Blue Mars beta

I can answer for myself, at least : I'm not a part of any of Argent's communities, but have purchased some of his items because they appeal to me as both a consumer and as a coder.

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any competitor to LL would be a big advantage for everybody, also for LL so they have to take it more serios and respect the people who pay their bills.

That's what I and tons of others are waiting for! The end user wins......because you can then really vote with your feet!

Five pounds of flax.

I'll tell you 1 thing I don't like about the SL world.

It's a bloody mess !

I don't know how you could do it (well, I do and it would mean major rules in place)

But part of the beauty of the real world is exploring new places, seeing and experiencing the difference different lands offer.

Different countries with different landscapes, different buildings. etc etc.

You know what I mean. (and perhaps SL was like that a bit in the past)

Now, you fly along almost any area in SL and you see, Castle, Tower Block, Normal House, palm trees, another castle, sex shop, Castly, palm trees, wooden house, tower block.

Ok, perhaps I exagerate a bit, but you know what I mean.

Anyone can do anything and it's a bloody mess because of it.

TBH I'd rather have strict rules and if you wanted a certain type of house you went to a certain kinda land, yes, some cross over of course, but it would be lovely to go to different places and see completly different things to other places.

And finding a McDonalds wherever you go!

In the first chapter of Larry Niven's "Ringworld", Louis Wu contemplates the way cheap teleportation homogenized the planet. "The only difference between Sydney and Moskva was five seconds and a tenth-star coin."

Palm trees, oil well, skyhook cable, palm trees, two hundred meters of blacktop floating inexplicably half a mile in the air, sex shop, palm trees, giant rabbit eating a bus, normal house, ...

This is really true of the mainland. I have a feeling that people in these forums who talk about how much better Blue Mars looks are mainlanders. It is why I moved early on to my own estate, and why I exert serious control over everything in my estate.

Thing is though that people really do like different stuff. The amount of control I've exerted really does limit peoples' freedom, and shrinks the market of people if I wanted to be a successful land baron.

The land explosion in SL (before the price changes curbed it) I think is evidence that people do like to have their own place to set up as they see fit. As soon as open space prim increases went into effect, and it was no longer necessary for people to attach them physically to an existing estate, and you could get instant delivery from the land store, well people just rushed to them in DROVES. Business went through the roof for people who offered region terraforming/development/raw file services.

The economy in SL has been depressed -- and it is very hard to disentangle the RL economic situation from the results of the (I think it is accurate to say) catastrophic changes in land policies in SL over the last 18 months.

So -- is there really a big market for controlled, predeveloped content? Will people be happy to live in prebuilt areas, even more prebuilt than in SL? When they say that there is no in world building in Blue Mars, does that include rezzing houses and terraforming?

And can't the Lindens just one-up the competition by letting people buy detached homesteads without qualifying full sims?

The ultimate models are very different, and the question is: how much artistic freedom will there be in Blue Mars? How many people need it?

It will be very interesting to watch this unfold.

Wrong.

Any look at a BM video or a CryEngine video proves why.

Heck, just walking around in the beta world has content that makes SL look like something Doom 1994 or something.

Briana, check your PMs.

Rock

Good idea! Will do. Somehow notification was turned off!

Hey, you know if you take that post....rearrange some of the words and remove a letter it says:

Briana, you rock.

Thanks for that!!

Well I was specifically referring to the vast difference in aesthetics of mainland and many private regions. I doubt many would argue that there isn't often a vast difference. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Some of the CryEngine graphics are definitely better than SL, especially light and shadow effects and the skeletal articulation of the models. The solid objects, since you can use the same ones in SL and in CryEngine, are not in principle going to vary quite as much.

But it is after all a matter of taste, and not something you or I can be "wrong" about.

Objects in SL are throttled to 10m in size. That's a serious drawback when compared to new platforms.

of course that's a Linden Lab policy rather than a technical limitation. And anyhow we were talking about aesthetics rather than size.

I believe that when the world gets more populated you will see the difference. Prim construction is much more limited than mesh.

It's totally a technical limitation.

Try making a long rope or cable by joining prims and apply flexi gravity. It looks like a waves, which is about as unrealistic as it gets. A single primitive object with gravity applied will sag in the middle.

The amount of math required to join prims to give the appearance of something larger than 10m is exponentially innefficient. Using 26 prims to make a roadway across a sim, requires 25x more math than what is really necessary when compared to other simulators, which have no such restrictions.

In SL, a freebee "blingtard" can load up with thousands of twisted torii, bad scripts, AOs, open listens and sensors at the expense of other's resources. And for what? Asthetics?

