Blue Mars beta

Any plan/vision in your mind what are you going to develop?

For those of you who are considering the closed beta, there are two options going in - one is as a content creator and the other a developer. To terraform, create levels, etc. you need the full SDK (CryEngine2) and need to be a developer. If you are more interested in creating objects in a 3d program and uploading them to Blue Mars you don't need the full SDK. Content creators get the sandbox and client (viewer), developers also get the SDK (CryEngine2).

Apparently there will be 3 levels of developer/creator eventually. City Developers, Block Developers and Content Creators. A block being about the size of an SL sim.

Trying to figure out which way to go is pretty tough.

ORLY?

Does this mean you won't be able to buy directly anything smaller than a block, you'll have to rent it from a bigger landowner?

I don't think that has been carved in stone yet but I understand that the size of a block and/or city can be really, really flexible.

I'm still getting the "e-mail address not pre-registered" thing but ... This is way too complex for me anyway... I'm just a resident who likes to make my own furniture and stuff and write some scripts to do things like make fireflies come out on my front porch when the sun goes down. I don't really create things that are intended for anything beyond my own personal use. The BM level of commitment is just too high for me it seems. You guys have fun over there.

awww
its not as if i am a digital leonardo myself. im just wanting to see it happen, and see it from the beginning. maybe jump on board even.

http://www.bluemarsdev.com/
do you see a 'sign up!' flash thingo on that page? try it from there. try it again!

lol, no I didn't see a flash thingo. I was wondering about that blank area in the middle of the page though so I tried viewing it with IE and then the flash app appeared. Then when I clicked on "Sign Up", I had to disable the pop-up blocker but from that point it was smooth sailing and I got pre-registered.

Yes, I have a very clear plan and vision for the level/city/region/zone I am going to create.

Right now, I am getting familiar with the tools for the job (but I am buggered if I am spending US$1000s for 3DSMax or Maya. I have now managed to get Sketchup objects into BM, so that will be my main building tool for objects).

My next problem is getting BM to go along with the idea.

Rock

What does this mean? Even after you buy a city or a block, you have to have approval from BM to build in it?

One can't help but wonder what Industry Standard and Sketchup have in common...

Am guessing he wants them to pay for it. Just guessing though...

No, not a case of that. BM has not released any info at present on whether it plans to 'zone' BM in the same way as SL is doing with the Adult Continent, and designate areas Adult/Mature/PG.

I do not want to go too far down the road of completely designing an Adult or Mature rated sim, if they eventually decide to go fully PG, and my idea actually crosses all three of those ratings (and there is an educational aspect to it too, which might need some explaining).

It will be some time before all the Policies are decided upon, so in the meantime I am just playing, practicing, bug reporting, feature suggesting, and waiting for an opportune time to bounce my idea off them.

Rock

It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Perhaps I'm cruisin for a bruisin here but my experience of SL in the past two years is that residents who do not take an active role in creating their own fantasies are quite simply short-lived blow-throughs.

Buying everything is mostly what we do in RL, right? To varying degrees we may be successful at keeping ourselves happy with regular forays to the mall on our credit cards but that only works to a very limited degree. Like any other boom in the economy, there will be a point where buying everything quite simply will not do the trick - for businessmen and consumers alike.

As an alternative to this pointless conundrum, virtual reality requires far more than consumerism to survive: it requires that we realise our fantasies, to some degree, through our own efforts, which is a standard that cash just isn't up to meeting as a matter of course, despite what we tell ourselves every time we feel the need to hit the stores.

Ask any millionaire (if they aren't too busy chasing more of what it is they were looking for in the first place): he gets himself a nicely tailored suit and feels like a new man but the trouble is that very soon the new man wants a nicely tailored suit ...

Sure, a goodly number of commercially inclined individuals will make a killing on the immediate impulse of new or newish residents to kit themselves out and get going. Hell, the customers will even come back for more and, better still, more new residents will follow along after them looking for more of the same.

But I can't shake the notion that Blue Mars will become just as empty and inert as many parts of SL until account holders realise that much of the responsibility for realising their cherished fantasies lies in their own hands.

Consumerism in SL may have taken off but I have to say that in the past two years the social aspect has taken a dive into the sh!theap. Folk just don't seem to know what to do with this thing once they've finished playing with their inventory and clicking pose and gesture buttons on their HUDs - just like everybody else in the vicinity.

If buying were all that I could do with this thing, I'd have cancelled my account long ago and I swear I can spot a 'bought' avatar at a glance these days: they tend to be as short-lived as spring daisies and just as boring en masse.

