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

I suppose that depends on whether or not you see Daniel's posts as "promotion." I don't: I just find them informative. We have had threads and posts on Metaplace and Open Sim here before . . . were these "promotion"?

SL doesn't exist in isolation, and developments in other virtual worlds are entirely germane . . . as witness most obviously the inclusion of New Caledonia in BM.

In the title I believe. At least in my language it's phrased as a question.

Assuming that ever happens.

Sure. And if it doesn't, that too will be relevant to SL, given that BM's more corporate top-down model both contrasts with, and seems to represent a possible future direction for, SL.

One that he answers himself. Let me further rephrase - where's the *SL-related* question?

Yes, I am allergic to the viral marketing surrounding BM over here in these forums. I don't mind other worlds being mentioned at all, but what happens with BM here IS outright promotional stuff in most cases.

Well, for what it is worth, my own impressions of BM, at least as it exists now, are that it compares very unfavourably to SL on a number of counts, not least of which is the GUI, which really sucks.

Most of the threads about BM that I've seen contain a healthy mix of praise and criticism.

I think you may have a self control problem then.........no one jumped through your computer and clicked on this thread, held your head in place and forced you to read it. If you are allergic to it stay away from it. People who are allerigic to peanuts should stay away from them too.

obligatory link: http://www.sourceforge.net
'nuff said.

i see the OP as "debunking the myth that BM will be any serious competition for SL anytime soon".

that'd be like "general motors is serious competition for NASA".

*BLINK*
How does having a good machine equate to excess cash?

I think you may have a sarcasm problem there. Yours isn't working.

I am talking about common courtesy and the right place for things. I don't go to the BM forums to rant there how much it sucks and how superior SL is, so why do people that stuff over here constantly? (And yes, I know full well the OP did not rant in that way. It was just one promotional post too much for my taste.)

I think that a feature comparison between SL and Blue Mars is a valid thing to talk about, and what features people are interested in is a valid question. If you don't think its an interesting subject, well, you can ignore the thread. If you think people should close their eyes to things outside of SL, that might affect it, well, I respectfully disagree.

One a personal note, telling me to shut up will have the exact opposite effect. Witness when Linden Labs removed the adult content words list from the SL wiki. I went and set up the list on the slapt.me site just cause hiding information rubs me the wrong way.

Would one expect those to be legal copies or hacked bootlegs?

Same goes for me, as a few people might have noticed by now.

No one, not even BM supporters consider it a 'serious competitor' yet...

I would say that excess cash is exactly the one thing that you do NOT have after buying a really powerful mac...

I think BM will NEVER be a serious COMPETITOR for SL... the "mission statement" is too different.

what BM *might* be in a few years is a place that you visit for maybe an hour to visit some virtual exhibition or such. passive consumption of stuff. like looking at webpages.

what SL *is now* is a whole world that you can immerse yourself in for hours on end.
I've been around for 3 1/2 years now and I'm positive that there are loads of cool places that I haven't seen yet.

A silence fell over the dusty-swept street, and a stillness, broken only by indifferent tumbleweeds impelled forward by the wind.

A dark silhouette looms at each end of the carriageway, motionless but for the slight flicker of a smile across the face of each gunfighter.

But who would make the first move?

[TBC . . .]

A shot rang out...

Clearly you have not looked at the blue mars developer list:

http://picasaweb.google.com/danielravennest/BlueMarsTechnical#5420829946963767474

I'm not seeing the Blue Mars developer list at that url, just a picture of Anshe's page there.

Just because Anshe is checking it out doesn't mean a lot; she (they) probably check a lot of things. She probably looked into Metaplace and Novoking as well.

The Blue Mars developer wiki users page is at http://dev.bluemars.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&limit=500

I was not sure the dev pages are accessible to everyone, so I took a screen snapshot.

But most of the Blue Mars developers I have met have SL experience, and we are building very much the same kind of places that we have in SL, residences, shopping, clubs, with some larger theme builds thrown in, like Caledon and Grid Rock city. In my case, I am setting up a sandbox area for builders to play around in, cause thats what I like to do.

Its not all museum exhibits like Lance was implying. Yes, there are a couple of exhibits supposedly under construction by an independant developer (Virtual Space Entertainment), but then SL has a few museum type exhibits also. They got a lot of early press, but in fact they are nowhere to be found in Blue Mars aside from the Venice demo area, which they set up and have not done a thing with since it opened.

The point about Anshe is that if renting land for homes is viable in Blue Mars, I would have every expectation that estate owners from SL like her would jump in and set up some cities. They are the ones that can afford the higher setup for larger cities.

Anshe isn't the only one:

Second Life's Caledon expands to Blue Mars
http://www.massively.com/2009/12/17/second-lifes-caledon-expands-to-blue-mars/

Sounds like Desmond Shang may be ahead of Anshe this time.

Well Blue Mars is of no interest to me, so it obviously can't succeed.

I had a look around on Blue Mars just yesterday, and here's what I found.

- You still have to control your avatar by clicking on the ground. You CAN use the cursor keys, but if you do, it just "cheats" by acting as if you'd clicked on the ground a few feet in front of your av. This annoyingly means that you can't run with the cursor keys (you CAN run with the mouse, by clicking a faraway point in the direction you want to go - since the default move is so slow, this seems to be preferred now, which kind of defeats the whole userfriendliness thing) Also, if you press the down arrow, instead of moving backwards your avatar does an _instantaneous_ about-face with no animation frames at all!

- You can do gestures and edit your av, but there isn't that much customization otherwise. The bubble chat is a bit better than SL's bubble chat, though.

- You can buy currency ("BLU" now, although for some strange reason you can only do so using Firefox. No, it isn't just because of IE being awkward - it won't allow Chrome or Safari either, it HAS t obe Firefox. Oh, and it goes through some weird site called Social Gold to do so.

- Caledonia is there, and it's pretty neat, but it mostly seems to consist of empty shops. I'm not sure if you can buy "blocks" (areas of land in other people's cities) yet. It seems there's some kind of built in system for "shops", where every item is stored in a built-in networked/web-based shopping system, no matter how you design the 3D layout of your own store.

- Oh, yea. If you want to go to a city you haven't been to before, you have to download it first (fair enough), and then... restart Blue Mars. Whaa? The download even occurs well before the 3D engine has started, so I have no idea why this is.

- Anyone can become a developer instantly now, and you can buy your own "city". Price is set not by land area (you can choose that!), but by hosting concurrency and maximum size of the compressed 3D file - the cheapest city is $100 to buy, $20/month, and hosts 5 users with 1Gb of data. But if you do buy a city, what you actually get is.. instructions to design your city using the City Editor they provide, and then have it create a .CTY file, which you FTP UPLOAD TO THEIR SITE! Yes, it's super-old-style web hosting back again!