Blue Mars Progress

Let me know if you ever get it to work.

Oh yeah, THAT Rock...the one that burned up the forums recruiting for OpenLife last year. Then in the OpenLife forums said he could help people move their *no-copy, no-mod* SL inventory over if they emailed him *wink wink*. Guess the love affair with OL is over huh?

I managed to find the yachtclub in new venice in BM, and tried the sailboats...


GAWD. HORRIBLE.

Whoever made those has obviously never set foot on a RL sailboat.


/me goes back to the blake sea, drags his open 70 out and goes off on a 30 minute fast one around nautilus island

Not that I have gone into Blue Moon but some of the comments of the way they walk or dress and even the hair reminds me of when i started in SL in 2004. Prim hair was in beginning stages ( no flexi or scuplties ), skins were rare and far more expensive, the av's walked like zombies and clothes were nothing compaired to now so most made them in there apperance mode. All games start somewhere and to compare a game in its beta to Second Life that has been around for years is kinda useless. Plus even SL has its vast issues as we all know.

Just my thoughts ,dont bash!

Can we haz full 1024x768 screen resolution support?

About 1024 x 768 workarounds:

I use 1024 x 768 on my old system not only because it's the resolution that makes the size of things on the screen optimum for me, but also because it's the highest resolution at which the system wants to let you set the refresh rate higher than 60. I hate 60 cycles refresh rates. Even the next highest up refresh rate, which on my system is 70 hertz reduces the visible flicker dramatically.

Lately I was fiddling with Blue Mars and the monitor resolution and I had the resolution set at 1280 by 960, which works ok with Blue Mars, and I decided to un-check the box in the Control Panel / Display / Settings / Advanced / Monitor dialog that says "Show only settings this monitor supports", which shows a wide range of different refresh rates most of which I am sure my monitor and card would not like much.

I set the refresh rate up to 70, the next highest choice, and nothing blew up or caught on fire and the display didnt' have any odd glitches or artifacts on it, so I let it stay that way.

I then went to Blue Mars with the whole thing fitting on my screen and with the chat box and other screen elements fitting like they are supposed to.

I've done this several times since then and seen no obvious problem as a result.

For me, it is not a bashing just a matter that Avatar Reality did not take advantage of all that as happened since SL began [and other online worlds pre SL and those that have come online since]. Comparing the BM platform to the beginnings of SL can be no defense of the BM platform in its current release.

Avatar Reality is using a well established graphics engine and has access to years of user experience in virtual, online environments. Avatar Reality could have shown what was possible in a virtual reality, but did not, and instead focused on benefits to developers. If you are a BM developer, then a BM city/island may be the best thing since sliced onions. For the end user at this time, a BM city/island is worth a look or two and then a quick exit.

If they did not want annoyed users, the beta should have been closed to the public, or a notice posted on the splash screen explaining that not all features are available, and maybe even have included a link to the time line for feature release.

As one regular poster on all things BM stated, "features will be gradually released," that is a fact not obvious to Joe and Jane everyday user.

BTW, IMO, the movement controls are a giant leap backward in time, and not including some basic graphics controls is a serious oversight. Users having to fiddle with PC monitor/graphic card parameters or config files to get the BM platform to cooperate is, at best, funky.

Unfortunately for BM this is their banner page:

"NEXT GENERATION VIRTUAL WORLD"

Problem being that if you bill yourself as the "next generation" people kind of expect you not to have problems from a early iteration of the previous generation. Maybe some new and interesting problems. I was hoping to see someone say "OMG, the graphics were so realistic that they melted my eyes, what do I do now?" That would be a cool problem.

Still no luck, Evangeline. I tried again late last night and still got the same stumbling block.

/me sighs

Does anyone think like me or is this a big "Well, duh, AckAck. Of course, Rock is a corporate shill for BM."

If that's the case, I'm surprised LL is letting this continue. But then again, I'm sure no one at LL has ventured into the forums since Eisenhower was president.

I have no connection with Avatar Reality whatsoever.

When I was writing on my blog about Far Realms, Vastparks, Metaverse, et al was I also their 'corporate shill'?

When I worked on the Gridnauts project teleporting between Second Life and Opensim whose 'corporate shill' was I then?

And when I wrote the User Manual for Opensim, and wrote the tutorials for it, what was I then?

I am currently writing about Blue Mars because no Virtual World has excited me more since Second Life first started.

