anybody else beta testing blue mars

I thought 1.8 introduce unilateral p2p teleporting (as opposed to responding to a teleport invitation).

In order to connect the client to another server hosting a different region (which can be the same as walking across a sim boundary, if the sim you are walking to is on another server) involves what then? I am intrigued by your statement.

Rock

It also got rid of the old teleportation scheme where teleporting involved the client completely logging out of the region, detaching everything you were wearing, and logging in again from scratch and re-rezzing and reattaching everything all over again. Instead you are now passed directly from one region to the next, with all your agent context and avatar context retained intact.

Curious, out of the interesting points I made earlier, you continue to wail away on the TP issue.

Side note to Peggy: As mentioned before, it is others who continue to pounce on the near meaningless point about the BM TP system. It is easier to pounce on this than address real issues.

Good to know the beta is finally to be released, because so far the alpha version is as appealing as a bouillon cube.

You find every opportunity to put down SL - even in the BM forums. Can't wait until you are gone from SL and these forums. Real answers require real thinking.

Come on, Rocky. Fess up. What exactly are you contributing to "your" BM city? Financial backer? What are your contributions to the scripting behind your magic carpet or stargate? You did not even do the builds in your SL sim. Have you ever attempted a build in SL? You have great swagger, but no product that shows anything of substance.

BM is different from SL. Period. There is no superiority when it comes to beauty or creativity or the talent behind the builds. And, its performance comes from not having to have the entire BM grid available to the client which is what happens in SL. Others here have done the math that compares SL to BM when handling grid size and avatars and BM fell far short of its ability to handle a comparable size, and you never had an answer to those observations.

Rock has done more then his fair share in regards to giving back to THIS community over the last couple of years and will be sorely missed. What have you done Paracelsus? Rock also is not the only one that bitches about some aspects of Second Life as I know I do my fair share of bitching. There have been some completely idiotic decisions on the part of LL the last couple of years. And yet I still spend multiple hours per week helping people learn here.

Try real questions instead of cheap shots, if you want real answers.

Well, 'interesting' is subjective. You may have found it so (being the author) but I didn't. However, I will correct disinformation on Blue Mars whenever I see it.


Up to now the software has been in closed-beta (not alpha). The open-beta starts this week. If your idea that a beta test should be a fully finished product, with all features sets included, and just a few bugs need to be found, then you are mistaken. The beta policy at AR is to start with a limited feature set, thoroughly test them, post back all bugs found, get them fixed, then issue another release with a few more features , and so on, until the end of beta.


I do not try to put down SL at every opportunity. I have praised SL where praise is due. However, when a new product comes out, with advanced features, those must be pointed out. Can you compare a new Ferrari with a Model 'T' Ford, without 'putting down' the Model 'T'? It is difficult. The best you can do is to say they are both great in their era. SL was great in its era, but that era is coming to a close, unless they up their technology, which I sincerely hope they do.

My SL sim? Which sim(s) are you referring to explicitly? As for 'fessing up' I think my Blue Mars City is my affair, don't you? I can tell you that up to now I have been working solely on my own.


True, but shouldn't people be made aware of those differences?


I must disagree. There have been talented artists in SL, and there will be talented artists in Blue Mars. The difference is in the tools that are available to them. A talented artist with access to a piece of charcoal and a cave wall is limited in what he can do, but a talented artist with access to a fully equipped studio, well, I think you get the point.



Yes, I saw that, and I did not respond because it was meaningless.

Currently, two of SL's most complained about restrictions are the number of avatars that can be in a region, before the lag becomes so bad it is like wading in mud. The number usually varies between 20 and 40. The other problem is sim border crossings, with rubber-banding, sinking into the ground, etc. In Blue Mars both of these restrictions are removed. A city can be up to 1024 SL regions in size, so there are no borders to worry about. It can hold several thousand avatars, and they can all congregate in an area the size of a SL region within that City, and no lag. One of the purposes of the open-beta is to fully test this claim, and perform this and other load tests.

By saying that 20 avatars per SL region x 1024 = more avatars than a Blue Mars city can hold, is a useless equation. By all means, create a 1024 region mini-continent in SL. You will still find that you are limited (lag-free) to 20-40 avatars in any one region and the region border crossing problems are still there. So, what did the maths do for you, exactly?

For those wishing to build a 5000 seater stadium and fill it, there is only one choice between SL and Blue Mars, and that example of 'maths' wont change that.

Rock

I did ask real questions, and all of them were ignored by Rock. Others have asked real questions, and he has ignored them.

Rock brags about the infinite superiority of BM and his builds. If he has made contributions in other areas, great. The focus here is on builds and his continual put down of what SL isn't compared to BM. It's like he never left his sim to find any beauty and creativity. And I find it obnoxious that he carries the same attitude over to the BM forums.

I never said SL is perfect, nowhere did I say that.

I never really thought about it in detail, but now I'm interested in how that's achieved, architecturally. Based on where the ultimate bottlenecks are in SL, one would expect that network bandwidth would saturate long before a thousand avatars, unless something is done to restrict the amount of information and updates sent about each avatar to each viewer.

Peer-to-peer would push the problem out to the network edge, but ultimately wouldn't solve it (and even ignoring asymmetric connection bandwidth, it would introduce horrific security issues, so I'd guess that's not the approach here).

Perhaps distributing more of the physics to the client would help some (not because of the load on a central physics engine, which isn't so much a problem any more, but because updates might be reduced with less noticeable deviation from synchrony among clients).

