Hypatia Callisto

a jetpack would not be impossible to do in Cryengine2, though at the moment, it seems these attachments and vehicle-type things are not possible to any large extent in Blue Mars. Which is a shame, but I am guessing it's not forever.

Anyway, I've started to see what I can do by just prying apart Crysis Wars, to develop a better navigation system, as it's got the full support of the engine. The movement in CW is much more fluid, and it's giving me some interesting ideas just hacking on it.

__________________
"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice.

"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.

"Call it what you like," said the Cat.

DanielRavenNest

The reason it's more fluid is it's implemented either local on your PC, or on a server set up for combat games: not many players, frequent position updates. Avatar Reality reduced the update frequency drastically (like to once a second), to enable lots of players per city.

I think that was a mistake, since the high numbers of players are not appearing anytime soon. If they increased the update frequency to 6x a second, that would put it a bit faster than human reaction time. They would lose maximum concurrent users per city, but going from their claimed 10K users to 1600 is no loss at this point. In fact I have doubts they will *ever* see more than a few hundred users per city. And if they do max out on 1600 or whatever the limit is, just shard the city and load up another server with it.

Argent Stonecutter

I thought that BM was doing the physics locally on the client as well.

__________________
Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

DanielRavenNest

They are, but the servers have to propagate position updates and other changes to everyone else, and otherwise send info about inputs you make. That's what was reduced to 1Hz. By lowering the update frequency from the server, that enables the server to handle more users.

Free Xue

Have the folks at AR ever explained the reasoning behind having such a high max on user concurrency per city, or is it more likely this was a decision based on wishful thinking?

__________________
"We're not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people."
~U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan

Argent Stonecutter

They'd be better off just making a "best effort" on the updates, and give the local user as smooth an experience for their own movements as possible. Especially given some of the updates they apparently don't send: someone was describing how they were riding a jet-ski or boat or something, and other people just saw them standing by the shoreline.

Hypatia Callisto

I agree, if its not possible to use vehicles in a social way, that's really going to eliminate the gamers, almost completely. Part of the joy of those things is being able to do them with your friends.

I can't imagine they'd be that dumb, though. Probably more the case that they haven't finished that feature yet. But it's a really important one.

Atashi Yue

Interesting. That's the way the current "fly" works also.

So, it's only happening to you - no one else is seeing it.

Argent Stonecutter

So like, what, it's basically a roaming camera then?

DanielRavenNest

Their initial plan was to host exhibits for NatGeo and the Smithsonian, for which a high concurrency sort of make sense. If you look at the city list, those exhibits are nowhere to be found. They still talk occasionally about hosting concerts and such.

Perhaps a WoW-like RPG might attract enough players at once to need a high concurrency, but I really don't know of other uses that need so many. The reality right now is *average* concurrency is 0.5 per city, with occasional peaks of 20 when there is an event going on, which hardly puts a strain on the server.

Desmond Shang

One major 'no' vote for people flitting around like superman in my areas. Hate it. Ick. Why even build buildings then ~ might as well have birdhouses. Roofs? Why? Doors? Why? Chairs!? Don't bother. Meh, might as well make the mountains half transparent too! Saves flying time, see right through 'em.

The preferable solution is simple, elegant, obvious:

a) Basic vehicles, like say, city bikes for functionality. Want to zip around town? No problem. Grab a bike or somesuch.

Let's face it, a web based marketplace is coming. And we are going to worry about people finding a shop? Srsly. Unless you are line~of~sight of the entire region's landing point, it won't much matter... people will go to the web based marketplace and search keywords/categories.

b) Mass transit for touring: a train for seeing the countryside and other towns. Or a rocketship. Whatever fits.

c) Want to fly? a basic flying machine readily available, with seats for friends in some models.

Fancier stuff would cost money (flying machine with guns, or majestic airship that seats 40 and a dancefloor, &c) but the basic ones... no need to charge.

Flying like a human mosquito a la SL... it's so tacky, it's so SL 2004. Ugh. Keep it. Flying around like that is great if your world will *never* have vehicles or you'll be kicked off your vehicle every 256 meters.

