents who were registered with RL info in some way, eg those who had PIOF?

Rock