Blue Mars beta

As far as I am aware, there will be no restrictions on non-commercial sexual activity (other than age-play). If you have a particular 'activity' you want clarification on, I recommend you contact AR directly.



To upload anything into BM you need to be either a developer (city owner) or a tenant of a developer.


It may put off some developers from SL. However, there is a great mass of 3D developers from a Maya, Blender, 3DSMax, etc background, which I am sure BM will appeal to.




Not at all. With BM you buy 'capacity' (resources), which will not cause lag. If you want more from your city than the resources can support then you can buy more capacity. SL does not support this. The only cap they put on the purchase of a private island is the prim count of 15,000, (and soon a script count). If you want to increase the number of avatars on a region beyond the level at which lag becomes unbearable there is nothing you can do. With the BM approach though you can, which is a big advantage, as in BM you can plan a concert theatre with a 2000 capacity, and fill it, and have no lag (if you pay for it). There is no way you can do that in SL, so BM will attract those who have this restriction in SL.




SL and BM are not in sandbox mode. I am not sure what the point of this comment is.



I am not so sure of the mechanics of this. At the last couple of games conferences there was a lot of talk about hybrid models, where to get the best of both worlds (gaming and virtual worlds) a certain amount of data is pre-cached (scenes etc), so I think this is a likely approach, but that is just a guess. I would also expect animations to be the same, i.e. instead of having an avatar jumping onto a poseball with a dance anim inside it (and once started you have no control over it, except to stop or pause it) the animation of an avatar dancing the same dance could be entirely pre-cached client side.



But I consider that to be an advantage. SL does not allow you to purchase extra capacity per region, only to buy more regions, each with their own restrictions. So you will always be stuck with a 40 avatar limit, and no way to build a higher-capacity club, arena, concert hall, etc. There are so many more possibilities when you sweep the prim and avatar number limits away.





I believe you can, if you model correctly. One of the main differences between SL and BM is that BM was designed from the beginning to be fully scalable. Problems with scalability has plagued SL for years. With a fully scalable system there should be almost no limit to the expansion and the concurrent numbers of avatars (Internet pipelines will ultimately become the bottleneck, not the servers or the clients). When Entropia (who are also switching to the CryEngine2) bid against SL for the CRD contract, one of the requirements in the Requirements Document was for a fully scalable infrastructure to support at least 7,000,000 concurrent users. The Entropia engineers persuaded the Chinese, and Entropia got the contract.

However, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and I fully intend to put all claims (positive, from AR, and negative, from some members of this forum) to the test. It will be interesting to see who got what right when the dust settles.

Rock

and Blue Mars bars.

I'm thinking that they are going for the Virtual Concert/Sports Market here. Maybe they are lined up with Live Nation, TicketMaster and others to Virtual Broadcast a concert being held in RL at the same time. What are their audio/video interfaces?

This is a very interesting feature and also I hope it will be quite affordable so for example if I want to make a huuuuuge desert I could get tons of km of land and not spend a fortune to mantain it couse it would only need to bew mantained according to resources of people involved in its use per hosting ....
If I understood well....

That rules Blue Mars out for me no matter how sexy it looks, even if they do provide native ferret meshes from day one.

I would say "an increasing amount of", perhaps, and plenty of creators I know are unhappy with that.

Good question. Can't wait to get inside and find out. I do know that Graphics and Video will be handled using Scaleform, a flash compatible middleware package that AR use for all their UI, though I am not familiar with Scaleform. Here is a bit of info on it:

https://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx

I'll be sure to let you know what I do find out.

Rock

Historically, sexual activity involving more than two people is increasingly likely to be treated as "commercial".

Three strikes, it's out. If I can't create stuff, just as an ordinary Joe, it's not a "virtual world", it's just a graphical chat system.

Why should I give a flying **** for them? I'm interested in virtual worlds, not VRML showcases.

"Yes at all", you just *stated* that they restrict building to city owners and tenants, and Jesse said that scripting is restricted to City owners, which is precisely what I was expecting when I saw they were using Lua.
Have you ever worked on non-uniform distributed processing systems? Have you ever written a compiler or interpreter for a real-time control system's scripting language? Building the kinds of behaviors into a VM so that it's appropriate for a real-time environment is something you need to start working on when you're laying down the bytecodes. It's always a bigger and longer job than you think it will be, as it has been with Mono: I am simply amazed at how good a job Babbage and other Lindens have done with Mono, because I have decades of experience dealing with these kinds of problems and they're NASTY.