BM is "pay to play" as it should be.

QFT. Right now, it's as if all texturing in Second Life had to be done with the inworld equivalent of MSPaint. Call sculpts the equivalent of being able to use Photoshop to texture, but you can only use the brush tool: no layers, no filters, no pen tool or any of that.

People have done brilliant work with MSPaint. And people have done brilliant work with prims. But that doesn't mean it's not limiting.

why is the grass in Beach City so fugly, then? : )

Right now, if I compare what I have seen in my explorations of Beach City to what I have seen during explorations of SL, I still prefer the latter aesthetically. When more of the builders of SL get in there and warm up the textures and get some spirit and imagination in there, that might change. Right now it just isn't a style I like very much, and it doesn't get me excited.

Another thing is that so far I have not had the same degree of camera control in Blue Mars as in SL. You can't really get up close and look at stuff. I can't wait until I can do that kind of thing better.

Really, it is a matter of taste. Some people really love, say, WoW graphics and think they are very imaginative and the colors are gorgeous. Other people hate them and find them cartoonish. I can see both views, actually. It is really silly to try to say one view is right and the other is wrong - to each his or her own, and in time as I see more stuff that actually accords with my taste, I will decide whether or not it is really better. In the end though it isn't probably going to matter all that much which better. What is going to matter to me is where all the creative juices are. Right now for me it is in SL. Next year, who knows?

This thread is about impressions people have, and those are mine.

The 10 m prim size limit is not a technical limitation -- obviously, since we have megaprims, and you can make prims any size on the opensim servers. The Lindens permitted megaprims to be made for a while last year, and then turned off the ability again.

I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet (or I missed it), but Blue Mars has a *major* advantage in visual appeal due to the ability to use normal maps and specular maps (and, by extension, per-pixel lighting). If Second Life had the ability to use those, visual appeal would be *dramatically* increased (let's be honest, Shiny and Bump are a joke in comparison). I don't know if LL will ever implement that, because of how that would increase texture load and basically kill FPS for all bad builds, but in the hands of skilled builders it would be a massive improvement.

Another feature Blue Mars has, that I hope Second Life eventually supports as well, is that the builder has complete control over an object's LOD. The ability to specify multiple LOD meshes on a per-object basis is just unbelievably powerful.

I do think that Second Life will eventually incorporate some form of these kinds of features, but due to the fact that 'just anyone' can build, it will likely be a reduced-functionality version.

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I'm assuming you mean something more than RenderVolumeLODFactor in the debug menu in SL? That is more of a thing that applies to all objects, right, rather than object by object?

I suspect that if Blue Mars takes off, a lot of bad builders will be there too : ). I don't get the impression they are going to be doing that kind of quality control -- at least I hope they won't be.

Correct. I mean that you have specific control over LOD for all people who view a given item, rather than just being able to tweak your viewers LOD. You can specify lower-resolution LOD-specific meshes for a given object, to ensure that the object's silhouette remains recognizable at increased distances.

Yes, bad builders will either omit those or not do a good job of it. Personally, I feel that Second Life should allow something like this as well. If I build something poorly and you cannot get more than 5FPS while viewing it, then ultimately I'm the one who will suffer, right? People would simply choose not to visit my builds or purchase my items, I think. Word of mouth is extremely powerful, whether in RL, SL, or any other *L.


[ETA] Lest anyone think I'm breaking NDA by talking about that, it's a common feature in almost every 3D game engine I've worked with in the last 5 years, is included in CryEngine2, and is therefore also included in Blue Mars.

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Avatar Reality won't, but region owners will. After all, it is their region, and it is no different than SL where many not so smart mall and full sim store owners use or allow the use of 1024x1024 unchecked - which is hell on people with lesser machines circa 2006 and earlier for sure.

It is not hard for a region owner to specify content limitations for their region, no different than a land covenant in SL.

that's a nice thing about then using CryEngine -- we can talk about what it can do, without breaking the NDA for Blue Mars.

True, but the CryEngine2 is a games engine, and has been heavily modified to be a virtual world engine, so you must be really clear what is a CryEngine2 feature, and what is a modified CryEngine2 for BM feature. Also the BM Client, Viewer, and (again heavily modified) Sandbox Editor, and the cities within BM should also not be discussed until the NDA is lifted.

What the grass looks like in Beach City is not an indication of the capability of the CryEngine, just the design skills of the author of that grass. I have not looked at the grass in Beach City, but does it compare with this vegetation, http://teamyo.org/xzero/Images/Crysis/Levels/New%20Realistic%20Forest/HighDefinition/HD10.jpg also created within the Sandbox?

Rock