Blue Mars announces its roadmap!

Blue Mars announces its roadmap!

http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2010/02/blue-mars-new-features-on-horizon.html

Virtually everything the users have asked for.

Rock

When? I want a frock coat and tophat or I'm not coming back.

It will be nice to not be one of the mass of jeans-and-teeshirt avatars. I did at least find out how to use the face editor to make a goatee, but I need better clothes. Oh, and better navigation would be nice.

The link didn't work for me.

Wake me when you can make real money.

Yay some threads I will not be sorry to see go, Rock's updating us on Blue Mars.

Maybe this will:

http://tr.im/bluemarsroadmap

http://tr.im/bluemarsroadmap

LL has a roadmap, too.

What matters not is whether they have one. What matters is can they follow it on anything resembling an acceptable timeline to their users. And can they do it without self-inflicted damage to themselves?

Still no porn... That's a key thing for many. Like it or not, sex and violence sells.

hey great. call us in 2020 when it gets done, is run by adults that understand what entertainment is, has real UGC, Has a real economy, and you don't have to have a NSA custom super computer to move around in it.

I can pass on the violence, but if there's no adult content I won't be going there at all. Don't care if everything else is 100% perfect, which apparently it's far from at this stage.

Lets be realistic here, its about 50% of the minimum functionality to make it a working virtual world (though that is a big step forward from the 20% functionality the user software is at right now). And I say that as a blue mars city developer.

http://www.bluemarsonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=764


My list of whats still missing *after* they put in the listed new features:
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BLU display *in world* - Its hard to go shopping if you dont know how much is in your purse/wallet

* Direct Teleport via a landmark, URL or other pointer to locations besides the spawn point in a city, and the ability to TP a friend to your location.

* Search - to be able to find things in world at a local level like shops (the places browser lists cities, but in real life cities have a Yellow Pages directory)

* Map - aside from turning on the statistics console, we have a hard time knowing where we are, and no way to find other people right now in a city.

* In-world profiles

* In-world inventory

* Voice and possibly video chat

* Groups - made for any social or business purpose in-world, for example store staff, or members of a class being taught in-world. Group features like group IM, member list, and ability to post notices for the group.

* Event calendar

* Jump and Fly, unless those are part of the improved movement

* Land controls: Block and city access list, Eject and Ban for troublemakers and an Abuse reporting system when needed for AR staff to deal with serious problems.

* User to user money transfer. This includes payment for services such as club or store staff, tipping live performers.

* User to user item transfers. This would include written notes and documents, photos, and gifts of items such as clothing. Right now you have to manually type everthing in chat.

* Snapshots and video capture

* Buying a set of items with one purchase

* Chat logging, for business, classroom, or to record bad behavior to report to AR Staff

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On the other comments:

The developer side of Blue Mars is in much better shape than the user software. It has to be done in that order, or else you will have an empty world when the regular users show up. All the real action right now is on the developer side. They have new editing tools in the pipeline, and their wiki documentation is starting to show progress from it's pretty non-existent state. They are even starting a script library.

On Adult content, sexually explicit content is not allowed in the main Blue Mars cities because they intend to open it up to age 13 and up. That just means it will happen in private instanced "Residences" and on private cities off their servers (which I have a
working example of already tested). Already working on stripper wear



@ Ann, myself and others are creating content, and an average priced new desktop PC bought this year can run Blue Mars. I have a new high end PC (i7-920/6GB/Nvidia 260)
and I have run *two* copies of Blue Mars for test purposed, or Blue mars and SL at the same time.

They launched too early. The beta should be another year.

Wake me up when September ends.



It is open to the right people. Developers. Trouble is, potential residents are going in and being dissatisfied when it hasn't been made for them yet.

@ Briana, they do need some non-developers to test it, and give feedback. which is about all that happens with the regular users at the current time. They get about one new signup on the user forums *per day*. Compare that to these forums, which have had 2.77 million users sign in, which works out to 1000 new people per day over the last 7 years.

What I will agree with other people about is that calling it "beta" right now is wrong. Technology preview, maybe, but not beta. That term commonly means "nearly all features working with some bugs still, and ready for user testing". When they put in all the feaures on the roadmap, I would venture to call it alpha quality (or half baked, since it will have around half the needed features at that point).

I've been in since before it went open...I quit rather early on. I saw that they had so much ground to cover it would never be appealing to SL residents, which are all i am interested in if i am going to make a new world on Blue Mars.

Right now it appeals to builders who enjoy building for it's own sake. I have been having fun learning to use 3dsMax, playing with all the features of their city editor, not worrying about prim limits or physical space. Its the same feeling I had back three years ago, when SL was shiny and new for me.

The vast majority of the developers I have met in Blue Mars are coming with an SL background.

If you want to run a business, or set up a house and invite your friends over, no, its not ready. Second half of this year, maybe, if they stay on schedule.

THAT.

^---- This.

I have tried to sign up about 3 times and never heard a word from them.Perhaps I will try again some day.

It needs a mac port. Now before anyone says their response of 'it is the engine developer's fault' or 'not everything needs to be dual platform' they are shooting themselves in the foot.

1) Even if a port attempt is futile, they can at least say 'we wanted to, anyone else want to have a go?'

2) A LOT of creative content producers use macs, a LOT. Sure, some use PCs, but I am not about to go buy a high-powered PC that I will only be using for BM.

and what makes you think that those are the targeted audience for BM content creation?


From what I've seen the targeted peer group that are supposed to build stuff in BM are companies with experience in windows game development.
Don't really see those use macs.


and besides that... who cares about BM.

There's no attempt to engage the open source community for Blue Mars, such as by having an open source viewer, is there?

I registered yesterday but don't feel crazy about it so far. I'll peek into the developer stuff though.

If they weren't doing it at the start, I wouldn't expect them to for a while. They're going to want to get to some level of stability before opening that road.

I'm not sure they have the ability to fully engage the open source community. They did license the Crytek engine, and i would suspect that there are limits in their contract that would not be compatible with OSS developers.