Blue Mars beta

I was involved in the Vastparks beta. The main problem with Vastparks was that it was not a virtual world, it was similar to opensim in that it was simply a platform for others to turn into a virtual world.

To me, it simply did not have sufficient wow factor to warrant any expense, was very buggy, had poor camera controls, and their team (which I suspect was very small) responded very poorly to testers' comments and questions. They are now giving it away for free.

The other virtual worlds that I have recently tested are Far Realms (Sony's Home, free from the shackles of the PS3), which is way to cartoony for me, Mycosm (excellent), Metaplace (also way too cartoony), Twinity (seems to be aimed primarily at the German market), HiPiHi (just an opensim clone of SL, with all the bugs that that entails). However, I must say that BM is by far the leading contender for me from the new kids on the block.

Rock

I'll take that on good advice. I was intrigued by it.

OpenSim is useful to both me and Weedy, she uses it for machinima and I use it as a training tool for emergency services personel.

Something to be said about being governor

It's not funny, it's sad. I don't know why every developer who thinks they're going to make a mark in 3d virtual worlds starts out with "OK, let's start by seeing how much we have to restrict the end-user". The LEAST restrictive is Linden Labs and they're nowhere near as open as your typical MUD or Muck.

It means that when I teleport to your sim, I'm still a ferret, and my flight aid still works. Even if you don't like ferrets and you don't think I should be able to fly.

I spent a few years investigating every new 3d environment I found out about, and discovered that there's basically three kinds.

* Chat systems with 3d avatars, like Lively.
* Chat systems with 3d avatars and externally provided 3rd party content, like There.com.
* Second Life and derivatives.

I've been EAGERLY searching for a fourth alternative, and come up dry.

Yeh, like me. I've been one of the pioneers for 30 years.

You're stoned.

Maybe that's the problem.

I've never been a "fan" of SL. I've *always* been critical of the limitations... the unnecessary limitations... in the platform, database, and scripting. There's a lot of standard and really fundamental capabilities that they would have automatically included if they had ANY experience with text-based worlds, that seem to actually scare them. Like user and object attributes that you can query from other objects, or scripted teleporting or private rooms. Others they've virtually shut down instead fixing of for no good reason, like push.

But at least they started with the assumption that everyone should have the opportunity to be part of the creativity of the world just by being there. Which is so essential that I'm still astonished that anyone would seriously question it.

Another interesting point, to me:

I see a certain similarity between BM and 3d games too, I just don't see that as a good thing. You came to SL from a gamer background. I didn't, I came to it from a completely different direction.

Yes, that's the impression I got too. They are not creating a virtual world, they are creating a video-game development platform. I wish them all the success in the world, but I'm just tired of people who tried to make SL into that platform pushing Blue Mars as and "SL killer" when it's a completely different kind of animal from SL.

Never heard of them is why. Why don't you tell us how to find them, why you think they're cool, and why they should be considered "virtual worlds"?

My biggest gripe with it so far is that there is no way to access anything that is not purely avatar-related anywhere inside the viewer.

Well the question was slightly rhetorical.. meaning !!of course you haven't heard them!! They are not virtual worlds but virtual world platforms. I don't really want to talk about them, brought up as merely examples and since you have been around virtual worlds for so long I'm sure you have heard of 'Google'? its as service where you can type in a keyword and get a page of results. (that was sarcasm)

-w

Like Project Wonderland, then. They have the same relationship to Second Life that Smalltalk does to Linux.

Some people do seem to take their gaming choices verrry very personally. But I think it's more than likely at least a few in this thread work for Blue Mars itself.

BS, you are quoting me out of context. The line you reference in the first instance does not mention you at all and is true by itself in reference to nobody. How is that a personal attack?
In the second instance, you are coming to that conclusion, not me. Again nothing I have said attacks you. In the third instance the things you have said by comparison are direct name calling. Not the same thing at all.
Why not desist with this? It is getting old now.

I definitely get what you mean, different strokes for different folks. It may turn out that BM is too photo-realistic for some. I might turn out to enjoy photo-realism more than I ever thought too. It is unclear at this point.

That had not occurred to me Clarissa but you could be right. If that is the case then that should be declared instead of all this nonsense we are seeing.

Oh Jeez - Blue Mars has a very limited number of employees at this point, I think someone mentioned 5? I'm quite sure that they have more to do right now than argue with SLers on this post.

And we're to take your word on that, Imagin, because...? (An entire virtual world was launched and is being supported by only five people??)

