Blue Mars beta

That's interesting. Many builders sidestep the LOD issue in SL simply by upping RenderVolumeLODFactor on their own viewer, which is just as much of a cop out as texturing a build to suit Windlight settings.

I look forward to seeing if the influence of sim owners in BM will make a significant improvement on the bad building practices that plague SL.

The capabilities of the graphics engine are the least important things about any virtual world... most virtual worlds over the past 30 years haven't had any graphics at all. The capabilities of the residents are what make it a world... or just another videogame.

I sort of agree, I remember playing text based MUDs. And yet, SL, the most popular virtual world of them all has the best graphics so far. Coincidence? I think not. In any case, CryEngine is hardly just a graphics engine. It also handles game levels, npc generation (human and not), vegetation generation, and much more.

I agree that SL would be nothing without it's creative residents. Literally nothing. LL didn't provide anything but the platform, the residents built the rest, well, except for a few pretty cities on the mainland. Which they then turn over to the masses who ugly it up in very short order. The exceptionally beautiful places in SL are all private sims/estates where the owner maintains strict control over what will and won't be built there to keep the theme. I'm sure the same will happen in Blue Mars.

It will take time for people to build up Blue Mars to the point that it has enough content to make it worth exploring but it will happen. There are many cities being built now that will be ready to upload before the public launch, some of them by private developers, some by corporations who have hired teams of 3d artists and game designers to do something really special.

It takes a pretty limited imagination after all that has been seen in this forum to take a look around Beach City in it's closed beta stage and say the graphics aren't that great.

Does anyone remember what SL looked like on opening day of their paid-beta? When you first logged on - what was there?

The capabilities of the graphics engine are extremely important, and to dismiss it as the least important demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the motivation of residents. You might also find that cost plays a big part too.

Harking back to the days when there were no graphics fails to grasp the importance of innovation and progress. Try turning SL into a text-only environment and see how important graphics are then.

'The capabilities of the residents' is a very broad statement, but I would argue that the capabilities of the residents will be more or less the same, broad or narrow, no matter which virtual world you look at.

What had the girls on my sim salivating about BM was not the buildings, or the landscapes, which are indeed fantastic (they simply liked those things better), but the quality of the look of the clothes, bags, shoes, hair, avatar detail, etc (which is what really had them excited). Believe me, where the women go, goes the success or failure of any virtual world.

I do not believe for one minute that the residents of BM will be any different from the residents of SL. They will come from all walks of life, from all socio-economic groups, from all levels of education, from all nationalities, from all cultures.

What will decide the success or failure of Blue Mars (having got the eye-candy to beat all eye-candy right now) will be the social freedoms or restrictions, the cost, the shopping experience, the exploring experience, and probably, in my opinion, the least important (but still important) will be the ability to build and have that creation in world (but all 'residents' will have that right, only visitors will not).

Rock

The biggest problem with the grass in that snapshot is that it's using alpha testing rather than alpha blending (which is why it has the jagged edges), likely for performance reasons. Alpha-test is a much cheaper operation, and when combined with instancing allows for truly massive amounts of vegetation, but doesn't look nearly as good as it could. It's a trade-off.

Still, if you were to have that much grass in Second Life, it would probably be unbearable for everyone without the top-of-the-line machine.

PS: The other vegetation in that snapshot looks great, though

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I just can't agree with you on this. You are absolutely right that virtual worlds have historically had little or no graphics and have still built up vibrant communities, but it's only since the addition of the 3D graphics that they've really exploded and become mainstream.

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QFT

There are role-playing communities within Second Life that could possibly survive, since the most engaging parts of their experience lie in the imaginative communication between members, but I think I can confidently say that Second Life would be dead within a week at the most.

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I think that computer graphics are like any other art form: one doesn't dismiss cave paintings because they were made with crude instruments, or stop liking renaissance art when cubism comes along. You see what people have done with the medium. Some have done amazing stuff, others have produced crap.

