What is the Status of Blue Mars as we enter 2010?

Back when I was a kid, I had hoped we would be on the real Mars by 2010. Alas we are not, but we have another virtual world ramping up it's development.

This is a compilation of current status of Blue Mars and their announced plans for added features. Are there any SL features or topics I missed?, let me know and I will add it or research it. Quoted items are from their FAQ pages: http://www.bluemars.com/about/faq_index.html


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BLUE MARS STATUS Dec 2009
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DOWNLOADS: Added selectable city downloads Dec09. No way to remove a city yet (aside from manually deleting the file). "We are transitioning to a patching process so users only need to download what has changed since the last update."

ACCOUNTS: Alts are available via separate emails for registration. (I have two user accounts for testing purposes). The various registrations for user vs developer vs wiki are somewhat a mess. "For the time being, the Blue Mars client is for users 18 and older. We plan to extend Blue Mars to users 13 and up in the first quarter of next year"

PROFILE: Added Dec09 on account MyPage in very basic form. Not accessible in-world that I know of.

FRIENDS LIST: Available since Oct09, shows online status only. No way to call them or find them at present.

INVENTORY: Added Dec09 on account MyPage. Shows 4 items per page. Not sure if it shows in-world yet.

SEARCH: "Managing security issues and improving our promotional features like search, ratings, and recommendations will be an ongoing focus for Avatar Reality."

LOCAL CHAT: Uses annoying chat bubbles and history window

INSTANT MESSAGING: Not currently available, status unknown.

VOICE: "We plan to make a decision on VOIP solution in Q1 2010. "

GROUPS: "Yes! We’re working on groups and group chat features now."

AVATARS: Default avatars have face customization and painting as of Oct09 and limited clothing and animation options. "In Q1 of 2010, we plan to support attachments, Masks, and Physiques. " (ie skin and shape mod)

MOVEMENT: "In the first half of 2010, will extend the movement controls in the Client to let users map the movement controls to the keys they prefer." Note: Currently no jump.

CAMERA CONTROLS: "In the first quarter of 2010, will extend the camera controls in the client to include mouse wheel support and alternate camera modes."

FLYING: "Next year, Avatar Reality will provide a standard set of flying controls and animations for developers to use at their discretion. "

INTER-CITY TELEPORT: Added Dec09 via "Places Browser" feature in client.

POINT TO POINT TELEPORT: "Next year, we will offer a global teleport system so users can go exactly where they like in a City unless the City Developer has disabled teleportation for that area. "

MAP: "Our global and default city maps are under development. We expect to release new versions of both in the first half of next year."

WEB LINKS: "We aim to launch direct links in the Q1 2010"

MEDIA: Added Dec09 via Flash 10 integration, including live video.

CURRENCY: BLU$ added Dec09, at approximate parity to L$ (265/US$). Very little to spend it on right now. User to user transfer I have asked AR Staff, open question. Balance only shows on MyPage I think.

SELLABLE CONTENT: "The beta currently supports furniture, hair, and clothing. In Q2 of 2010, we plan to offer an Animation Editor so developers can create and offer custom Avatar animations for sale. In the second half of 2010 we plan to offer scripted items and Bots as saleable items. We will offer a web based marketplace for Blue Mars items next year. " Textures, 3D models, scripts, terrain files and other builder component items are not set up to be sold yet. Developers have asked for ways to do that, and last I heard "it is being looked at".

PERMISSIONS: Currently all sold items are no copy, no mod, no transfer, single items only (ie no outfit sets of clothing or furniture sets) Downloaded city and inventory data are encrypted to reduce content theft. Any items used in building are currently full permission as you are using the original data files in your builds.

LAND MANAGEMENT: City and block access permissions not implemented as far as I know. Neither are eject, ban, or abuse reporting.