I guess, once everybody is sitting in that 5000-seat stadium, physics updates aren't going to be the bottleneck anyway, but rather the volume of data that has to be broadcast to all 5000 clients about whatever it is they're congregated to watch. So then there's not really much avatar update volume (modulo changes of attachments, clothing, animations), the problem more or less collapses to that of stream hosting, in which case 5000 recipients is certainly doable; at compressed audio bandwidth, that's still pretty pricey, but presumably most content would demand less bandwidth than does audio.

No idea if that's on the right track.

I really have no idea (yet) of how they achieve all this, except a small snippet of a conversation I had with Glenn Sanders of AR, when he said because we download the Cities we wish to visit, their game servers only really have to deal with avatars.

So I guess they are not streaming the entire cities and their contents, as we have them on our HD (encrypted). But I am guessing here.

Rock

Going by what I saw..
Those 5000 would be animated by a standard set of animations, gestures and poses that are already on everyone's hard disk.
The entire build is on the client hard disk, as would be the standard animations.
Avatars do collide with objects, but not with each other. We walk right through each other. That should simply the physics load immensely.

The grand scheme is to have nearly everything preloaded.
From what I gather, people leasing space from a city owner have to pass their content to the city owner as a package for inclusion in an update that is scheduled by the city owner. That could be once a week, a day, a month, whatever. There is no building on the fly.

When it comes to non-standard animations, it might be up to a city owner if these are allowed in the city or not. The more flexibility allowed, the greater the bandwidth mounts with avatar count.

However, maybe the "5000 avatars" only seems impossible in SL terms.
I understand that
- A city owner will pay at scales related to avatar capacity.
- If necessary, a city will be 'sharded' into multiple instances. There might be 5000 avatars seeing the city, but they will be in different instances of it. That would berfectly aceptable for most circumstances. Do we really want thousands of tiny avatars on our screens?? What would be the benefit.? The servers could always stuff a stadium with avatar imposters if some atmosphere is required.

The Beta BM cities are fake at the edges. Those hills and buildings way out at the edges are knock-up jobs as in film sets. There's a lot of 2D content out at the edges. This is particularly noticeable in the New Venice build.


I don't know if it would be possible for '5000' to be in a situation in which they could all interact with one another, or all view the actions of certain avatars performing or competing at an event.
Somewhere or other I came across a mention of some measure to allow city owners to jump between sharded instances.

SL and BM are very different beasts.
The only thing that really have in common is that they are 3D interactive environments.

i am beta testing also - so far venice blew me away but not much to do there yet. they are down for 4 days so we will see.

OK, so there's basically no way that my hypothetical ferret avatar would be able to work in a city where the city owner hadn't included it.
Yah. BM is great for people who want to build mini 3d MMOs.

Yes, subjective is correct. However, I made some objective observations and comments in an earlier post, and just try not to repeat myself.

But, I never expected a beta to be full featured, and made such comment to that effect in previous posts. Consider also how some people refer to SL as a beta, and we chuckle at that. It would be most unpleasant for BM to become a continuous beta. However, any technology is a work in progress and must be recognized for how it handles the "tools" available to it.

I do apologize to you as I did not mean to impugn your character.

Finally, as I said in previously, I do look forward to exploring and participating in BM.

Best of luck in your own build.

I applied ages ago. I haven't heard from them. They smell.



Yes, I am sulking. Just a little bit.

Knowing what their criteria was for choosing who received it or not would be interesting to know. Maybe waiting a while longer as features are incorporated is not a bad thing. Good things come to those who wait. Or some such crud.

Count me in the I applied and was ignored bunch - oh well - I will be a tourist when it comes. Home is where my SL is

Yeah: I was definitely coming at the question with a lot of tacit SL-centric assumptions. I kinda knew that, but I'm still learning what assumptions I need to shed.

I doubt we'll be seeing posts in BM of "Why can't my 6 yr old PC run Blue Mars??"

Actually, we already see posts about brand new machines having trouble.

The cryengine, on which the BM platform is based, makes demands on the best pc.

I have a two year old Quad core, 3 gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 9800. Granted it's beefy but not outrageously beefy by today's standard and it's not out of the affordability range of people buying a current computer, say under $1500.

I was not only able to get into BM, I was able to run full options and record video previews.

Affordable?

I have a similar machine. And one can have a newer computer than mine with more power for way less than I gave for it 3 years ago ($1000 without a monitor).........like for about $500 less. Yeah I would say there are many affordable PC's on the market that run BM (even SL) with guality performance. If you got a low end Celeron CPU and cheap onboard graphics set then you might have difficulty. In fact you probably would have difficulty in most anything more than simple email and internet web surfing.

What kind of machine do you consider affordable? Maybe I am out of touch.

To most people "affordable", for a desktop, means "under 400". For "under 1500" I'd expect something that could give me a massage and manicure.

Under $400 for a desktop? Do not think so, even home built, well you can, but it would be no better then buying a netbook and in no way will run SL. Under $1000? Now you are talking!!!! You can build a pretty spiffy rig for that much.

You can build a pretty spiffy rig for $600. But $1000 would be better.

I think the point was that you do not need a computer that is anymore powerful for BM than one for SL............in fact, from what I've read and heard SL makes more demands on a computer than BM.

But, I haven't been their yet...........so that is second hand information.