Is this good or bad news for SL?

Remove the question mark at the end of the URL, and it will work right.

That collection is simple 3ds Max models I made, and then imported to the Blue Mars editor. Once in the editor, you can scale them uniformly without breaking their physics. You can scale them on different axes but that messes up the collisions. There's no 10m limit, I have made 100x100m objects.

You have the usual XYZ position and rotation controls, snap to grid, linking items together.

If you want to make more complex changes to the geometry, like slices or holes, then you go to your 3D program of choice and do it there, at which point you can create any arbitrary shape you want.

You can have as many different surface materials as you want, up to 32 per object. For each side of the cube, I made a separate material, which allows me to use different textures, transparency, glow, normal maps, shinyness, etc per side. Textures and glow can oscillate, and you can make vertexes move.

The idea I had was to make a basic prim collection for people who didn't want to go and learn one of the 3D tools. Then it becomes a matter of dragging the right item out of inventory. Making a good starter collection only has to be done once, and then everyone can use it.

OK, they're like a collection of sculpts.

Just tried Blue Mars.

Graphics aren't bad but the controlls are poor.
It is laggy though and after 15 minutes my interest was gone, so i deleted it again.
1.45 Gigabyte is a lot, especially for a few places you can visit, lol.

I sometimes visit the Hippo Sim (OS-grid) and yes, those moneysmelling landlords are beginning to rent out their so called "lands" which they host on their own computer.
Some already start to ask 75 dollars for serverspace and you have a full sim with heaps of prims. But it's still too quiet and apparently not that popular, except you can manage to host your own sim and be happy running around all by yourself in an empty city.

The way i see it:

Either they connect to the SL grid and apply SL's regulations, or SL will take over their grids.
Many of us have invested too much money to delete everything and start all over again.
So they will stay on the SL grid, with all it's hickups and nervewrecking flaws, crashes, lag and errors...

But competition can be healthy too.
It's a sign to LL that they are not alone anymore so they are forced to improve in order to keep their residents happy.

Time will tell...

Well, as usual, something happens, and everyone predicts the death of SL is certain. For starters, any up and comers have to play serious catch up. SL has had years of head start over the competition. About the only thing that any of these will do is cause SL to get off their behinds and bring SL up to their level in the areas where the newcomers are better. As for Blue Mars, I'm still into the monstrosity of a download, so I haven't checked it out yet. Some of the positives are the promise of better graphics, and the open ended development tools. However, it seems to me that the client is so demanding that it will fail because so many people will just not be able to handle the system requirements. SL is demanding enough as it is, many people I know have had to upgrade some or all of their system just to be able to run SL. I do see the benefit of having such high requirements, but on the flip side, if you're trying to build a business, you want to have as wide a potential audience as possible. If it doesn't kill it, it will surely cause it to lag behind for several years until everyone's hit that next 'time to upgrade the pc' point. In the mean time, I'm sure Linden Lab has people looking at the competition, and putting together battle plans to stay in the game. In the end, this will only improve SL. Personally, I welcome the competition because LL has had the corner on the market for quite some time, and any serious competition will cause them to move forward quicker to keep up with the Jones'.

Well, they also directly mention Second Life in the about section of the website...

*** From the Blue Mars Website:
How is Blue Mars different from Second Life?

Blue Mars offers an experience unlike any other virtual world. Our high end graphics, massive concurrent user support, system wide participation based rewards program, support for industry standard content creation tools, next generation NPC intelligence, simple LUA scripting support, and breathtakingly realistic Avatars are just a few of the compelling features that set us apart from the competition.
***

So, it's obvious that the ultimate goal is to compete directly with Second Life.

Great. So I might be talking to AI instead of a live user. Lovely.



... that all look alike...

Right now, they are not competing with anybody in particular.
Down the line, they will be competing directly with SL for x% of the consumer market - or sort of indirectly via the city developers

They will never (never say never) compete with SL on the easy user-generated content. That ability is what brought me into SL - the first virtual world I had ever tried. I know many people who would not be interested in a world that didn't allow that. They would neither be able to build easily nor see the creations of their peers.

There are very definite possibilities for people to develop role play 'cities'.
The moment I saw Shade City in BM, I thought "Whoooaaa! Panther country!!"
I have RPed as a Panther in Gor. Some of the multi-sim forests in SL Gor continents are beautiful. It's worth risking capture to wander around carefully.
There is an issue with sim crossings though. They do mess up the action. Although..I must admit to running along a sim boundary and skipping from one to the other in order to shake off pursuers. I rationalised this sort of escape as being due to my superior Panther knowledge of the forest.