And to answer a couple of other posts, Avatar Reality are producing a Virtual World platform, nothing more. They will not set up their own regions, or produce their own content, or launch new continents to screw the land market, they have taken a completely hands off approach. It will be for the developers to create the cities, the blocks, the content, the avatars, and what is and isn't allowed within each city (within a very similar TOS to the SL TOS).

In order to test the extensions to the CryEngine (to convert it from a games engine to a VW engine) AR created four test 'cities' and some basic avatar shapes, camera and movement functions, a miniscule subset of what is possible. The purpose of the beta was not to start playing with avatar appearance etc, it was to find and fix the bugs in the extensions. If finding and reporting bugs is not your thing, I would recommend staying away from the beta, and come back after launch, slated for the 1st Jan 2010.

If anyone wants to see what avatars can be like in Blue Mars, or their movement, or camera control, you just have to take a look at any of the Crysis trailers. This is what the developers will be (and are) producing.

A few threads ago people were complaining that in Blue Mars there will be no flying, or teleporting, and in the four test cities that is true, it was not the purpose of the beta to test these, that functionality is already there in the engine, it was the extensions that needed to be tested. But now that third party cities have been created, such as New Venice (now called Venezia) you can see that there is flying (the camera flies) and teleporting.

The skins in BM can be extremely lifelike, take a look here (the eyes need some work though!).

But, to repeat, and I wish I didn't have to labour the point, AR are NOT testing the creation of avatars and skins, nor providing a wide selection, that is for the developers, they are testing the extensions.

Rock

Hold on, does this mean that the stuff that's missing from the BM client will be expected to be provided as extensions by the BM developers? No wonder it's taking the developers so long to create their cities.

yep, the old hen&egg problem...

providing quality content is up to the city owners (developers), who won't put any effort in as long as there are no users, which in turn won't come until there is quality content.


in other words, epic fail.

No, Lance, I'm asking about the user interface tools that are missing, are they supposed to be provided by the city developers as well?

oh... no idea but i would not be surprised. Most likely with some lame excuse like "Well, the UI totally depends on what people can do in your city, sou of course you have to make the UI as well".

Maybe it is just me, but this is the RA section of the (soon to die?) Second Life forums. So what the hell does a thread about another "game" do in here? What is next? WOW threads? IMVU threads?

Of course, I could simply not open the thread, but that is not my point. My point is that threads about BM belong in BM forums, threads about WOW belong in Wow forums, and threads about IMVU belong in IMVU forums. If every fanboi of every online platform starts posting in RA simply because its more active then the forum of the product itself, there is one more reason to close down this medium. And who could blame them?

No, access to the extensions via the UI is being developed by AR. They created the Chat interface, a friends list, put them out, got a load of feedback (we don't like chat bubbles, we want a chat history you can copy/paste, the chat scroll bar does not work well, we want avatar names over our heads, we don't want avatar names over our heads, use mouseover instead, we want IMs, etc).

The functions that AR had to develop, mainly to do with chat, IMs, avatar customisation (facial features, hair), multiplayer functionality for games, item registration database, various editors, interfaces to social networks such as Twitter, facebook etc, etc are being rolled out in chunks, so their inhouse devs can focus on bug reports for a limited number of functions, get them fixed, and move on to another set. The next release of BM will have an additional 25 new features. Of course, some participants in the beta are impatient, and would have preferred most of the functionality to be present once they joined, well they can always return once beta is over, but I for one am enjoying this phased approach, as I am getting to know the platform much more fundamentally because of it.

The BM developers will develop cities, the content, avatars, skins, scripts, etc, and access rules. AR will not be doing that. But, fear not, a veritable army of Crysis modders are already champing to get their amazing content into BM, as are the army of 3DSMax modellers. Add to that the huge amount of content in the Google 3D warehouse, Renderocity and Content Paradise, and I don't think anyone will have any worries about choice, when it comes to buying ready made content, clothes, avatars, skins or hair etc, and can create their own using a number of free programs if they wish.

Rock

So I tried BM two days ago and had the same experience as many of you.

Controlling your Avatar is god awful.

Just knowing who somoene is is impossible unless they speak.

There are no IM's

Camera controls are god awful.

BUT

The avatars themselves are light years ahead of SL and the graphics far superior.

The few animations you currently have access to are much more fluid and realistic MUCH more. You can REALLY hug someone in there and it's not clunky.

I think they have a LONG LONG way to go but I think they can get there.

If they can fix avatar controls and IM's and if there is or will be a way to create your own animations then, even with these three fixes they will begin to put nails in the coffin of SL. Yes even with those 3 fixes alone.