The graphics engine is not going to be what makes a 3d world beautiful. The CryEngine is simply not going to solve the issue of bad building or the bad taste of others -- and I have noted in my life that other people for the most part do seem to have really lousy taste. There will be beauttiful places and horrible ones and eye candy and disappointment in any user-created 3d world.

People are seeing this new venture as a cure-all for everything they haven't liked about SL. But it simply isn't going to do that. It will have its beauties and its uglies, its limitations and its strengths, and its bumps in the road as it develops. And five years from now people will be having this same discussion about something "new" that is "better" than CryEngine version n.

You know. . .everyone says "when the competition finally comes along."

Well, what do you call TSO, Lively, Entropia, IMVU, There. . .and even Active Worlds from way back in the 90's?

Other VW's are out there, or have come and gone. Seems to me that the ones that are still around don't get talked about much.

Something may come along and replace SL. But SL IS a moving target. Phil had a vision and realized it. Now they're working the bugs out and trying to turn it into a real business. IMHO, they seem to keep shooting themselves in the foot, and, chasing the wrong targets, but you know what--we're still here talking about it.

And I've walked around in Beach City. Sure seems awfully empty and still. Truth is folks, we're not going to know what BM is REALLY like till a few hundred thousand of us are there wandering around.

And you can do the "better technology" argument all you want. If that were true, Betamax would have won the VCR wars, and Atari would have won the first computer war and Commodore/Amiga would have won the second.

SL may or may not survive Blue Mars. It's too early to tell.

If I were M, I'd nail down grid interoperability and license it to the other VR developers.

QFT squared.

But it's not the improved graphics and 3d simulation that make Second Life better than ActiveWorlds and There.com... in many ways the graphics and the simulation in Activeworlds and There.com are actually BETTER than in Second Life. Things rez faster, tere's no sim crossing problems, you can ride a hoverboard in There without rubberbanding, you don't Duckwalk in Activeworlds.

What makes Second Life superior is the open economy. Not the graphics.

It would suck, because SL's scripting sucks by comparison with what you can do with scripts in MUDs and Mucks. And yet scripting in Second Life is one of its *strengths*. Which is a measure of how far 3d virtual worlds have yet to go before they're up to the standards of text-based ones.

And Blue Mars is moving in the exactly wrong direction there.

I agree, up to the last parenthetical comment, because creating an artificial distinction between "residents" and "visitors" (or between "guests" and "citizens" as in ActiveWorlds) is a huge part of the reason the 3d virtual environments before Second Life failed to be "worlds".

Could you explain what you mean about "Blue Mars is moving in the exactly wrong direction there.", are you referring to the scripting language?

I also do not understand what you mean about "artificial distinction". What is artificial between those who pay and those who do not? I would say that is a very real and clear distinction. There are other abilities that are restricted, depending on whether you have paid or not, as in SL. Is the ability to turn on or off the rezzing of objects or the changing of media on parcels you do not own in SL an 'artificial distinction'?

As BM uses industry standard objects, created in 3D apps such as 3DSMax, Maya, or the free Blender and Sketchup, and uses the standard for 3d object interchange, Collada, anyone can build, and using the BM Viewer, which will be released free to everyone, you can see what your building/scripting/anims will look like in BM. However, if you want to upload them into the populated BM world, you need to pay, by being a tenant or a land owner. I don't see anything artificial in this at all.

Rock

Perhaps. I'm definitely excited about it addressing what I think are massive failures of Second Life's design, but I would never go so far as to say it's a cure-all.

Bad building is bad building, you are absolutely right, and there is simply no way to address that with *any* technology. But Second Life caters to the unskilled builder by hobbling the skilled one, it's a fundamental design decision that is immediately apparent in everything that you see here. Even the *very best* builds I've seen seem to me as if the builder - however skilled - was hampered by artificial limitations.

I dunno, I'm obviously biased and my perceptions have been colored by hanging out on game artist forums (like GameArtist.net, Polycount, GameArtisans) and all day every day and seeing what truly skilled game artists can do with the right engines, and if that could be successfully done with a virtual world it would be amazing indeed.

