Blue Mars beta

Totally agreed, very nice work in progress Virrginia!

I think same

Agree! And those games are best!

So much to learn! But yes, I've already done the preliminary rigging in Maya. Mind you, I'm still studying how to get those animations into Blue Mars. But again, these tools and skills are what you can use elsewhere. Character rigging/animation techniques are fairly universal. Lua is widely used in games (not just those with the Chrysis engine).

It's a bit frustrating in some ways, as after two odd years of fiddling about, I actually can script in LSL. But that's the only language I know. I looked at the Lua book and nearly broke into tears. But I remind myself that even if Blue Mars folds, I will be able to use Lua somewhere else (and people have told me that skills in Lua are somewhat transferable to other languages, too).

Those skills absolutely are transferable, yes.

The Lua book (you mean the blue one from the original Lua developers, right?) is often quoted as being the best resource, and it is if you are already familiar with programming concepts and are just looking to pick up a new language, but I'm not sure how good a resource it is for people who've only done LSL.

Lua is a powerful and expressive language, and I'm pretty confident that once it starts clicking for you, you'll be doing wonderful things with it.

Also keep in mind that may not need to use Lua to script in Blue Mars. I'm not certain, but I think Blue Mars will also support Flowgraph (built into CryEngine2), which is more of a visual graph-based way of scripting things by connecting nodes together. It sounds like a toy when you first see it, but I've discovered that it's a great deal more powerful than I thought. Between those two options, there seems to be little that you cannot do.

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Robby, have you seen this?

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5289218?fr=yvmtf

(Just happened to get that gem in my email inbox.)

Thanks, Rocky, I'll definitely have to take a look at Flowgraph. I also understand that Flash files are going to be supported. Basically, a short Lua script will activate the Flash file. It's what they used for the various signs in Bay City. I wouldn't say I know Actionscript, but basic level time line based Flash files are easy enough.

And Baby Racoons are teh cute! They didn't seem entirely thrilled at being taken away from their lifetime supply of Pepsi

hehe, no I hadn't

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Yup, Flash will be supported, and can interact with Lua scripts. I believe I've also seen Flowgraph interaction with Flash, but I can't find any references so I may have misunderstood something.

Where I see Flash being *really* useful is for custom HUD development. Having developed a number of HUD-using items in SL, I'm really looking forward to comparing a Flash HUD to an LL object-based one. One thing I know I already like is the ability to use real text boxes, dropdowns, and progress bars

ActionScript seems easy enough, I think. I did some playing around with it a while ago, and while I didn't do any significant development with it, it seems easy to learn and pretty expressive. It's really just a Javascript variant, so I expect that it shouldn't be too hard for most aspiring developers. Development environments/editors, on the other hand... I don't care to spend money on the full Adobe environment, so I'm hoping that something like FlashDevelop or Aptana will work. That's far down on my todo list, though, there's just too much exciting stuff I'm finding out about Blue Mars

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Have you read this?

http://davidcheney.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/immersion-2-0/

Thanks for posting this


It would be very interesting to hear what YOU think about Blue Mars.

I was at the meeting, and got a few of my questions answered. But it was agreed at the end that unanswered questions could be posted on the Metanomics website for BM to answer over the coming week. Unfortunately, the site is not allowing posts to be made (I posted 3 more questions, but not one one appeared on the site).

Rock

This is a post with a number of the unanswered questions from the interview with Jim Sink on Metanomics now answered:
http://www.metanomics.net/blog/blue_mars_questions_and_answers/

Yay! Many thanks for that Imagin. The questions I asked were appended to the end, and have been answered.

Rock

This sounds like so much fun

"Are there any game titles planned for Blue Mars?"

"A: There are quite a few games in development. On a personal note, as a recovering game designer, I’m particularly excited about game development in Blue Mars. We’ve created sample code and asset packs for sports and racing games to give our developers a head start on coding single and multiplayer games, managing camera control, integrating physics, and tracking scoring and player status. We’ll be releasing those samples to the development community throughout the rest of the year. We’ve worked hard to create our own Casual Game API to streamline a lot of the common functions game developers need. Our goal is to make the complexity of 3D game development in Blue Mars comparable to 2D Flash based games. As an example, our Golf game is just a few hundred lines of code. I think we’ve just scratched the surface of gaming in Blue Mars and I can’t wait to see what the community comes up with as the platform expands."

So I have now been inside Blue Mars. Here is a synopsis of my observations and thoughts so far about 2 hours worth of use.

It took me a little time to get up and working due to the configuration of my PC and having to install new graphics drivers - not sure why as SL does not require them.

The viewer is very early days yet, that much is obvious and so this should be kept in mind when reading my observations and thoughts following.
So having said that the viewer is early days yet, it is* the only way we get to interact with BM so first impressions and frustrations are going to matter to a large degree.

It is pretty, of that there is little doubt. The sounds generally were very good too, I liked the rushing waterfall sounds. These things do add to the immersiveness of the whole thing.

The frame rate is very low on my PC which by comparison handles SL very well. The difference in responsiveness was very noticeable.

Unless there is some trick it seems only to work at 1280x790 which makes the viewer a very small window in the middle of my screen. This made everything look small and very game like to me. I attempted to search for a solution to this but found none and as my frame rate at that resolution was poor anyway it is probably a good thing.

There isn't much customisation of the default avatar available at the moment and so everybody kind ends up looking a little similar though I was pleased that there was a selection of clothing to choose from.

I didn't like the navigation controls much, neither the mouse nor the keys felt comfortable even after a long period of time. Finding the right combination to rotate the view was very challenging. I didn't like the way each movement you make causes a sound to play and a little blue pyramid to show where you are headed, it got annoying very quickly.
A major source of frustration was that the window seemed to lose focus or put the focus into the chat box at random during movement which meant either your movement was halted or you started to repeat the movement key into the chat box.