Anyhoo..... if one steps out of a SL forest sim and into the likes of BM's Shade City, it's an eye-opener. It's huge. The terra forming at the coast away from the landing point is very detailed. It feels much more real. Add some of the hilly/mountain bits as in the edge of Beach City. That's the sort of relatively immense non-cartoony landscape in which all sorts of RP groups can have a very immersive experience. That's Gor, general medieval fantasy, and similar. More modern combat
Plus - there's no nonsense with gamers using big draw distances and minimap.

One of the drawbacks for BM developments is that content has to be uploaded via the bottleneck/dead_hand of the city developer. RP groups might be less affected by that. They can have full RP with a relatively limited range of weapons, clothing, etc.


BM developments might take RP mini-continents from SL. With that would be the people whose SL is primary the RP.
I'm not sure they could take Caledon, because that seems to me to be centred around creativity by users rather than the RP.

I don't see BM taking the likes of people who set up a PI and control/create their environment. I don't see it taking the people who buy PIs to develop and/or rent out parcels.
Any audience that is primarily looking for the social RL-replacement/extension is not going to be attracted to the small social worldlets of BM.

BM isn't a place.
It can be thought of as a world, but a world in which travel has to be researched and planned. This would come as a shock to people who might expect the easy SL-type TP to wherever for a quick look.

As I see it, BM is best as a relatively inexpensive platform for someone to develop their own 3D environment.
They would benefit from a general BM marketing/recognition weight and an available pool of BM signups.
Developing and promoting the same thing totally from the ground up would be vastly more challenging.

OpenSim and the other grids will never be a contender.

It's true on a regular user account you cannot build items like you can in SL. For that you need a developer account so you can get the editing tools (it's free though). I've already put together a basic "prim kit", which reduces simple building to dragging items from "inventory", then applying textures. For more complex items, you need to learn a 3D modeling program.

As far as seeing what other people are doing, there is a "developer mode", where you log in to their servers to access your avatar, but it uses the local city files to display the surroundings. So for people wanting to work together on a project or see each other's stuff, you can do that as fast as you can share the files with each other.

I imagine someone will make an "auto-update" tool (if it's not already out there as a software manager), to keep your set of files in sync with the city dev master set. That way, for example, someone testing out a racing game can have each person bring their own car, and try them out in multi-player mode.

On uploads, its not correct only city owners can do that. For personal items, content creators can upload to their account directly. For land type items (landscaping, buildings), those have to be merged as blocks into a city package, which then gets updated to the BM servers and distributed to everyone else. How often and how automated that process will be is not yet known.

I think private islands in SL are exactly the kind of model they are after. Cities can be anything from 128x128m up to 16384x16384m (at least on my PC, there are settings for larger ones, but it crashed the editor when I tried it). Blocks are very much like regions or land parcels. There *will* be some delayed gratification (looks at Argent - yes I mean you), which will turn some people away. You can jump into preview mode more or less instantly, but if you want your friends to see what you made, you have to get it live on their servers or use developer mode.

For the kind of person in SL who rents a parcel on a private island, and then sets up a house and pool and some furniture and trees, you can do about the same thing with a Blue Mars block if you get the prefab bits from other people. They also have a "residence" which is like a private skybox. You can't change the building, but you can decorate with furniture.

But not in real time, and not interactively, and they will have to arrange some external repository to transfer and share files.

I find it hard to imagine how they can do that if they can't upload the software that controls the car.

What distinguishes "land type items" from other items? The difference between a building and a bed is merely a matter of scale.

It's not just a matter of "delayed gratification". The difference between interactive collaboration and batch mode is profound.

Consider, as a trivial illustration, the game of "primtionary".

A drivable vehicle would consist of 5 types of files as far as I can tell: The entity file that registers it as a usable item, the Lua scripts, the 3d model (.cgf format), the materials file that defines what textures and shaders are used, and the actual textures files (.dds format).
Pack that all in a 7zip archive, send it to your friends, and they drop it into their developer directory, and they can use it.

Let me define it more carefully: Personal items are those which you have bought through the Blue Mars shopping system. They are listed in your personal inventory and travel with you. Item creators can upload them for sale directly, without a city owner in the loop.

Land type items are those which can be placed on a block or city build. Those do not have to be bought through the Blue Mars system, you can create your own, get them from TurboSquid, other builders, or whatever. Those have to be uploaded by or via a city developer, because cities are the unit of delivery to and from the servers, and Avatar Reality will be charging city owners based on city data pack size and max number of concurrent users.

If it's not uploaded to the server, how do the scripts run?

So you can't "drop" them somewhere? They're like attachments, and never show up in-world for other people to see unless you're there?

Scripts run locally on your PC, only needed data, like position changes, get passed to the server and then to other people.