Simple consumerism, when it is not balanced with a healthy and creative attitude, will make both SL and BM shallow charicatures of RL and, if that is where virtual worlds are headed, I have no doubt that in a few years we will be discussing banks of servers loaded with the deserted inventory of account holders who have long since retreated to the escapist staples of television and cinema in RL.

I can't help but think that result would add weight to detractors who argue that virtual living is for sad-assed failures at RL - who can't even do their shopping right.

It isn't a responsibility issue, though. The problem is the same thing that happens with this in the real world - the quality of the work produced by the people who focus wholly on producing things skyrockets in comparison to everyone else. That's exactly why a specialized economy is such a good thing. But it bites back when people find they can't create their own "fantasies" (or other things) because they can't do them well enough; it doesn't fulfill any fantasies to have low quality things; and even if they CAN learn to do them well enough, making them will take so long that they will have no time for the fantasy.

Plus, there's another factor - adding new factors from the outside is part of what makes an experience "real". In the real world, when you do something, a huge set of feelings and smells and subtle visual differences and things come into play that you don't have to specifically engineer. In Second Life, when you use something that someone else made, the same thing happens. You use (say) a poofer and suddenly there's all the particles and effects and details you haven't seen before. But if you make the poofer yourself.. it's just the same effect you've seen a hundred times while you were tweaking it to get it right. It just doesn't feel as real. Strange but true.

I think some of that may be true for the SL demographic. Certainly, I'm part of that demographic-- the one thing that hooked me on Second Life was the ability to create things from my imagination, then walk around and play with them.

But the market for virtual worlds isn't just SecondLife, and purely consumer based games of all genres do very well, from World of Warcraft to Eve Online. And it's not just the established games: Free Realms just opened a couple of months ago and is now past 3 million users. And that's in a recession (mind you, their "no money upfront/micropayment" cost structure probably helped. But SL essentially has the same structure).

Blue Mars is intriguing. It's halfway between the Second Life "anyone can build" and the more traditional "only employees can build". I suspect what will happen is that some regions (I, like Rock, prefer the term ) will be popular as their content will be attractive. Some regions may gather cobwebs. But in essence, they will be providing the tools for region owners to create their own little MMOs, with the added bonus of being able to transfer assets between regions. Is it Second Life? No, but that's not to say it can't be a successful business model.

You make a two good points here Yumi.

Its more than products though. The city I live in has always had a very high percentage of artists as part of the general population. Every part of town the artists have congregated in has started off poor and ended up gentrified because non creative people wanted to be near the energy. Each time the cost of living went up and the artists would move out and the area would become as lifeless as the area the newcomers left. The next generation of artists would congregate in another poor part of town and the cycle would start again. This has happened 3 times in the past 20 years.

I see SL as the artistic part of town.

Just to clarify, I define creativity in very broad terms: making a good sandwich for yourself is a creative act and even turning a buck is a form of creativity, but the distinguishing characteristic is that you put some care and attention into doing it, whatever it is.

I totally agree that it is fun to go out and buy what you want or need without having to plumb the sometimes tedious depths of building and texturing your own stuff. In my slacker moments I often wish that it were a more practical option with SL. Nevertheless, buying very quickly becomes a tiresome and disappointing business in itself and that is what concerns me about the plan for BM.

SL would be a much smaller and quite possibly duller place if everyone were just interested in building their own things but some balance is also necessary in that respect. How many SL residents make and sell something themselves if only to offset the expense of tier and also (hey, why not?) buying other residents' products?

Selling is very much the other side of that same coin residents like to spend and a purely consumerist BM will have a ceiling right there that they will not readily pass through.

There seems to be a lot of conjecture on a game for all intents is still vaporware. When I first looked at this I thought the Beta was to begin in the first quarter of 09 and recently noticed this has been slipped to the 4th quarter. They seem ver proud of the fact that they have 2.4 million in funding. This amount of funding for a project of this complexity seems a little thin/

Without user created content it is just another 3d visual chat room, plenty of those still hanging on the vine and many more rotting on the ground.

While the game engine is impressive so is the equipment required to just play a game. You can still play SL on rather antiquated machines )) and have an enjoyable experience.

Using SL as a benchmark if they do ever show for real they will have a rather steep curve to become as useable as this game. Also using SL as a benchmark the problems will also be enormous, lets face it the ground under water still has a nice texture in windlight. BLACK )) with Nvidea the supposed standard for the game.

Linden Lab is famous for smoke and mirrors but this is a true case of the cart leading the horse , at least at this time.

People get bored, People want new (shiny) things.

How many here upgrade their mobile phone when the old one still does the job fine?

I've finally managed to "fully" break my "Need" to use SL, as after 1 year I feel I've been there, seen it all, same old same old......

