Guess who is now CFO of Blue Mars?

Good luck to him, I know he was involved in controversial price hikes but he spoke straight whenever I asked him a question and didn't engage in the ducking and weaving I see too much of from other management figures.

I dunno, on my (slightly measly) hardware, SL actually looks WAY BETTER than BM.

I'm running SL on ultra and i'm getting 25fps... on the same computer i had to tune down BM (manually by editing some obscure ini files) to get maybe 10 fps and it looks like crap.

What I've seen of Blue Mars has not been that visually impressive. It is okay, but does not (IMO) live up to the hype over the eye candy.

Okay, but better than Pixel Drams, Insilico, 6pi, Innsmouth or The Wastelands?

They'd better have something a whole lot better behind the curtain at Blue Mars than what they've shown so far.

Have you seen the Niveus build? It's a Crysis game level, not Blue Mars, but uses the same graphics engine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLzNbPXMDg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLzNbPXMDg

And then watch the follow up video I call "Damage not enabled"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw5BXUhZuUI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw5BXUhZuUI

The demo areas, aside from New Venice, were done by the Avatar Reality staff, to give areas to test out the beta software. The real builders will be people like us.

The shadows are a marvel. But is it to be all sepia-tone? (I saw one red banner, so I know it's not just that the video had been bleached of color.)

bm continues to suck

That was a design choice. You have full control over sky color, sun color and intensity, fog, clouds etc. I think they just wanted the "dusty medieval city" look.

I have the brightness cranked up higher in my little physics demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM5cXuSdZjk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM5cXuSdZjk

(which was my first video, so its pretty bad otherwise)

Summary
======

The version change from 0.56 to 0.65 is an accurate indicator in my opinion. Definitely a step towards full release, but still has a long way to go. Biggest news is probably pricing and the Blue Mars economy about to go live.

Official release notes:

http://www.bluemars.com/BetaClientDownload/readme.html


Client Software
===========

* Installer is now 392MB rather than 1.34 GB. The main change is not including all cities with the installer.

* A new "places browser" is available, which you can choose cities to download in the background (a separate download window). Downloads can run while logged in and visiting another city. Direct teleport from one city to another is now possible via the places browser. When within a city, the places browser can be used to take you back to the starting point of that city.

There is not a default city indicator telling you which city you are in, or what position within the city. You can turn on statistics to find that out:

[Create a text file called "system.cfg" with the following line:

r_displayinfo = 1

Place it in "Program Files\Blue Mars\Game\Config" folder]

* There is now a twitter bar on the left side

* The annoying beep is gone when you click to move, but the target cone is still there. Otherwise movement and camera are unchanged (and still unacceptable for many people). Jump and fly are not available yet, as far as I know.

* Bug where you could not click in chat area even when minimized has been fixed.

* Avatar visibility and chat range has been increased to about 50m. Annoying chat bubbles are still there.

* Game sounds stop when you click outside the game window.

Website
======

* Player Mypage is now set up, which will let you change displayed name, avatar sex, purchase game money etc eventually. Currently shows your friends list and inventory. It's pretty crude at this point - only shows 4 inventory items per page! gack.

* Pricing will be released 2PM SL Tomorrow (18th)

Developer Items
===========

* City Editor is now available to all developers. That means scripting can be worked on by anyone now, mainly. The solids tool is still pretty much broken, so anything beyond boxes and library items still have to be created externally on other 3D software. I have not noticed any other major changes yet. My previous builds seem to load OK, and there are about 10 more default entities (scripted items) provided.

* You can now incorporate flash items into your builds (I know pretty much zilch about flash, maybe someone else can say what the significance of that is)

* New default avatar is supposed to be included, and more clothing prototypes for cloth editing (have not checked that personally)

* Developer wiki is undergoing re-organization, and will soon be open for contributions by any developer.

* Item uploads and money page is set up, and will be active any day now, so the Blue Mars economy is about to open.

Cities
====

* The welcome area has been redone, with some casual seating, and you can no longer walk off the edge of the platform. It's still kind of boring.