It sure would make some things make a lot of sense - such as the continued necroposting of this thread.

(Most companies also hire a lot of freelancers, although I'm not 'accusing' anyone of anything in the converse, i.e. not saying that simply by working there that they are in this thread.)

Can you expand that Novis. Not sure exactly what you mean.

The BM Viewer is purely for importing objects from 3D packages, to see what you will get if you then upload those objects from the Viewer into BM, as the Viewer is simply a wysiwyg viewer. This is used by content developers.

The BM Editor has all the bells and whistles (used by city developers), including editors for terrain, terrain painting, animations, weather, materials, facial expressions, sound, etc.

Rock

Argh. I did not mean the thing they idiotically chose to call viewer, but the thing that we as common users refer to as viewer - the thing needed to access the online environment. In there, you can only change stuff about your avatar. No chance to access anything even remotely related to system preferences.

I think you are on to something about the definition of a VW versus a game world here. Some one earlier said that you could not walk from city to city. To me a virtual world has a sense of location that is an illusion of being real at least even if it isn't.
By that I mean without being able to traverse a huge distance and cross from one city to another without a teleport, is an important factor in defining a virtual world to me.

Sure SL has private islands that are disconnected but we have mainland that isn't and it is a least possible to put PIs together to make a huge contiguous spaces.
I think I would miss this aspect now that I have experienced it. I like the sense of knowing where you are in relation to other things. This is one of the reasons why I like mainland so much. There is nothing like trying to traverse a continent via one of the huge waterways in SL. It would be a shame if that is missing. Obviously without this contiguous space consideration there are all manner of performance issues that disappear as well and so if it turns out to be true that multi-city contiguous spaces are not possible, that does change the nature of the comparison with SL in terms of complexity of the VW experience.

I am sure that Jim Sink said at yesterday's interview that the number of employees was 57, but that they were recruiting and expected to have 200+ by the end of the year.

I was munching on some radishes at the time, but I thought that's what I heard.

Rock

Ahh, the Client. The client that is currently available is a heavily cut-down version of the eventual release client. Right now, the beta testing is focussing on smoothness of installation, and stability. Once those tasks are accomplished they will release another client, with more features, and we will be asked to test-drive those facilities, and so on, until the end of beta.

Rock

I think the BM experience will be very similar to SL, but without the disadvantage of sim crossing, in this respect.

A BM region can be any size from 128m x 128m up to 8km x 8km.

Now, an 8km x 8km BM region has a size approximately the same size as 976 SL regions, but with no sim crossings to worry about. That must be an advantage, for those contemplating transportation systems, and large builds.

When you wish to go from one of these 'super' cities to another, it will be just like teleporting from one continent (or private island) in SL to another, except instead of a black screen saying 'Teleporting' with a progress bar, BM is currently using a black screen with a 'Loading' icon on it.

For those who like walking from one sim into the next in SL, I think 976 regions worth of size will keep them busy for quite some time in BM (one guy in the BM Dev forum walked around the perimeter of Beach City, he said it took him more than 3 hours).

Rock

An inspiration has been launched - no new world. There is no prove that BM will work.

Sandbox Viewer is not the Cryengine2 Editor. Not yet

Yup I already knew this when I posted what I did. It is great that cities can be that big, but even them you could never have then big enough to encompass bigger distances. SL mainland is much bigger than a linear 8km, there are some large estates that are much bigger. Even then it is not so much about size of the city but the travel between. It gives a sense of location. You always know where xyz city is in relation to abc city. The attraction of sailing or doing a road trip is the interesting things you see along the way. Not just getting from A to B. It also breaks the illusion if I walk to the edge of a city and there is no place left to go. Sure there are continent edges in SL but generally there is an illusion of real world continuity that I like and that I feel defines a VW like Argent says.
I am sure someone could explain better than I the concept I am trying to share here.

In a non-contiguous world what is the difference between teleporting and just logging out of one city and logging in to another? Yes we have that too in SL but we also have region crossing as flawed as they are which gives unlimited contiguous space potential.

Pretty stupid to not even let the user choose a screen resolution, neither during install nor later on, since this is an essential setting for many users IMO. As an example, I am stuck with a client in widescreen format now while I still work on a non-widescreen TFT format. But I am no game developer of course.

But you won't be able to walk from the equivalent of Luskwood to the equivalent of Abbots Aerodrome. Or from Dogpatch to Night City in SPR.