Blue Mars - Locally Produced Virtual World

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David C. Brauer on June 5, 2009 at 2:08pm

I'm "hoping" I can do the beta test. So far I have had 2 false starts. I registered for the Beta test, but found I could not download the client software. Then I was informed that I needed to register as a developer, which I did. When I received the notification that I could activate my developer account, I found that I could only create a female avatar. While I know some people are in to VR transgender, I am definitely not one of them. So I'm still waiting to get my Beta account set up and download the Client software.

Permalink Reply by David C. Brauer on June 9, 2009 at 9:32am

Wow, I didn't realize what a BIG DEAL Blue Mars was until I read this article:

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2009/06/blue-mars-2150-moves-close...

This is prime time stuff, its really great its happening from Hawaii.

Permalink Reply by David C. Brauer on June 26, 2009 at 1:54pm

Well, I finally got my developer registration to work and downloaded the Blue Mars client and Sandbox viewer.

Are there any other Beta testers in this group?

Dave

Permalink Reply by Burt Lum on July 30, 2009 at 7:43pm

David, I am interested in Blue Mars and am planning to try it out. I can probably do it a work but my home setup is all Mac. So no Blue Mars client for me.

Permalink Reply by David C. Brauer on July 30, 2009 at 7:49pm

Hey Burt,

I found that Blue Mars takes a significant amount of CPU and graphics card power to run well. Its a real dog on my laptop so I'm really not able to evaluate it.

Dave

Permalink Reply by Burt Lum on July 30, 2009 at 8:28pm

Thanks David, good to know. As beautiful as Blue Mars looks, Second Life seems to be more suitable for a wide range of computers, ie PC and Macs. Have you been spending much time in SL? Are you involved with the UH project in SL?

Permalink Reply by David C. Brauer on August 2, 2009 at 9:00pm

Hi Burt,

I spend a lot of time in SL. I'm interested in putting together an inworld Hui to construct a Virtual Ahupuaa. Slow going as its totally on my own time, but interesting. The SL community is so evolved, with so many tools and user groups. Blue Mars is going to have to really catch on to compete, and frankly I don't see there business model developing that kind of user base. SL is truly a global community of over a million people and the place is totally user generated. A fascinating study in online social behavior.

Burt Lum said:

Thanks David, good to know. As beautiful as Blue Mars looks, Second Life seems to be more suitable for a wide range of computers, ie PC and Macs. Have you been spending much time in SL? Are you involved with the UH project in SL?

Permalink Reply by Sam Joseph on August 5, 2009 at 11:46am

I've been following Blue Mars for a while. I am also curious to understand how they think they can compete with SL. They presented at the TechHui Conference, and although I didn't attend friends told me that things BM has over SL are:

1) much better graphics
2) scripting with Lua, an established scripting language as opposed to the admittedly clunky home rolled LSL
3) support for Flash

While these things might be cool I can't really see how BM can do much damage to SL, since for most purposes the graphics in SL are adequate, and it is already heavy. The windows only even heavier client of BM seems like a significant barrier to entry.

However I remain keenly interested to see what they have to offer. What would make a real difference was some sort of inter-operability between SL, BM and other 3D worlds ....

Permalink Reply by David C. Brauer on August 5, 2009 at 12:03pm

I agree with you Sam. I think another significant shortcoming is the inability of regular users to create user-generated content. If all content must be created by "developers" then there won't be a significant amount of content as compared to SL.

Interoperability of Virtual Worlds is a great topic. Perhaps we should create a separate discussion on that.

Permalink Reply by Sam Joseph on August 5, 2009 at 12:12pm

One other thing I think BM might have is better support for importing 3D objects from software packages like Maya, although I am not sure what sort of support SL has - I start to hear a lot about "sculpties" ...

Separate discussion of Virtual World interoperability would be great, although I'd love to get people working on BlueMars like Andrei to comment on this discussion ...

Permalink Reply by Peter Quigley on October 29, 2009 at 7:16pm

One of the advantages to BM in addition to the ones Joseph mentioned is the ability to have a lot more users in the same space as opposed to SL...So said Henk last week. He is a little frustrated that it is PC driven gig so far..Henk is a MAC fan...

David C. Brauer said:

Well, I finally got my developer registration to work and downloaded the Blue Mars client and Sandbox viewer.

Are there any other Beta testers in this group?

Dave

Permalink Reply by Sam Joseph on October 30, 2009 at 10:15pm

Hi Peter,

Interesting to know. Actually my name is Sam, but you are in good company calling me Joseph; Kaleo, the UH student newspaper just called me Joseph Samuel in their latest article on our SL island ...

Do we have any figures on how many users BM can support in the same space. We can have 100 on our island, and our biggest party had 75, and that just worked fine. We've yet to encounter any serious numbers limit on our SL island, but perhaps other people organizing bigger events have encountered that?

Good to hear that Henk is a MAC fan, but sounds like he will continue to be frustrated since the whole of BM is built on the Crisis engine, which is game console/windows centric and unlikely to ever work on macs ...