Blue Mars beta

Just apply again and again... it's free Hurry up

If you do not get approved- do they let you know? Cause I 'applied' ages ago and never heard back one way or another.

I know someone else who has yet to hear one way or another

I just applied, and although I'm pretty 'small potatoes' compared to a lot of SL content creators, I remain hopeful

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I know someone else who has yet to hear one way or another

I just applied, and although I'm pretty 'small potatoes' compared to a lot of SL content creators, I remain hopeful

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as far as the vetting process, here is the developer application form:
https://www.bluemarsdev.com/DeveloperRegistration/?regKey=Jdie9wl2Hdk24

doesnt look like very serious scrutiny. ppl are making out 'developer' to mean dreamworks ppl and whatnot.

and submitting that form doesnt do anything anymore.

I just tried it and it told me "Your email address does not exist in our database. Please register at our creator pre-registration page first."

i believe thats the screen where you would have registered your email address with them initially.

Tell that to 70% of the female avatars in SL. That click-clack sound drives me up the wall!

Have they released their cost structure as yet?

not that i know - everything is still imagination

so why do both SL and BM choose the extremes? it makes no sense...

LL could easily just require actual details to enable building/scripting, and track it through the already available account info, and poof most of their DCMA problems vanish in a puff of smoke.

what I'm saying is with a little verifiable info from a user, backed by a credit card attached to a name, it becomes inherently much easier for LL to enable content creators to pursue their own legal rights, and allowing LL to easily enforce decisions, while not overly restricting casual user content creation, and as a bonus they'd have more singly verified users for their marketing stats.

for that matter, BM could do the same, but it doesn't look as if EITHER will wake up to that possibility.

SL didn't choose the extremes. The extreme is Youtube, with zero IP protection unless you're big enough to sue them.
If they'd done that they wouldn't have a fraction of the content they have. That's the approach BM is taking and it's a show-stopper for me.

What LL should do is require actual details to GET INTO SL AT ALL. Like they used to.

I can name two people who have been waiting at least a month for word either way. To me, that sounds like implicit rejection.

I hope that my experience is different, as I'm anxiously awaiting word

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If you can import meshes into Blue Mars, then it would in fact be fairly easy to do.

But why on Earth would you want to? Second Life looks like [edited] compared to the kind of graphics that CryEngine2 is capable of.

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Because I have a lot of really cool stuff in SL, and I don't care whether you think it looks like ass, it still looks better than anything I've seen in the videos TO ME.

Argent, you make some very cool stuff, from what I've seen, and I've enjoyed playing around with it. Thanks for the flight feather script, btw, it was one of the first LSL scripts I ever played with!

But I can't help but think that you could make stuff equally cool, and much more attractive, if you weren't limited by Second Life's odd building system.

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Argent, let me take that a little further. I played around with the craft you have at SkyHook station, and it was fun. But I never got one, because even though I think you did a pretty great job on it, I hate Second Life's flight system. Especially when it comes to lag and sim crossings

And if you had any experience with the Sandbox Editor, I'd bet you could come up with some visually impressive stuff.

As for porting your content, the scripts obviously wouldn't work, but if you were a 3ds Max user, then you could use MaxPort to export your builds, take it into Max and export as Collada (or whatever BM uses) to use in Blue Mars pretty much unchanged. If you use Blender, there are other alternatives. I plan on doing this myself if given the opportunity, just to have a starting place. But given the enhanced graphics capability, I can't imagine not enhancing my builds to take advantage.

And I'm pretty excited about using LUA. LSL is great for what it is, I guess, but it's nowhere near as nice as LUA, in my humble opinion.

Just my $0.02

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If I had to negotiate with each city owner to run the scripts necessary to make it work, I wouldn't bother. If I had to spend money to bring stuff into the world every time I came up with a change, I wouldn't bother.

And it's not the language that's key. LSL is not a bad language, it's a lot higher level than most real-time control system languages, or most virtual world languages. Forth is a relatively high level language, as such things go, and LSL is WAY easier on the average user then Forth.

The key is the runtime, and while SL's is middling-poor (MUF's interactional capabilities blows it out of the water) it's better than (say) DDL and MUDDL. I don't know what BM's is like but given that they picked a relatively heavy-weight language like Lua I doubt their runtime is anywhere near as agile as SL's, even.

Yup, I think I understand. I was just saying that if you/someone *did* bother for whatever reason, I would think it odd if they just used SL content without changes.

Well, before Mono, Lua was likely much more performant than LSL. I've personally written a Lua compiler that used .Net reflection and Reflection.Emit to generate MSIL whenever possible (I'm not a compiler-writer by trade, so closures and tail-calls gave me headaches, but everything else was straightforward), so I know that the runtime could be at least on par with Second Life's performance-wise. When I mentioned Lua, what I was thinking about was it's expressiveness, which beats LSL every time in my opinion.

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Performance isn't the important metric for this kind of system. Responsiveness is. Real time doesn't mean "fast", it means "fast enough", with VERY stringent criteria for what that means.

As for using SL content in BM... if the SL stuff is better than I could ever do in ANY platform... and much of it is... why not?

I'm more of an enterprise/web guy, so I'm sure you're right on that, though I would argue that we don't know enough to make fair comparisons yet.

I guess my own bias is at play with the "SL content in BM" thing, since I have made *much* more visually appealing stuff with less effort for other game engines than I've ever made for Second Life, and all of that within the last two years (I've been in SL for three). I just assume that would be the case with most people, once they have learned the other tools.

And if that is what you wanted to do, there are options. Blender has extensions that allow you to work with familiar prim-based concepts, as does 3ds Max (PrimComposer). And since those tools basically put a prim face on actual mesh data, there's no reason why you couldn't "mix and match", so to speak. You could use familiar primitives with a UI that has the same cut/taper/hollow/etc., and use true meshes in addition.

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Well... Wow, that was faster than I expected. For those that are interested, they are still accepting new dev registrations. Just got mine approved

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BM is using COLLADA for importing 3D content. There are supported plugins available for 3DS and Maya, and 3rd party plugins for Blender. I sucessfully managed to solve how to get Sketchup objects into BM this week, so the whole of the Google 3D Warehouse can now be available.

Argent

You are missing a trick here. Rather than complain about the route that BM is taking, or the route you imagine BM is taking, you should have signed up, and joined the beta. I can tell you (though I probably should not because of the NDA) that the BM staff are VERY responsive to suggestions from the developers. If you think any of their features or policies (and policies are very few at this stage) are going in the wrong direction, you should be in there telling them, rather than in a SL forum, as BM ARE listening to folks.

You would be amazed at what the CryEngine can do, truly, amazed. I had never touched a 3D package (unless you count SL) before this beta, and I have still to launch Blender (after downloading it a couple of weeks back, I have been practising creating terrains and painting them), but I have been having so much fun with Sketchup since I started with it two days ago, I never realised how easy a 3D app could be, it is simplicity itself, and the step-by-step video tutorials are right on the button. I had complex 3D objects created in a minute, that would take a week of spare time to build in SL.

I don't know how responsive LL was during their beta, but AR are very responsive, so get in there and tell them where you think they should be going.

And when you have seen what is going on in BM, get back here, and tell LL to up their bloody game!

Rock

They were on holiday in Hawaii recently, so they are getting to grips with the backlog of applications.

Rock