The point is that if you haven't actually put 70,000 users onto a grid, you can't say how well it will work. Blue Mars has not gone live.

i.e. you still have to download the content one way or another. You either have to download it when you install the software (or otherwise offline), you have to download it when you enter a region, or you stream it as SL does. There's no magic way to make the download time go away.

Actually, they support 100 avatars in a region now. But my point is that while my cellphone company says I can send all the text messages I want to pay for, the way it works is that I'm better off with a fixed budget of text messages because the cost per message once I go "a-la carte" is exorbitant.

With 2,000 avatars in a city, can I, as one of those avatars, talk to any and all of the other 2,000 avatars? Or are they split up into N-avatar shards and you can only interact with avatars in your own shard?

SL was designed to be "fully scalable" too, it's just that what "fully scalable" means has changed in the past 7 or so years.

I have no idea what "the CRD contract" is, but I bet it wasn't anything to do with a virtual world.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/05/entropia_univer.html

BTW, not defending Blue Mars here. I like many, are very interested in seeing what the final product is though. I am not looking at fleeing SL no matter what. I LOVE IT HERE!

Very strange. Entropia has a classic MMO "fish mining" pseudo economy, it makes index futures look totally solid and down-to-earth by comparison.

Everything up to this point was making BM look less and less attractive to me but if I, as a regular resident, can't script, I won't be there. Strike 5, I'm out.

ugh I am not entirely clear on the owner/resident/store owner bits yet. Haven't rcvd my package yet and once I do I probably won't be able to clarify it.

It is possible that you can upload to the owner and the owner enables it? I know that Rock probably knows more then most and is probably chaffing under the constraints also. I do know that I will reserve final judgement for AFTER the roll out.

Then it's not for you. It's for the vast majority of people out there who do not care about scripting, building, etc. or those who are willing to step up and make some kind of investment.

I'm curious about what the parameters are, since it seems that there is a role for content creators who are not city developers. It sounds as if there may be a proper rental system built into the system, which would make identifying non-city dev content creators easy. That sounds like a godsend.

Lost your bet.

Here is some info from my blog:

http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2009/02/direction-of-virtual-worlds.html

Entropia Universe, while not being a newcomer to Virtual Worlds, is about to launch a brand new world, Creative Kingdom, also based on the CryEngine2. See their teaser trailer here. Their original World, Planet Calypso, being based on their own proprietory software, which is looking somewhat jaded today, although better than than the graphics in Second Life. Soon after Creative Kindom, Entropia plan to launch CRD, China Recreative Dreamland, following a contract signed in 2007 between MindArk (the owners of Entropia) and the Beijing Municipal People's Government to create the largest virtual world ever. The deal was negotiated for almost a year and Entropia Universe was chosen over several other bidders, including Second Life.

More info on the Entropia website, and reams of info in Google on CRD.

Rock

This is the first time I've thought that Phillip Linden's idea of SL being "the 3d internet" actually means anything.

What made the Internet blow away the tightly controlled OSI network stack, as well as online services like AOL, Compuserve, and the rest, is that on the Internet... while most people don't care about "scripting, HTML, etc" the fact that ones that do are just any random joe is what made the Internet work. Back in the early '90s, AOL looked way better than Mosaic and Usenet, but to "create content" on AOL you had to set up a contract with AOL, submit stuff, get approved, and all that horse exhaust. AOL was right there for "serious content developers" who were "willing to step up and make an investment"... whereas you could get on the Internet and *do stuff* without making an "investment", no matter WHO you were.

Yes, SL acts like an online service, but only so far. It takes the parts of the online service model that were actually useful... like a subscription and payment system that actually works, without all the anal-retentive control freaks acting as gatekeepers.
I guess it depends on the god you worship.

Oh certainly. I was in no way saying that BM wouldn't be the exact right thing for some people -- just that it's becoming increasingly apparent that it won't be very attractive to me. It is quite possible that, once it becomes non-vapor and we get to experience it rather than just speculate, it just might be attractive to me for reasons completely different than the ones that keep me in SL. As Jessie points out, we can't make a final judgement until that then. I do have enough data points now to understand that I don't need to follow the topic, or this thread, quite so closely until things begin to solidify.

Won my bet. See previous message on the subject.