PROHIBITED CONTENT: "Blue Mars does not permit games of chance or skill that offer payouts in Blue Mars Dollars or anything of value, sports or betting services that offer payouts in Blue Mars Dollars or anything of value, securities markets, banking of investment services, sexually explicit content, content that depicts bestiality"

CONTENT CREATION: 3D Models, characters, animations, etc imported from any tool that can create COLLADA XML file format ( https://collada.org/mediawiki/index....ucts_directory ) or native Crytek formats (.cgf, etc.) Textures in TIF or native .dds. Scripts in Lua language. Blue Mars provides a set of editors to convert items to their format, and assemble builds in 3D space. Items can be uploaded for sale. Land based building requires access to a block or city file. Technical specifications are too long to include here, (I have a separate list for that) but in general they are higher than SL (more objects, more texture options, better physics, etc.)

SL to BLUE MARS ASSET TRANSFER: Export from SL of full permission objects you created is possible via Prim Composer to 3ds Max, and thence to Blue Mars format. It is not easy or optimized, but I have done it for simple objects. Textures just require a format conversion. Scripts are incompatible. Animations I don't know about.

Guess that sheds light on one burning question.

Epic fail, no bestiality? Come on!

Why no games of skill for money? Aren't games of skill excluded to some degree from the laws produced by the gambliphobes?

The section labeled "Allowed Content" appears to be mislabeled and should instead be labeled "Forbidden Content".

SL has games of skill with Linden dollar payouts, such as trivia games, doesn't it?

It is still a far from completed curiousity.

Fixed it for ya.

Status:LAME

It is. I am going to be very interested to see how, or if, these content rules develop further. My suspicion is that the combination of a far more "corporate" outlook, and a clearly targeted audience of educators and (again) corporations is going to mean that there is significant resistance to the addition of adult content of any sort for some time. Blue Mars may try to position itself as a "clean" version of SL, possibly.

But that may well change if their putative audience doesn't come through for them.

I think AR thinks of BM more as a platform than SL does, and less as a homogenous world for players. It seems to me that city developers will eventually be free to create whatever sort of 'society' or game they want. Perhaps Daniel can tell us whether Blue Mars city (sim) managers will have much more control over content and resident-available tools than SL sim owners. I bet they will ---for example, in some cities flying is now possible, in others, not until BM develops a common toolset.

AR will initially welcome residents to visit everywhere on their grid, in order to wring out the platform. I wouldn't be surprised if city-driven balkanization happened pretty quickly, with city developers creating for-fee "games" that are only nominally part of the overall grid.

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Interesting point, and a development that is maybe already hinted at by the fact that (so far as I can tell) none of the currently available areas are geographically "contiguous." If, as you suggest, sim owners/managers will have more control over content than is the case in SL, there is also the potential for a much more diverse range of types of content from sim to sim.

However, given the institutions -- NASA, the Smithsonian, etc. -- that BM has already convinced to buy in to the platform, I imagine that BM is going to be much more "publicity shy" about certain kinds of content than SL is. I can see "sexually explicit" content making it in one day. And combat-type sims, particularly if they have the veneer of historical respectability. But I would be very surprised to see a Gorean or Dolcet sim open in BM.

1) ask their lawyers, I have no idea why they picked that set of prohibited items.

2) you are correct, I changed the section title

@ Milla - yes, they know, and we know its far from finished. The only people who do not know that are clueless noobs who sign up and don't notice it says beta. Number signed up for their beta forums is 2850, and my guess on number in-world at any given time is about 10 to 20. If things go well in 2010 and they finish all the stuff on their to do list *and* enough people create content to make it interesting to visit we can call it a real virtual world thats up and running. For now, its a work in progress and should be judged on that basis.

@ Nika - City developers are the ones who upload the city data package as a whole, and can thus control all the static content that is included. In my own city projects, I plan to exercise the minimum of that. Sandbox City is designed specifically as a SL style sandbox area for people to build and test and break things. About the only control I will exercise is if you create something like a script that crashes the city, I will remove it. Tharsis Estates is aimed at residential and commercial tenants, so I intend to manage it more like an SL estate owner typically does, but by no means heavy handed.