Chat was straight forward though I personally dislike the bubble above the head form of showing it as others have already stated. The only confusing thing is that on the few attempts to chat with people, all I could see above their heads were a series of odd characters (looked like the ASCII nul character). I am not sure if there is some problem there or whether the few people there at that time (8pm NZST) might have been asian speakers and the characters were BM's attempt to show their character sets.
Either way I failed to communicate with anyone for the time I was there.

One interesting note were that these people seemed to be having a lot of problems with navigating around too as they kept walking up and down the same stretch a lot. I found I was doing this a lot too until I found the way to rotate the view.

Nobody seemed to have names that I could see, clicking on their avatar asked me if I wanted to shake hands with them, presumably equivalent to offering friendship or introducing yourself.
This is a very odd way of presenting that option as a handshake can mean a lot of different things, especially in different cultures - I thought asking if you would like to "Greet/Meet" the person might have been a better choice.

Walking close to and colliding with some items seems to make them go translucent until you move away (it happened to a telephone box when I went close and bumped into it).
Not sure why that should be as it didn't seem to serve any useful purpose to me.

Summary:

All in all a quite frustrating and off putting experience so far and I have not even begun to explore bringing in any of my sample creations yet. There quite obviously needs to be a lot of work done on the viewer to make it anything close to being easy to use.
I was disappointed by the performance on my machine I thought I had read that it should run as well or better than SL on the same machine. This detracts (again obviously) not insignificantly from the experience. If you are able to get great frame rates then your frustration factor is going to be greatly reduced.
To be fair, I have no idea what the SL viewer was like during Beta but if it were like this viewer it might have put me off using SL altogether.

I've never seen anything like that; all in all I thought they did a pretty decent job of managing expectations in that area. Hardware requirements are fairly high, and unless you have a pretty beefy machine, you're not going to get great performance.

Think of the performance being like Windlight on max with shadows enabled, I guess.

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I *have* windlight turned on and all performance sliders on max in SL. I am not running a shadow client so far and so that will have to wait to see how SL performs with that.

When you say you have not seen anything like that, what parts of my experience do you mean? Just the performance or something else too?

EDIT: Oh I realise now you mean the statement that performance should be similar to SL.
I'll have to see if I can find the post that gave me that impression.

When you first start Blue Mars what are you supposed to see?

I see water, no land, and a platform. There are three places to go, golf, waterfall, and a city. There are spaceships flying by that you can't interact with. Is that what other people see?

Pretty much.

Oh I have found the link where I got the idea that hardware requirements would be similar to those necessary for SL today:

/327/70/317029/8.html#post2400269

Whilst it does not obviously mention SL it gives the impression that the type of hardware necessary would be similar to a nothing special machine to run SL too unless US$400 is all you need to get a high power gaming rig in the US these days.

Yes, that is what I meant.

I remember /something/ about them saying that the client might run on SL-capable hardware, but I can't remember any specifics, and even then I was under the impression that it wouldn't be the same kind of experience.

I'm a little dismayed about the hardware requirements myself, since I have very little money I can spend on hardware at this point, but I guess I understand. It seems logical to me that if you want to create tomorrow's virtual world, you can't do that by tying yourself down with yesterday's technology from the beginning. If you start out with the lowest common denominator, you have to support ancient hardware forever or you risk alienating people who'll badmouth you everywhere on the Internet, as we learned when LL decided to stop supporting Windows 2000, or every time they announce a new feature like shadows that raises the bar

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Ah... Well, I just picked up a quad-core machine with 6GB of RAM for $399, and adding a new PSU and video card capable of running Blue Mars is going to cost me another $250.

You can make trade-offs, of course, but for me it's going to cost just under $700. That's not much to pay for a machine that I will use for RL work as well as hobbyist stuff, though it's not exactly pocket change for me, either

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The higher the requirements for entry of use, the less people are going to be able to use it. Many people are already using marginal hardware and minimal settings for SL, if the barrier is significantly higher for BM then achieving a critical mass of users is going to be harder.
If they could give the option of toning down the graphics for less powerful hardware then I think that would help greatly. Graphics are not the selling point for me and I could get by without dynamic shadows and certain other killer graphics features.

I'm all about pretty. Bring on the shinies!

I would agree if Blue Mars was launching today as a production release to the masses it could be seen as a limiting factor.

They have made it clear that they aren't going after the low spec side of 3d games / virtual worlds or browser based play. Within a year I expect the prices of hardware to steadily drop, at a certain point not upgrading because it costs too much will not be an excuse. For example.. 4 gigs of ram can be found pretty easily for 50 bucks now. The latest price wars in the GPU industry means that the high end card prices are getting cut in half.

Much of the traditional games industry is based on technology upgrades at least in the PC market, i don't think virtual worlds should be any exception. 4 million copies of Crysis sold in 2007 tells me that people have the hardware for it. At the time, the 8800gtx was just about the best card out there, but could you find one? No, they sold out before they even hit some stores.

Plus one statistic i heard mentioned although I don't have a source for it is that there have been more GPU's sold capable of running Blue Mars well than the total sales of xbox and playstation combined. The graphics tech drives the developer to make better looking games, which in turn drives the consumer to go buy an new Graphics card, which in turn drives the card makers to push out the next round of card improvements.

Blue mars ran fine on medium spec settings on my decidedly wimpy setup, an 8600 gts with 2 gigs ram, which was one of the lowest end cards that supported dx10 at the time I bought it. But I wanted more! I upgraded to an almost top of the the line ati 4890 card and dropped 4 gig of matched memory in.. less than 300 euro, now its smooth as butter on very high settings.


-w