Blue Mars beta

I still don't see a lot going on over there. As far as I can tell, it is vaporware. But we will see. Only time can tell.

No I haven't explored it in detail yet -- it is kind of empty and repetitive, and I don't like the click to walk thing (hope they make that optional) but eventually I probably will.

Truly I do understand why some people are investing hopes in a new effort. And people who have spent a lot of time and care in SL, I hope it can be undertsood, will view it suspiciously and critically.

If BM is better than SL then it will supplant it. That is the way of the world. But there is no way to tell now, how good it will end up being. It will be interesting to see.

I have found you can walk without clicking. Clicking ahead to a distant point is a great way to get you where you want to be, at a jog, but if you just want to walk just press your Up arrow key. I also found that the opening square in Beach City was empty (apart from the bot-girls, so I went exploring over the hills, into the great valley trap (still not found how to get out of that place yet), over the mountains and rivers to the beaches beyond, and almost everywhere I went I met with others doing the same. Have you seen all those amazing fish, turtles, and that gorgeous manta ray under the sea near the waterfall in Taki?

The way I like best to move around now is to go into First-Person view (similar to Mouselook in SL), then hold the right mouse button down, and use the Up arrow key. No need for any turns with the left-right arrow keys to get you in the right direction, you just look (where you want to go) and walk.

Rock

You are right

btw, PM

Rock

that's because this is the SL forums. It is fairly natural for people to defend something they love, when someone starts a thread like this that is meant to tout a competitors product, a product by the way which is clearly aimed at winning over SL's market share (unless it can find a way to create its own audience). Maybe it is best to have these discussions somewhere else.

A virtual world's forum seem like an appropriate place to discuss a virtual world, to me.

It is understandable that people are defensive of the virtual world they love, but the misinformation that some posters posted about BM ensured that this thread went on for over 600 posts now.

However, I do think that discussion of the competitors out there is healthy. LL should never take their eye off the ball when it comes to the competition, and advances in technology that those competitors take advantage of. They should also listen to the things said in the forums about what some residents do like, and don't like, and what they may envy in other worlds.

I for one, hope that SL progresses (technology-wise) and keeps pace and matches what other platforms say they will be offering.

When SL was born there was just a handful of virtual worlds, now there are over 300, but SL has grown despite them, and despite then being discussed. I hope that the growth in SL is in some small part due to other the discussion of other worlds, and the marketing guys in LL took note (Mark Kingdon was questioned about Blue Mars in a recent interview).


Rock

Dave: and yet Activeworlds and There and the Sims are still around. Possibly there are *different* kinds of 3d VR environments that can *simultaneously* be popular, hmmm?

This couldn't be more incorrect. As much as those of us who have been "accepted" want to feel special - they aren't even asking for credentials. As far as I can tell, everyone who has asked for access to the beta account as a developer or content creator has been granted it. In some cases I doubt they even intend to create anything.

I don't see Blue Mars as being any more exclusive than Second Life. If you come to SL as a newbie you have to learn their in-game building tools. If you go to BM you use one of several highly recognized 3d software packages, one of which is free (Blender). The only difference is the intimidation factor.

No one will ever convince me that building in 3d Studio Max, for example, is actually harder than building in SL, once you know the program. In many ways it is much easier. There is a button to automatically create stairs, for example. In SL you either tediously do it manually or you buy & learn a gadget to generate it for you. Either way is a heck of a lot more work than clicking the stairs button in a real 3d program and neither will produce nearly the quality of results. Prims will just never have the seamless perfection of a good mesh.

In any case I don't think that SL will be supplanted any time soon. I expect it will chug along just fine for many more years but I do think it's going to see a decrease in users. The thing is the vast majority of people in Second Life either haven't ever actually built anything and have no intentions of doing so or they have played around a bit but certainly wouldn't miss building. They are there to socialize or find themselves or be virtual tourists or make money dancing or whatever floats their boat. When these people realize they can get a free account on BM and have much, much more realistic avatars and do their thing in a much more beautiful world - without lag. They will leave SL.

These non-building SL residents - the vast majority - don't tend to visit forums. But the builders and business owners certainly do. I'm one of them. I have a huge stake in SL as an estate owner and I hope to keep my estate going for a very long time. But I'm not going to ignore this new opportunity either. I'm having a ball learning to terraform in the SDK.

I think some here just don't want to start over or figure their brain is full now that they have learned to build here and they can't fit any more software in or something. I found a set of video tutorials on the basics of learning Blender on YouTube. They were done by a kid who couldn't have been more than 14 years old. I'll bet he'll be building in Blue Mars.

Imagin, they are implicitly asking for credentials.

Yumi - where are they implicitly asking for credentials?

By referring to "qualified developers" on the application page. If that wasn't done to stop unqualified people applying, why was it?

Ok, I see it now, it says "We provide our Blue Mars SDK at no cost to qualified developers." That isn't asking for credentials, they don't even define what they call qualified. As far as I can tell in this case it means interested in creating content.

