Blue Mars beta

the beta is over?
everything i hear indicates ll were also very responsive, knew members of the grid by name, would talk in IM and so on.

I think I would also know their names if they all paid me US$200

I also see from their website back in 2002 that during their Early Creator Program sign-up page they said:

"Experience with 3D software tools such as Maya, Photoshop, Bryce, or Poser preferred."

Interesting,

Rock

im pretty sure the $200 thing was an optional 'lifetime membership'.

It was a lifetime membership but it was not optional. You paid or your didn't get in.

Easy? Oh yeah? Let's see now: I would have to convert it all to dae format to use the CryTek sandbox, piece by piece. If I used something like Second Inventory, that would be a nightmare, first saving the SL stuff to my disk then using a conversion program such as blender to do file conversions (most likely by hand) then import to the sand box would have to be done piece by piece because it all comes in scaled to the same size. I have an inventory of 20k items, 90% made by me. Sounds REAL easy.

Why would I want to? Because I don't want to piss away 3 years of 12-16 hours per day effort.

Why else? Because most of my stuff is already fully sculpted. Don't confuse the rendering with the object being rendered. You still have to BUILD stuff using the sandbox -- that stuff (in baked form) can be rendered in SL or in Blue Mars. And the basis is still dae stuff, which means that (for people doing a lot of out of world building for SL, as I do) the basic texture and mesh creation process is still happening at the level of photoshop and blender/maya etc.

But maybe those anazing Blue Mars people will make it so you can click a single button and convert any selected SL object to an uploaded BM asset, with zero lag. Better yet, a whole inventory. I am sure that would be easy, too

then why dont bri's alts have the free land tier?
why do people say 'i wish id gone lifetime'?

That's easy to do when you have only 10-20 active users, judging from the number of people posting on the developer forums, and your company consists of five people. Like BM now...

and that was sl in the early days too. so theres every chance blue mars ppl could turn out like lindens

anyone know what the public beta will do in terms of names? is the importance of sl identities recognised by blue mars?

I got to chose my name - first and last. And it is the same as my SL name. No idea what will happen after the beta.



I think this is the crux of the issue for the anti-BMers here. The whole idea of starting over. Personally I think it is exciting but it is human nature to fear change. But I do know what it is to have a stake in SL. I have invested about $10,000 US in SL to build my dream estate. It is always full & I usually have a waiting list. It makes me a modest income that I am happy with. I love interacting with my tenants and I hope like heck that it continues for many years to come.

But Blue Mars offers something I can't have in SL and I want that too. I've been dabbling in 3d Studio Max for years and am no expert but I have had some professional contracts over the years. Thanks to SL I consider myself a master-terraformer. I absolutely can't resist the possibilities that Blue Mars offers!

I've taken SL as far as I want to creatively. I'm the type of person who loves to teach myself new things and I've been having a ball playing with the terraforming in the BM SDK, I'm also doing some 3dSM tutorials to brush up on my skills there and trying to decide where I want to fit into the scheme of things in this new world. The last thing I'm concerned with is whether or not I can bring my stuff from SL with me.

If you aren't interested in BM that's fine. This forum was started to discuss the BM beta and the possibilities of the new virtual world. It has degraded into



*sigh*

Again, I do not see BM supplanting SL. I believe that SL will lose some people to it but I suspect SL will be chugging along for many years to come.

That's nice for you. If you were a programmer faced with just the restrictions already reported for programming in Blue Mars you'd be less excited.

If I had reached this point, I would feel the same. But I have so many things I want to do in SL and to learn how to do, that there is not enough time in a day for them. It is because everything I sell I make myself: textures, scripts, animations, sounds, sculpts... So any time spent on blue mars is keeping me from that.

Fortunately, all my new stuff is workable in both SL and blue mars. So if the tide turns that way, I can follow it. But I will go where the people are and where the creative juices are flowing, and where the people are producing astonishing things. If BLue Mars can keep that feel, and doesn't become overly professionalized and sterile (which to me is what it is like at the moment) then it will be in my opinion a good replacement for SL.

Right now, SL is where it is happening.

I really don't think it's as bad as you are making it out to be, but since I actually do intend to try and convert Second Life builds, I'll report whether my experiences actually end up matching your expectations or mine or wherever they end up on the scale.

I can assure you I haven't. I have already converted some Second Life content to Collada in order to view it in Google's O3D (I wanted to build a 3D web-based viewer so I could show off actual SL products from my website), so I'm quite familiar with the difference.