Sim crossing (flying into nowhere for a while still you get renched back to you new location every 256m is a total joke) if it happened ever so often then fair enough but every 256m !!! Making you fly into/thru buildings near a sim line.

The Transparancy glitch that makes your plants look like they are indoors 1 second and outside the next.

I could go on, and it's not THAT bad, but half a dozen VERY basic things.

I'm sidetracking a bit here.

But, IF you offer people something new, then people will go take a peek.

Come on, even content creators, must be getting a bit tired by now trying to work around SL limitations.

Every now and again it MUST be nice to "wipe the slate clean" have a fresh "better" start and move on.

You can't keep on adding room, and redecoratng your old house. Every now and again it's nice to bulldoze it down and start fresh, new, clean and move onto better things.

Otherwise we'd still be in caves.

I don't care if it's Blue Mars of Second Life v2, but we NEED now (or soon) to grasp the "bull by the horns" and move onwards and upwards.

IMHO

One of my fondest dreams is that people build some sort of gateway system that allows connection between totally different game -- like say between SL and WoW. Technically being able to move around freely among them is probably far in the future -- I mean, for me to port from my sim to Orgrimmar or Galaxy City.

One could argue that you don't need that ability. But somehow people seem to compartmentalize, to think of WoW, for example, as distinct, and certainly there is little social overlap for most people, WHen I am in WoW or City of Heroes, the people I know have never been in SL, and the people I know in SL don't play those other mmos.

It would be cool to have some really live way of connecting those worlds, to make them feel less separate from each other. Would be cool if SL could be the venue for social interactions that are always a bit strange in other games, And crafting is such a pale pale reflection of building in SL. People in mmo's are always clamoring for customization, and flipping out when some new gear comes out. In SL it would be nice to have some additional robust ways to spending time besides building, chatting, and en garde.

I think that whoever finds a way to do this, and it does seem to me inevitable, will be building a more significant "next generation" platform than something based merely on eye candy.

Not me. I laugh at people who do. Ha ha. Hear me laughing. Ha ha ha!

Yes, we're just chomping at the bit to go deal with a company that's stated up front that they're going to let landowners impose limitations that no sane content creator would dream of putting up with in SL.

I looks askance at you. Blink! Blink! You're a dangerous person. I'm taking your keys away and calling the cops if you ever show up with a bulldozer!

That's not a "cave", that's a "low impact ecologically efficient house".

That's what Be thought. And AT&T. And yet BeOS and Plan 9 have not gotten anywhere because they're not sufficiently UNIX-compatible. Even Microsoft had to grasp the horny bull and buy Interix from Softway Systems, because they needed to make NT UNIX-compatible... and they're in the incompatibility business!

Those kind of people are never happy and I sure as sh!t wouldn't want to go chasing my tail to please them - not for love nor money.

In fact I wouldn't want to even speak with someone who is bored because bored just means 'I haven't got a clue what to do with myself'. What kind of individual thinks like that?

Are you sure you like anyone then? LOL

I'd guess almost everyone on the planet (apart from some monks) are like this.

Why do women want new handbags, shoes, dresses when they have perfectly good ones already?
Why do people buy new phones, upgrade their perfectly working cars?

Who not log onto SL buy 1 house on 1 plot of land, 1 set of cloths and stay like that forever?

Nearly everyone wants to move on, get new things, get bored with what they've got.

Otherwise the whole consumer industry would die tomorrow. and we'd still be running 286PC's with 16K of memory.

Something like SL which has graphics as good as the "Real World" and you were a virtual headset/glasses and can FEEL the environment around us (go on holiday from the comfort of your arm chair) is the obviousl end result of all of this.

Be in 10, 20, 50, 100 years..........

We will get there eventually as that's the obvious point we are working towards.
I'm not saying it's a GOOD thing as such, but it's what people will want.

Hence, why I LOVE change and moving on.

I come from the 80's with computers and am used to dumping all hardware and software every few years to step up to the next generation which is how we got to here where we are today.

It seems a shame now that "The Consumer" and "Big Business" are now so involved with computers (rather than techno nerds!) that they are (or they seem to) be stopping progress for fear of damaging sales or upsetting the masses etc etc etc........

(Just having a little rant here) LOL

I could think of nothing worse than SL being the same (pretty much) as it is now technically in 10 years time.

And if Linden don't have the drive to force change, then I hope someone else will, other wise we shall just stagnate.

There have been lots of changes and improvements to SL even in the two years I've been around.

My worry is that most of the stagnation appears to be happening amongst the residents themselves whereby increasing numbers are coming in, doing the Barbie and Ken thing with a bit of shopping, getting bored with their shallow travesty of RL and leaving within a very short space of time.

It just doesn't seem to work.