I am still learning how all the city features work, but I believe that things like flying, camera controls, etc, are all controlled by what set of Lua scripts are present in the city.

Even to get basic spawn location and default camera movement, I have to place some standard entities on the map which contain the scripts to do those things.

Blocks are areas within a city that are split out to be worked on separately. They are the Blue Mars version of land parcels in SL. I have to first cut them out of a city map, then send the created block file to be worked on. When the block developer is done building on it, she sends it back to be imported to the city file. If they want custom scripts in their block, they will have to somehow get that to me. Not sure yet if its included in their block file, or they send it to me separately.

It is quite possible to create complete games using the Blue Mars tools. After all, the editors they are giving us are closely based on the one used by Crytek to design the Crysis game series, and the game engine (CryEngine 2) *is* the same engine. But doing so takes a lot of work and a lot of skills. Its a hell of a lot easier to plop down some terrain, houses, trees, and furniture, and just rent out places for people to live.

As far as prohibited content, there are two levels of privacy in Blue Mars which we do not have in SL. One is instanced residences. These are private spaces spawned when people enter them, and you cannot see into them from the outside. Effectively they are a private game level that exists when people are using it. The other is running in developer mode. You log in your avatars, so they can communicate, but the city file you use is the one local on your PC, and which you can distribute privately to co-developers, friends, etc. I am posting my block files, and shortly my city files on MediaFire file storage so that the people building on it can load and test the city and their builds in it. If someone wanted a private orgy city, they could work it that way. Distribute the files privately, charge a fee possibly, and do whatever they want there. It would not be on the Avatar Reality servers, and not accessible to the general public.

[ Side comment: I imported the actual martian terrain to a blue mars file today, since someone gave me a link to suitable data sources. It was about an hour's work, and not the highest quality, but fun. Check out the video:
http://www.vimeo.com/8432792

@Scylla - CryEngine2 was developed for combat games. Blowing shit up is built in by default. There will be lots of that right away

http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/crytek-mass-explosions-2/165402

Say what?

Take a look at ARs executive team, coming from Electronic Arts (is not their RPG portfolio mostly war games?), Final Fantasy, etc. Take a look at their customers, and do not doubt that they will be going after Proton Media's and EDS's government contracts (wargame training for actual combat). And, if they get those contracts, we will probably never know unless we go to a VW trade show.

Take a look at the revenue numbers for porn online.

If Blue Mars allows city managers to develop subgrids which are explicity NOT reachable from the rest of the community, if such subgrids are only reachable via external websites, what does AR care what kind of customer base the city managers cater to? If Nasa's scientists are part of an education-oriented grid, what do they care if BM hosts a separate grid of big-breasted ponygirls?

Is that any different from the 2D web reality that the same datacenter that hosts YOUR personal website may also host "psycho-killers anonymous"? How would you know?

You may be right. Again, I don't doubt that combat sims will be a part of Blue Mars. And maybe sex, although they seem to be ruling that out for now. The point I was making was simply that I think BM is more likely to be sensitive to the kind of bad press that SL has tended to receive. And I would add that BM is something more than a mere "datacentre." How many people even know the names of the hosting services they access online? BM, however, is marketing itself as a coherent platform, not as a series of discrete "worlds": having put as much effort into that marketing campaign as they already have, they are not about to become an anonymous hosting service, and (I think) they WILL remain sensitive to the kinds of associations that people make with their brand.

You raise an interesting point though: the lack of contiguity between sims in Blue Mars is going to make it much easier to hide content away from prying eyes. So that may impact upon what gets offered.

Each city is a separate data package, functionally identical to game levels in the Crysis game series. You can fake geographic continuity in various ways, by having a low fidelity partial model of a neighboring city in your city and placing an area trigger which will teleport you when you reach the boundary.