The world, and the avatars are leaps and bounds beyond SL already.

If I were you guys I would give them a chance and keep your eyes open.

I'm excited about what I see already and waiting for more.

oh yeah, if they have good customer support then that would be the end all =c)

I tried it and I think it looks like IMVU crossed with EA Tiger Woods Golf. It has a long way to go.

Dude, I don't care whether you are or not. I was just surprised LL lets this thread continue, although most people commenting are making me not want to explore BM, so maybe this is a good thing for LL after all. As for having no connection, you sure do know a lot for just standing on the outside looking through the windows.
You were writing on your own blog. This is not your blog. You were reviewing them, you were a fanboi, whatever. But posting inside knowledge elsewhere smells of phony viral marketing. It is, however, better than waiting for people to find your blog. I salute your cleverness.
You are right. You weren't a shill. You got paid a salary (I hope) and worked for them. To me, a shill is someone secretly working for a company and getting paid for it, yet pretending they don't. If you're not getting paid by BM for this thread, shame on you.
You were employed by them, and paid for the work, right? You didn't do it for free. Please say you didn't.
I am excited about BM, too. But it's far, far from being competition for SL. Which I wish were not true. Again, this isn't the place for a thread like this, but LL doesn't care, the moderatorss left this forum months and months ago, so you're golden. : ) Keep going until they shut the Forums down. Ride on!

It's so silent there

I downloaded the developer's kit and client, got logged in and wandered around New Venice and the other regions. Yes, the graphics are lovely. Running full screen on a 1680x1050 monitor with a Geforce 7950GT I was only getting about 4fps, so only people with high-end gaming systems will see it smooth.

But it's Alpha software, not beta. Beta means you at least have all the features you expect in the full release in there. They may be buggy and need tweaking, but at least they are in there in some form. Right now it's not to that level yet.
What is there, works OK, so that's cool.

My observations from a couple of hours of playing with it:

* Cities are large and seamless. I took this pic from way above New Venice:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/members/danielravennest/albums/blue+mars+snapshots-333/new-venice-blue-mars-2478/
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/members/danielravennest/albums/blue+mars+snapshots-333/new-venice-blue-mars-2478/

Had no trouble wandering around and almost no graphics load time lag. Bandwidth was around 10kbps. This seems to be because most of a "city" comes pre-loaded in a data package as part of the client (1.24 GB vs 30MB for SL)

* Once I got the hang of "leading" my avatar with the movement diamond, walking around was easy. He did get stuck a lot bumping into stuff. In SL you tend to slide off objects when you bump into them, in BM you just stick until you turn around and walk the other way.

* Not much to do yet except wander around, chat with other newbies, and sit. There were things like boats in New Venice, but could not find any way to sit on them or use them.

* I noticed that in New Venice, I could fly the camera view around and then TP to a destination (Esc, arrow keys and mouse to move the view, q to end flycam and TP). In another city that did not work. Dont know if thats a feature that things work different in different cities, or just New Venice is newer and had that added.
If features work different in different cities, that would be a *major* turn off.

* A lot of stuff seemed to be "just scenery". They were either flat objects or I fell thru them.

* I missed having no map function. One reason I discovered the TP function is I wanted to get an overview of the city, like the photo I took (I was in the process of falling from TP way up high, and missed the cute "Ahhhh, Im falling" animation from SL and wind noises)

It looks like the city consists of a lot of repeats of the same basic building blocks, is that right?

Several people have complained about this thread existing on these forums,
attempting to play forum police (like above) and other tactics.

Speaking as a resident of SL: I am glad these discussions are here,
because it's useful to compare SL to other systems.

The questions being implicitly posed are along the lines of:
"When will SL have something like that?"

And why doesn't LL shut down the topic?
Well, probably because You Can't Stop The Signal,
and trying to do so just looks bad.

(And in the unlikely event that LL were to bother reading these threads,
they provide feedback about features of the competition.)

Outside of a tiny group of users (who are also mostly the contributors)
nobody reads these forums anyway. And they might go poof tomorrow.

That card is like 7 years old. There are some basic functions that must be emulated instead of being built in on the chip. Try an 8800 (getting a little long in the tooth as well) or better and see the difference.

This sort of thing comes up with virtually any beta or otherwise developing gaming software I have been through. During development the standard is set rather high because as anyone knows, last years high end is next year's PoS. If you want in on the bleeding edge you will need bleeding edge equipment. But to expect to get better quality with lesser hardware is just not going to happen.