Blue Mars beta

It is because SL uses OpenGL and BM uses DX9/10. Recently Nvidea released new drivers specifically for Crysis-based games to significantly improve the performance.


For the beta BM deliberately made the default graphics setting Very High, to see what the testers experienced. You can set this lower, and set the resolution as well if you wish, and details of how to do that are here:

http://life-on-mars.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=support&action=display&thread=35
http://life-on-mars.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=support&action=display&thread=27



I found the best combo was to get the menu up, choose camera, choose the last option, which is similar to SL's Mouselook, then you can walk around in 1st person mode, using your forward/back arrow keys and pan/tilt with the right-mouse button held down.


I agree, I dislike the bubble chat over heads in various games/worlds. I have written a suggestion in the BM Dev Forum to have this changed to something similar to the way SL handles chat. The more people that second this proposal the more likely it is to get adopted. They do seem to be quite responsive to suggestions right now, and it might even have been put in place already for the next client, which they said 'incorporates many of the suggestions received so far' but without saying what those were.

Those people walking up and down and spouting strange characters (on my screen they in various languages, English, French, Korean, Japanese) are actually all bots, as is the girl outside the Golf store. They are just for loading purposes. I have not yet seen a male bot though, so males are almost guranteed to be real people.


Yes, several have mentioned they do not like the 'no names' over peoples' heads. I like it actually (for the same reasons I do not like bubble chat over heads), but I go along with the suggestion that a name should show when you hover your mouse cursor over an avatar. You do get to see the name if you offer a Handshake (unless the avatar is a bot).

The phonebox is what you use to get back to the spawning point (the place where you choose which city you wish to go to). This is only in place during beta.


The beta viewers are deliberately crippled as to functionality in order to thoroughly test the functions that are in there, and get feedback/suggestions. Each new release of the client will have more suggestions incorporated, plus a few more functions to test, and so on until the end of beta.

As far as performance is concerned I also find that BM needs more in terms of hardware performance than SL, but given the impressive graphics that was to be expected. BM has four graphics quality settings, similar to the 4 you can choose from in SL. BM uses Low, Medium, High, and Very High, where Very High equates to Ultra in SL. For any given hardware setup you will be able to run fine on the graphics quality setting in BM that is one down from the SL setting. So if you run SL in Ultra, switch to High in BM etc. If you can only run SL in the lowest setting you might struggle to get BM to look good.

As others have pointed out, by the time BM launches the graphics cards needed to give really good performance will be a fraction of what they were last year.

Rock

Thanks for the info and the tips, I shall give them a try.

just a note, when I purchased my first mac computer set up, with 21" colour screen (rare then), 256 greyscale scanner and A4 greyscale printer, the computer was a MacII with 40MB harddrive, floppy disc, a few programs such as v.1.1 for PhotoShop and FreeHand, the whole package cost me £15,000 GB.

Virtual worlds aren't *just* games. You need to maintain multi-generational stability. If people can't get in because of an upgrade, that can cause hardship. This point has been made often enough in SL, particularly for the handicapped residents.

Agreed. The guys that run top-of-the-notch pcs and upgrade them with highest end graphics cards are not the main clientele for virtual worlds because it may be pretty, but it isn't "game" enough.

I agree in theory, but Blue Mars may just blur the lines between virtual world and game.

I was just in BM and met someone from Germany who is a member of a team that is creating something that is most definitely "game enough". I have heard of several other game projects as well that will likely attract the MMO players we don't normally see in SL. This is one thing that SL can't do very well but BM can because of the CryEngine2 game engine it is built on.

Or get lost in the cracks. No, I'm sure it will be successful, I just don't see it as having anything to do with SL.

It's sounding more and more like a 3d Facebook. My brother talked me into getting on Facebook. It's interesting, but I wish I could turn off most of the features.

I don't see it as having anything to do with SL either. Thank goodness. Don't see how BM is any more like a 3D Facebook than SL is though.

It's the games. I had to mute all the "Your brother scored 64700 in Random Game" messages.

I got rid of Facebook the same day I tried it.

In Blue Mars a game would be like a separate region. You could chose to go or not. You don't have to be "burdened" with game stuff if you don't want to be. I think that the gamers will enjoy being able to leave the game when they are done and go do something else.

So, obviously BM is currently in beta. Is this beta for developers only or is it just a closed beta that already chose it's participants? I signed up to receive updates on the beta a while ago, but I haven't gotten anything.

It's in closed beta. It's really meant for developers as there isn't much to do inworld yet but many are in there that aren't intending to create anything. I think the best way to get in is to email them and ask. However, I understand that it will be open to all (open beta) within a matter of weeks.

I suspect that we won't actually see much of the high-end content until the actual full launch as the projects are produced off-line.

New Client Update is out

SHhhhhh....this don't belong in SL forums. Second Life subjects should be here, not their competitors.. hehe

Well, neither should third-party videos about kids smoking or any of the other 30 non-SL-related threads, so who cares?

Of interest in this latest update of the Blue Mars item developer tools is the cloth editor. While I'm not personally interested in working on such things myself, I think it's cool as heck, and I also really like the idea of clothing acting like it's made out of cloth

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right now, Blue Mars being discussed here actually reflects well on SL... it's REALLY beta, like pre-release SL beta.

And the new Cosmetics Editor too.

Rock

Rock, did you do those tutorials that I think you rashly promised months ago? Once the adult content move is over I'm going to fire up my dev account over there and start looking at it. So any information that will reduce the learning curve would be much appreciated,

I'm not sure what tutorials you are referring to, but there are a lot of links on his BM forum site to various tutorials, including Sketchup tutorials : http://life-on-mars.proboards.com/

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