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The Blue Mars promo pics look good but browsing the FAQ almost puts me off: it seems they are going too far in the direction of locking up content creation, which will result in a consistently better 'look' but what will the average resident actually do?

I both love and hate SL for the ease of participation that supports such a gamut of amateur to professional content creation, which is what I suspect keeps most regular residents logging in. I don't know many who spend regular time in-world without eventually getting into making something or building - those who don't invariably 'disappear' after a while or maintain only a minimal or occasional presence.

Since BM will be unbalanced in this respect, I wonder how it will fare as an environment that most residents can only visit? However pretty BM may be, SL also has its fair share of good-looking sims but they remain largely empty, in my experience, where I would have expected to find more avs socialising, roleplaying or even exploring.

Will the average BM resident take the trouble to 'apply' to be a registered developer when he or she feels the first pangs of boredom? Or will they just add to the population stats like so many SL 'residents' seem to have done, logging out after a couple of visits never to return?

I suppose I'll have to go and see for myself.

I'm really not sure I understand how you'd be pissing away so much effort if you chose not to bring your existing content to another platform. It still exists in Second Life and serves it's intended purpose, right? It's not an all-or-nothing proposition for most people, I think.

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I was able to choose my name. And I wasn't stuck with a list of predefined last names

I don't know if they plan on allowing that when BM is rolled out publicly, but it's hard to imagine why they'd change it.

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I think it will likely stay that way for quite some time. I feel compelled to check it out so I don't get caught out in the future, and because I truly think it has some very exciting potential, but I don't think it will be a serious threat to Second Life any time soon.

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Agreed. That about says it all : )

I disagree here. I suspect that the vast majority of SLers never build anything. They shop, make themselves pretty, socialize, look for a mate, roleplay having a family, play house, and rub pixels. The most building they do is to buy a house and place items inside it. These are our customers. Few of them visit the forums.

These type of people will prefer Blue Mars, and Blue Mars will be catering to them. And a lot of newbie virtual tourists too.

I have always had trouble keeping a foot in more than one world. That happened with OSgrid too -- I just felt spread too thin. I have active accounts in WoW and City of Heroes, but whenever I am there I feel that I should be here building.

If I spend a lot of time making stuff for Blue Mars, then I will be neglecting SL. There is only so much time in a day. And my customers will be able to tell that I am not putting my love there anymore and go somewhere else. Who could blame them?

I have never taken these forums to be at all representative of the SL population and your description may very well be typical of most SL residents but after two years I still wonder where they are and how often they come in-world.

I guess if you are going to "do it right", then yeah, you'll probably only be creating content for one world at a time. But what you have created will remain, and one would hope it would still be enjoyed even while you are working on other things.

I guess customer support and other social aspects might suffer, but since like you I do my content creation offline anyways, it doesn't seem like it would be a huge difference. People like Argent, who see content creation as being a social process would likely have an even harder time of it.

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This is why you are here denouncing Blue Mars? It's not compulsory you know, you don't have to go. No one seems to think that BM is a threat to SL.

Don't you feel guilty for all the time spent in this forum?

Well see I need to sell stuff to cover tier. I don't just make stuff and put it for sale and then go off and doing something else. Pretty much everything I do is to get people to come to my sims and to experience what I make. It is more art than commerce, that way.

For me, the important thing is the creation and experience of the 3d world. I am not making stuff to leave it behind as some kind of legacy. My sims are a creative growing thing, always changing and evolving. They are really a 3d expression of my creative energies.

I go to see the work of other builders to experience it that way too. When I see good stuff that has been done, it moves me aesthetically on a very deep level.

I am just not sure that a more commercial effort can achieve that. It is the aching humanity, warts, beauty and horror of SL, all at once, that make me want to be there.

If there are "standards" in Blue Mars, and there is a level of professionalism there that plasticizes, perfects, and sucks the soul out of it, then something vital is lost in it.

I am not denouncing it. I am discussing it.

Yes, I do feel guilty about that. But I am interested in the topic so I make that sacrifice.

Actually, Blue Mars is a threat to SL, since it will compete for the same audience that now supports SL. If Blue Mars takes off, SL will shrink. That is all too apparent.

Anyone who loves what we do here, will be interested in exploring other platforms that come along, in case there is a need one day to migrate to another place.