Objects can be placed beyond the edge of the terrain map. So you can place, say, low detail models of the next city's terrain, out to a certain distance, and then a photo backdrop, like a stage set. It does not have to be very high detail, cause you will never get close to it, you will get teleported before you get there.

The other way is to create a large blank map, and drop city models within it, and have the area triggers on the borders of each, in other words cities within cities.

yay, habbo hotel with better eye candy.

Thank you for the report. It was an interesting read, although am amused that bestiality is so singled out. I'm glad depictions of extreme and brutal violence are permitted, however (I am jesting, of course).

Seriously though, this really helps in understanding where BM presently is. I'll likely check in in about a year or so. I'm sure it will be very scenic.

Oh, by the way, do you know if the developers will be making an effort towards accessability? i.e. ensuring that speech recognition (such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking), keyboard shortcuts, screen readers (such as JAWS) etc. will be taken into consideration? While I realize the disabled is not a financial viable market, they do make up a large portion of virtual environments for obvious reasons.

Thank you again. Cheers.

Status: Avatar Reality is apparently uninterested in a significant share of the market.

"Avatar Reality would love to offer a Mac version of Blue Mars. Unfortunately, the Cryengine does not run on OS X. If Crytek ever offers a license for an OS X version, we can explore creating a new client for Mac users. In the mean time, Mac users can use Boot Camp to run Blue Mars."

http://www.metanomics.net/blog/blue_mars_questions_and_answers/

Does that mean AR will give us copies of windows to use in boot camp so we can run their product? Lame 'solution'.

It's unfair to put it that way. Avatar Reality did not have enough capital to write their own game engine. Their solution is to license what they thought was the best available one, and which runs on potentially 90% of operating systems.

What is much more limiting than OS support is graphics card support. I have estimated that around 2-5% of computers on the planet are capable of running Blue Mars. That comes from looking at graphics card sales vs computer sales. It's a fuzzy estimate since some people put multiple graphics cards in one box, or replace their cards multiple times.

@Elric - I don't know of specific things related to accessibility. They just integrated Flash 10 to their toolkit, and the client is capable of two-way communication with the web, but I dont know enough about the internals of scripting and accessibility software to know what is possible. One place to look is for the Crysis series or DirectX games in general. Whatever works for them should work for Blue Mars as it is based on both.

@Kara - anyone with a Mac powerful enough to run Blue Mars can easily afford an XP license, specially with Windows 7 now taking up market share, there should be lots of secondhand copies of XP available. I see copies for 30-35$ locally on craigslist.

Meanwhile, I posted traffic stats on SLU. SL has nothing to worry about at the moment:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/virtual-business/37026-second-life-shopping-sites-tracking-6.html#post843321

why you talking about BM in a SL forum?

Because a serious competitor in the virtual worlds space has a direct impact on SL, either taking away people, or spurring Linden Labs to improve things to stay relevant. Oh, and inter-world asset and financial transfers are of interest also.

/me wonders if they're planning to do a Blue Mars: Red Light District at some point.. I'm sure that LL sometimes wishes that they'd clamped down of porn &c early on, even if just to make it easier to segregate.

Do we know if they're saying "no. never." or if these are just the rules for now?

Then let me phrase 3Ring's question differently - why are you posting this in Resident Answers? Where's your question?

Well, that seems a little pedantic, surely? There was, I am told, a time when RA was indeed solely or at least primarily about Q&A, but that hasn't been the case for some time.

As someone who is watching developments on BM quite closely, and from the perspective (I might add) of an SL resident, I very much appreciate the info that Daniel is posting here. And I do think it is entirely relevant to a better understanding of SL, and will become even more so once BM is up and running as a fully functioning competitor.

Strangely, it's only pedantic when BM is concerned, eh? Other residents get reminded of this being RA quite often.

I am aware that this has been used as an enhanced chat area all too often. I still think the promotion of other virtual worlds has no place in resident ANSWERS.