Items like furniture can be "placed", in which case the item data has to be sent thru the server to other players. It's part of the "live" data that has to be sent to new players as they enter an area, along with any other avatar data for whoever is there at the time.

The bulk of a city's data content is the static pre-download, but there is still stuff that has to be sent live, like added furniture, vehicles, avatars, and any changes to static items. Items can also be destroyed, since the Cryengine 2 was written for combat games originally. The data is still there as part of the city download, but now you get a message to not display that item any more.

Item additions and removals are done with SpawnEntity() and delete entity functions at the script level.

So the physics in Blue Mars is done on the client, not the server?

So how is this live data maintained through server updates?

Crysis physics, not real time, but done with same graphics engine as Blue Mars uses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG5qDeWHNmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG5qDeWHNmk



That I dont know about, yet. But hey, I can make reflections (4th photo):

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

Those 3000 barrels are not being simulated on 3000 different computers. If my scripted object is going to interact with your scripted object, and the scripts and physics are running on our own computers and not on the server, then the lag and rubber banding is going to make the worst sim crossing nightmares in SL look good.

This is the result of a phone conversation with Jim Sink, CEO of Blue Mars and several emails back and forth. Since he has reviewed it and said it's OK, it can be considered semi-official. Official updates to their website FAQ are coming in early December. I will try to keep this updated as more info becomes available and people ask good questions:

=======================================
Blue Mars for Second Life Users Information (Draft 30Nov09)
=======================================

Terminology
-----------

Blue Mars uses different terms for things than Second Life. Here is an approximate comparison with definitions:

City Developer/Owner (SL ~ Estate Owner). Controls a large area of virtual land capable of hosting a large number of avatars at one time. Can create smaller parcels (blocks) to be worked on by individuals called Block developers.

Block Developer (SL ~ Region/Sim owner or large parcel owner). Controls a smaller area of virtual land. Able to place buildings, landscaping, scripted items, and mod terrain within a larger city.

Content Developer (SL ~ Content creator). Has registered to create and sell items.

Developer = working on it, not live on their servers, Owner = live on their servers.


Hardware and OS Requirements and Support
----------------------------------------

(1) For current Client software see http://www.bluemarsonline.com/about/sysreq.html

Native to Windows, Mac via Bootcamp, Linux via Wine. Native support for other OS and consoles is possible in the future when licensing and code will permit.

(2) For Developers: Windows and certain 3D tools (3Ds Max and Maya) are recommended. Other tools can be used (SketchUp, Blender, etc) and will be supported as possible with plugins/converters.

(3) Documentation is at an early stage. A Developer Wiki is being set up, lots of holes at the moment, and dependent on Crytek documents, which are not 100% compatible, but useful for reference - http://doc.crymod.com/


Beta Milestones and Roadmap
---------------------------

(1) Currently in open beta (v0.5664) to get user and developer feedback. The areas open now are technology demonstration rather than finished product.

(2) Major update is expected in early December with new functionality, release of pricing info, and future plans information. New website and FAQ will also be coming out.

(3) Future versions will include "places browser" with smaller basic install, and options to download cities as needed. Most content is pre-downloaded, rather than streaming model of SL.


Pricing
-------

(1) Cities in Blue Mars are variable physical size, from 128x128m to 16,384x16,384m. There are settings for larger terrain maps, but crash on a new Windows7-x64 I7-920 6GB Nvidia GTX 260 system, so that's a practical limit.

(2) Pricing based on max number of concurrent users and download file size rather than land area or prim count.

(3) Regular user, developer, and city developer accounts are all free, as are the game client, developer and city developer kits.




Content Creation
----------------

(1) Development model is different. Item creation and land setup are done offline using 3rd party tools and Blue Mars provided editors (free). When ready, items and city updates are uploaded to sell or go live for visitors. There is no cost until you go live.

(2) Content Safekeeping. To reduce unwanted copying, creators are required to register as developers, and content delivered to end users is encrypted.

(3) Types of directly sold items will be phased in over the next few versions, to eventually include clothing, body appearance, accessories, furniture, behaviors (~ gestures and AO) and animations.

(4) Methods to connect developers who make intermediate goods (such as scripts and textures) and block and city items (buildings, landscaping) with other users will be worked on. Forum section, in-world purchase with outside delivery, etc are possibilities.

(5) Project collaboration. Before going live for all users, developers can distribute block or city updates directly to each other, then log in to Blue Mars servers in dev mode to test with their avatars.

(6) Technical Limits. There is an overall city data package limit, and there will be some polygon limits on items, but latitude to work within the overall limit. Display limit is around 3 million polygons (graphics card limit). Because 3D models can be replicated (trees for example) the total content within a city can be larger than the display limit or data package size.