A fake "fish mining" economy has zip to do with a virtual world. However entertaining it might be.

my current moments understanding is that only persons that apply for and receive a developers license will have access to any building or design tools. This I believe is to limit/track wild and damaging content. dunno how hard it'll be get that after the beta, but several have suggested it's pretty easy right now. (still waiting myself). I believe (but can't confirm) that this will be automatic to region owners, and and ultimately access controlled for shop owners, by the region owner.

on one hand this is a sad state for cottage industry developers, on the other hand it's a huge boon to region owners in controlling assets. but then it fits their business model (one which will definitely compete with LL's corporate and educational showcase crowd)

because of this focus, I can't image myself leaving SL for it... I have no interest in being purely a developer, or purely a consumer. I might expand there, but I enjoy being able to engage a wider variety of beginning developers, cottage industry types, content providers (amateur and professional), hobbyists AND consumers; all in the same milieu. I may expand there, and visit, but frankly it's just not gonna fulfill my wants

You mean the World Wide Web.

To produce content on the WWW, you have to have access and just about everyone has to pay for it. How is this different from Blue Mars? Second Life is different in that it allows anyone to upload textures and animations (for a price) but may use a(n extremely) limited set of built in materials, or stuff that you buy from someone else in order to build. This model of building is the same - you have to pay to do it.

It also has a scripting resource that happens to be completely free and that is the only exception to the usual method of doing business. Perhaps LL should consider charging 10L per new/copy of a script? I wonder how many feathers that would ruffle.

As for the rental system - for those of us who are developers by trade, having a system that is already built in is nice for administration and it doesn't matter what god you worship.

It is always difficult to hve a reasoned discussion with someone who just redefines words to suit their argument.

How on earth you can assert that CRD has nothing to do with a virtual world, is, quite frankly, bizarre in the extreme. Perhaps you would like to educate us all on your definition of a virtual world, then rewrite the virtual world wiki page to match it, then inform all the VW bloggers about their erroneous stories on the CRD VW.

Never had much time for people who couldn't lose a bet gracefully.

Rock

No, I mean the Internet. Actually, I mean the union of the Internet, Usenet, and things like FidoNet. I've been on the Internet and its precursor networks since before the term "Cyberspace" was coined.
To produce content on the World Wide Web, and on its precursor networks, you need spend a total of zero dollars and zero cents. Yes, really. You don't even need your own computer, internet access, and webserver. To produce content in Second Life, you need spend a total of zero dollars and zero cents, you don't need your own computer, online service, and storefront or mall space.
I'm talking about "which would make identifying non-city dev content creators easy". I assumed that you were talking about control over "bandit" content (whether pirated, malicious, or unsanctioned but otherwise legitimate). Obviously I misunderstood. Rental systems sound interesting, but I don't see what they have to do with "identifying non-city dev content creators".

If it doesn't allow every resident of the world to create content based only on the limitations of their own skill... not mining for fish or hunting for sweat or whatever the Entropia platform uses as its basis for crafting, it's not a "virtual world", it's a "3d multiplayer video game".

I'm unclear as to whether Creative Kingdom, China Recreative Dreamland, Next Island and See* are all just additions to the existing Entropia Universe storyline or might be separate in concept. I started playing Project Entropia when it was new, and while it amuses me once every six months or so, I have always found it chillingly cold and cutthroat.

* All mentioned in press releases.

Source for this definition?
The only one I can find is this:
"A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars."

This sounds like a definition from the later 90's.

With a definition like that, a Virtual World can be anything from: The Palace to Everquest, including SL, and The Palace and Everquest look silly compared to SL when speaking of "Virtual Worlds".

An article Richard Bartle (the guy who implemented the first program that could be called a "virtual world" back in the '70s) wrote a few years ago, drawing the distinction between games and virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are living environments, ones where the actions of the people in it are not inevitably transient and impersonal.

If only a few people in the world can be creators, then it's not a world, it's just a game.

Let's say you're in a game and some NPC tells you there's a guy who's drowning puppies down by the lake, and you go down and stop him and save the puppies and get 75 XP and 40 GP. Then you go off to the next quest and the next newb that comes along has the same conversation with the same NPC and has to stop the guy all over again.

Even if you craft goods and amass territory, levels, what have you... there's nothing of YOU in the creation. You're following someone else's script, not creating your own.

By that definition, forums.secondlife.com is a virtual world. But LambdaMoo wasn't. Interaction is only one of the "games" or "roles" people play. You need them all.