* Caledonia and Pavonis have been added (owned by our SL friend Desmond Shang). They are a preview version right now, the shops and houses are there, but not occupied yet. It has internal teleport rings (yellow)

* Shade City has added maps with teleporters at the bus stops. There is a bowling alley and golf minigames. The bowling sucks, the ball does not go where I aim it

* Other cities are supposed to have updates, have not downloaded/visited them yet.

Does it display properly on a 1024 x 768 screen yet?

I know that it's been possible to change a config file and make the display occupy 1024 x 768 pixels, but it looked like crap and I think it didn't work properly, with parts of the interface off screen, although I may be misremembering that part. I'm sure about the looked like crap part.

1024x576 is the closest setting. All the available window sizes are widescreen aspect ratios. Actually the largest one, 1920x1080, is a few pixels wider than that, since I have a 1920x1200 monitor and the window frame overhangs the screen. Stuff like that is why I call it alpha software, it runs, but still needs a lot of work.

There is still very little for players to do there, all the action is on the developer side (where I play, happily). As a builder I am having loads of fun discovering I can cut tunnels under the terrain, make chunks of it float in tha sky, build way past the edge of the map, and just generally mess around:

http://picasaweb.google.com/danielleeberSL/MyBlueMarsBuilds#

while it is definitely interesting to know that someone else was able to something impressive somewhere else, it is higly irrelevant to the topic of BM, even though it used the same technology.

I don't think it is irrelevant at all to demonstrate what can be done with this technology. I downloaded Niveus and loaded it into my BM Editor to see how it was all put togther, a fantastic hands-on approach.

Lots of CryMod builds will now find their way into BM I'm sure.

Rock

I am waiting to see how it goes...Blue Mars has the potential to deliver much better graphics than SL, but so far the cities available are for testing. Once we have more developers working on BM, I think that on the right hardware, it will easily outdo SL, but the hardware requirements will also limit the audience.

Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, it appears around 80% of *gamers* have adequate graphics cards for Blue Mars.

For the total market, assume the average life of PCs is 4 years. There are 300 million units sold per year, so a total base of around 1.2 billion PCs.

Looking at Xbit article on average graphics card sales:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20090828120338_Average_Selling_Prices_on_Graphics_Cards_Continue_to_Drop_Jon_Peddie_Research.html


Around 80 million graphics cards are shipped per year with average card around $175.

Good enough cards to meet Blue Mars specs at that price started to be sold mid 2008. Therefore around 50% of sales for the past 1.5 years have been "good enough", or 60 million units.

Therefore around 5% of *all* PCs have good enough cards to run Blue Mars, roughly.

I installed it, and now I get "Failed to download UI".

Oh well.

That covers desktops, but more than half of all computers sold today are laptops, few of which have the graphics to run BM. And some of those run OS X, which does not play well with BM in Bootcamp, assuming Windows is even installed. Read the threads here about problems running SL, and then up the minimum specs to BM levels. The hardware will probably cut 60-70% of the people here from the potential market for BM.

Also, "average" there is the mean: the median is probably far lower based on the graphics in the article. So far less than 50% of computers sold in those years would cut it in Blue Mars.

Quote: "Due to the market's excellent performance and signs early in the fourth quarter that demand for PCs, particularly mobile PCs is healthy, IDC has raised its forecast for PC processor unit shipments in 2009 to well over 300 million units and a unit growth rate of 1.5% compared to 2008."

So the 300M units I quoted is total processor shipments, including laptops and netbooks. I agree that very few laptops and no netbooks will be able to run Blue Mars. There are a few "gaming laptops" sold with a good enough graphics chip built in, but that's a niche market. Also you are correct about operating systems removing some from being able to use Blue Mars.

Since they did not break down the market segments in enough detail, I could not estimate the fraction of good enough cards sold very well. Also note that 300M units includes business as well as home PCs. Aside from graphics designers and engineering type workstations, I would guess very few work computers would rate as "good enough", so that might raise the percentage on home computers.

In all, I would put a range of 2-5% of all computers currently capable of running Blue Mars, but when you look at the home segment, and then the gamer segment those percentages go higher. I haven't seen recent figures on what kinds of graphics cards/chips SL users have installed, so how many of us could potentially play that other game I have no solid idea about.

This alone will keep LL safe from defections by current SL Residents. ^_~

With this guy, BM is FUBAR.