If I recall correctly you had to pay $200-$300 to participate in SL's beta. Only qualification was money, no interest in creating content necessary.

"Qualified", in the absense of another definition, means "having a qualification".

Sigh. Yumi, I gotta quit paying attention when you say things like "I wasn't allowed to ...", you obviously have a unique definition of "ability" and "permission".

Agreed, but if the qualification for getting into the closed beta of Blue Mars is that you have an interest in creating content then that's not much of a limitation is it. Especially considering they aren't even asking for credentials. I'm not going to get into debating definitions with you.

There isn't much to do there if you aren't a content creator at this point so that's who they are trying to get for now but there do seem to already be quite a few people who don't know any 3d program nor do they have the SDK. Perhaps they are planning to learn a real 3d program or perhaps they just want to get a first look. They certainly aren't discriminated against in any way.

If they meant "interested" people then why not just say that?

I will believe it when I see it - and it may not be Blue Mars that provides this. From what I have gathered, the CryEngine is most like the Unreal or Quake engines, which players use to produce "mods" that are offered on servers in peoples' homes. This is very much like something that could have happened (but seems not to have taken off) with the SL viewer once it went open source and especially since the opensim people came up with a server code. With interoperability, if the server code worked better than it does, one could imagine people being able to host their own regions, and connect to the main SL grid, and tp back and forth, and so on. That effort, which seemed to be going forward a year ago, or two years ago, seems to have run out of steam.

The CryEngine (and the Unreal, Quake etc. efforts) thus far seem to have the opposite problem, in that they have always been a sort of grassroots thing, and there has not been a huge central meeting place (like the SL grid) where everyone can meet up at once -- but rather just all of these little separate instanced games. You can apply for various sorts of licenses to use the CryEngine (now out in version 3, which is hopefully seamlessly integrable with stuff done for version 2 that Blue Mars is using) and that is how people are able to get the building tools to make mods that they can use to host servers.

A lot depends also on how much developers have to pay Avatar for hosting their cities. That information is not available at the moment. That is going to be the first thing the Blue Mars people do to piss off all of their customers -- when the beta developers find out how much it will cost to run their cities. That is one way Avatar is going to make money.

Whether or not the CryEngine really can produce graphics without lag on the same hardware people are using to play SL, with thousands of people all together for example, I just seriously doubt. I could be wrong, of course: but I do believe people who think that can happen are being a bit utopian. Maybe they will find a way to run better graphics with low lag and at a tenth the cost of SL; I expect to see someone claiming that in the next post or two.

Whether or not LL rises to the occasion if Blue Mars ends up presenting a serious challenge, is another question. If LL has abandoned their earlier flirtation with opensource, then one could imagine them obtaining a CryEngine license too, and offering a Second Life 2 version, as someone else in this thread mentioned some other game doing. One can even imagine LL teaming up with some of the Crytek people and coming up with an independent platform that is even newer and next next next generation (and not something invented in 2005).

For high end environments I want to say -
only a selected few will be handed the key
to produce -- excellence.



Very interesting! My argument above is polarizing but it is far away from being incorrect. I didn't make a simple statement, like, "only a selected few will be handed the key". Again, I made an argument. It is my argument, my vision of a High Definition and High-End environment which is commercial, international and successful.

Now I make an argument which may will make some people here jump off their chair

[statement]
You (may everybody) have access to this High-End and High-Definition world as a content creator but you will have an extreme hard time to keep up with those who are already out there editing, creating, programing excellent "worlds" with Maya and 3DMAx, some Blender.


[argument]
Supposed this BM will really start as a commercial HD world, supposed everybody will get the creator key it has never been harder to keep up with competitors around the world to produce excellent work.


The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic - Oscar Wilde

I think this matches perfectly.






.

Couldn't agree more, now let this artist educate this critic and make the statement that the most highly prized and creative works of this species rarely come from an environment, as you put it, "which is commercial, international and successful". The best art has always come from passion, not deadlines and paycheques.

There is no need to keep up with professionals to make your mark in Blue Mars. We all use the same tools, the quality of the work depends only on the imagination and creativity of the artist. Anyone can learn to push the buttons in the program. Not all artists work for corporations, the best of them freelance for a reason.

I do not agree with Oscar Wilde when he says that the "critic has to educate the public", I find that in most cases the public ignores the critics. Indeed in this case the "public" isn't even here. Lots of critics though

You hire an artist for her vision. Anyone can buy skills.

this is as true as it gets..
if we listened to critics we would have a lot less artists in the world

Have you applied and been turned down? If so, you might have cause for complaint...but I think you are just continuing to find excuses to not try, and then whine about how you aren't "allowed" to succeed.

Yumi has already stated that he/she did not even apply because he/she was so put off by the term qualified.

you didn't understand then

Again.. Why use the term "qualified" if nobody will be rejected?