Cryengine2 graphics engine had many features impossible or difficult to do in SL, including:

Normal maps, Live shadows, breakable objects, reflections, weather, definable collision proxy. It *does* require a higher minimum graphics card to run than SL.

(7) Content Updates. Blocks and cities will be updated automatically. Purchased item updates will be looked into.

( Formats: 3d models and animations in Crytek formats (.cgf .cga), output directly by 3d graphics program or from COLLADA open format and converted by their editing tools. Scripts use Lua scripting language. Textures use DirectDraw Surface (.dds) formats optimized for graphics cards.



Business Issues
---------------

(1) Avatar Reality will eventually charge for uploading content, and a percentage on sales.
Block and shop owners will have to pay to rent their selling space. Amounts TBD. Initally no charge for uploads.

(2) Payment methods. Credit cards and Paypal for funds coming in, Paypal for payments going out. No extra charges for funds out above paypal fees.

(3) Sales tracking per item will be provided. In case of user loss of data (ie hard drive crash), Avatar Reality will track items bought and allow re-download.


User Issues
-----------

(1) Residences will allow interior customization within pre-built private spaces. For greater modification (build from scratch, landscaping, etc) then register as a developer (free) and rent a block.

(2) User Interface. Movement and camera will be revamped from current beta version 0.56, and more features added in coming updates that people expect.

(3) Terms of Service specify you must be over 18. Only check is entering DOB when registering.

(4) Currently no limits on alternate accounts. Developers must register with real life info comparable to SL premium accout with payment info. City dev also agrees to written NDA.

(5) Not a unified inventory system, but purchased items will be portable, and building is done offline with items you have local on your PC, so moving a build can be done between areas.


Open Issues:
------------

- Used items? (Trading and resale), selling entire blocks or cities?

- Avatar appearance. What will be the outer limits on appearance? Can you become the opposite sex, a skeleton, or robot/minotaur hybrid? How many clothing layers and attachments will be possible, or is there some other system for that?

- Access and interaction controls - Who can and cant enter a city or block? Muting, ejecting, or banning annoying people?

- Will there be adult verification and R or higher rated areas?

- Non-graphical client or other way to interact from e.g. smartphone. Voice interaction?

- Tenant Rights - what happens if a city owner fails, to the shops and blocks in his city? Disputes, failure to pay issues, etc.

I've been having fun with the Blue Mars developer tools. It's put me right back where I was 3+ years ago as a newbie in SL, learning new stuff and just messing around to see what I can do. I think a lot of early users will fall into that category too.

Today I figured out how to make basic physics work (last two photos):

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

WoW sent me a free 7 days thing to entice me back for their 5th Birthday celebrations, I forgot how bad it was, the Avatars afterr you chose your race, Male/Female basically only have hair style color options they nearly make SL look cutting edge

Nice looking vid, but the info made me double over laughing:



So this is your example of how Crysis physics are so much faster, better, brighter, shinier? One pic every five seconds, in a perfectly clean sandbox environment...?

You don't have any idea about Opensim then.

I been involved in the BM development for awhile and must say that both SL and BM are two very different beasts that caters for two different types of needs and people. You cannot say BM is better than SL cuz SL also is better in some areas than BM and depends on your needs. For the most part BM in its infancy is quite interesting research for any advanced content developer who wants to learn higher end game development.

I got to say though, that personally, as a content creator I find BM to be time consuming in creating content than SL. The reason is the specs how 3d models should
be in order to be be optimized for online use. It's not just make a 3d model and texture it but also adding extra model elements to prepare it for online use. In SL people just create and texture it and its all ready, done.

Now if you look at the next sl 2.0.. if they add collada import with LOD support then you can see that its a BIG step towards content development and still retains the speed in importing content. I think Blue Mars programmers can also come up with a way to reduce the time consuming process of developing content to their specs but at current state don't expect quick development like SL has now....

A perfectly fully interactive virtual city in Blue Mars will not take months to complete but years... in its current state.

qft

Opensim might as well be a SL clone, they are copying all LL's best mistakes for the sake of compatibility.
From what I've seen Opensim is a Lagfest even with only one avatar in the sim.
Many of the Opensim grid owners also seem to think they can run 4 times more sims than LL per server and give everyone double prims with no negative effects.

omg i agree totally,,Opensim was one of the worst..I couldn't do squat there..
Then they had Legend city..i think i finally got to rezz the prim clothes from the default avatar but that was about it LOL

Those two places showed me just how far SL was ahead of them and how far those places still had to go..I think one of them died already..

I just know they are not any competition for sl at all..who would want to leave sl for something that is just like sl but worse headaches LOL