So I'm not saying "this will fix everything", but I can't help but be enthusiastic about some of it. And one of the hopes I have from this is that Linden Lab will be prompted by upcoming alternative virtual worlds to add features that I truly feel would improve Second Life's appeal and performance.

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As much as I go on about some of the cool stuff in Blue Mars, I strongly feel that Second Life will not only survive, but continue to thrive. As has been pointed out before, Second Life has much going for it that seems to have been missed by every other VW developer.

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That I can partially agree with.

The economy is largely driven by graphics, though. People often seek to visit the most beautiful areas, purchase the most appealing clothing and skins, show off the most realistic dance animations, and bump pixels using the... You get my point. Even you seem to have strong feelings about your appearance, and have made it clear that your avatar is part of your desired identity.

The economy in Second Life is perhaps the single biggest factor in it's success, and that's one area that almost everyone else gets horribly wrong.

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The real deal is who will win to be the standardized 3D web browsing provider. There are a whole bunch of competitors trying to make a standardized 2D/3D web browser that will not only handle virtual worlds but also be able to play popular games such as UT3, Crysis, and others.... all without downloading massive content to your PC....

Blue Mars is an experiment and research on how this high-end game engine can be used in a variety of alternate ways, but I don't think it will hurt any other virtual worlds such as Second Life.....

That is absolutely true. Every game developer knows that Beach City is basically the equivalent of "programmer art", and is not necessarily indicative of what the final result will be like.

That would be like assuming that all of Second Life looks like the original version of Orientation Island.

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Having a good graphics engine is not all about *just* visual appeal. It's also about efficiency. For instance, I'm currently working on a new weapon for my SL combat system: http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/w2.png (in-world snapshot, sorry about the size)

While I'm doing the best I can with the tools Second Life allows (sculpted prims, etc), the equivalent model in any other game engine that supports native meshes could be done in a third of the polygons, and custom uv mapping and would allow it to be *far* more texture-efficient. It would be more network-friendly in every way.

This picture (http://www.helderpinto.com/ssp_director/albums/album-6/lg/render_sci_fi_Texture.jpg) depicts a simple box primitive. Because it uses normal maps and specular maps (essentially special-purpose textures), what appear to be ridges and valleys and edges all react to lighting in such a way that you get visually accurate highlights and shadows that are fully dynamic at realtime framerates.

If Second Life had those features, skilled builders could make the same things they are already making, much more efficiently. Poor builders simply cannot be helped, no matter what platform limitations are imposed.

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Yeh, but I can create the desired appearance of my character MUCH more effectively in text than even in Second Life: SL is simply not technically capable of rendering a credible pack intelligence. None of the people in the BM beta have been able to provide any indication that BM is going to be even as capable as SL here, even when I've asked explicitly the best I've seen is a photoshop of a ferret photo on a BM background.

So what happened to the work Roger Dean did?

I'm sorry, I don't know what you are referring to. I am probably supposed to recognize the reference, but I don't.

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In one of the first Blue Mars videos they went on about Roger Dean... a famous visionary architect and designer... the guy who did the floating island album covers for Yes and Asia... being involved. "This building was designed by Roger Dean... blah blah blah... how cool is that?"

I am sure you could Not everyone is as imaginative and verbally gifted, and any virtual world that wants to reach critical mass is going to need graphical representations of user identity.

I have seen what I think are encouraging signs that you will be able to create avatars similar to what you posted before, but I won't go so far as to say it will happen. I just don't know.

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OH!!! Yes, he's working with VSE, and to my knowledge is not involved in the stuff you'll see in the Blue Mars beta. VSE is kind of what you might call the Blue Mars equivalent of a Second Life Solution Provider. The way I understand it, they are an independant third-party content developer working on commercial projects for big-name companies like National Geographic and the Smithsonian.

Basically, VSE != Avatar Reality, and you shouldn't expect that kind of stuff in Beta.

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