And here's another thing that people from SL don't get: the wilderness expanses on Mars can be HUGE. For effective human~mosquito~flying mode, you'll have to be able to move as fast as the cam in the cryengine editor, which is beyond~supersonic, and you'll have to search areas so vast you'll end up going back to your startpoint and following the road, river or directions anyway. Might as well get in a vehicle, or some kind of steampunk teleporter and use a light flying machine for local exploration.

Ever try to find a 1 meter object in 1.7 billion cubic meters of space? That's anything within 100 meters of the surface of a 4km x 4km area. It's a little harder than you might think, especially if that same space is full of other stuff that might distract your search.

A rocket pack, an autogyro, hell, even bat wings would be a vast improvement over weightless blingtards wafting by on the evening breeze, with no visible means of support. It's an aberration, something that screams SECONDLIFE!!!!! and always will. And that's fine. But Blue Mars doesn't have to be Second Life.

In place of having my digital data splayed openly for any visitor to peer up and examine every intimate nook and cranny, they are gonna have to get to know my areas first. And the rewards for that: the joy of discovery, a sense of magic, a sense of accomplishment... a sense of privacy.

If that's too much of a commitment to make... to not be able to cam into everyone's house, fly into absolutely everything and not even bother to use even the most inobtrusive flying machine... there's always SL.

Atashi Yue

Yep.

Free Xue

It's a shame Desmond doesn't feel strongly one way or the other about this.

Hypatia Callisto

Des, movement in Blue Mars isn't on the level of Crysis.

When playing Crysis Wars, I was struck by how beautifully the player character moved in third person mode. I could run in diagonal lines, absolutely fluid. I could see which direction I was going in the map.

I can manipulate objects in Crysis. Pick them up.

Atashi Yue

No mention of camming or flying into peoples homes has been made here. If people cannot get to where they want or need to be within a reasonable timeframe, they will leave. Simple fact.

Hypatia Callisto

Correct.

I used to hide and watch people teleport in when we still had hubbed sims. They would TP in, which is the equivalent of spawning, and stand around, looking, and TP right out again, because they didn't know which way to really go.

If folks could not TP to my place directly, I would have nobody coming to an event. If folks can't log on and off in their lodgings, or at least find themselves spawning where they logged off, and have to travel through half the town to get to their residence or where they once were, I don't know if they are going to stay for long.

Atashi Yue

If you're thinking of renting land, or shops - then this is a big deal. People won't spend money long if their potential customers can't get to the shops. No customers, no revenue, no money for shop rent. Renters won't stay long if they have to walk slooooowly to their lodgings.

Argent Stonecutter

Some people have birdhouses, and no roofs, or phantom ones, and other people build paths and roads and all kinds of unnecessary decorations. That's the cool thing about virtual reality. It only needs to be as real as you want.

And flying doesn't make flying machines unnecessary. I love my Mehve. I've spent hours at a time over a year and a half fine-tuning the flight code, and re-tuning it. I've flown it from Abbots clear across the old continent, dipping down to fly nap-of-the-earth over Linden roads and swooping up again around skyscrapers and towers and Mount Gaal.

And I've flown vast distances without a vehicle... BM-scale distances...

And I've walked all the roads of the old continents.

And worn wings and jetpacks, and scripted them, and flown without them, because... why not? If I want to be limited to two dimensions why do I need a 3d world?

Teleporting all over the place? Why bother having a continent at all? Shard it into little skyboxes, like Myst and Riven. That's so 1990.

Hypatia Callisto

I think the important thing is we need a choice. But I can guarantee, that folks if they can't find where they are going, won't be able to get there.

In SL, we had maps so that if you were a power user, you could at least find where you were going in a sim. But we don't even have that, so no map + no ability to figure out where "home" is, is going to mean a bad retention rate of users. And we need users.

DanielRavenNest

Perhaps you have not visited many Blue Mars cities, but most have teleporters or networks of them set up. In mine you can travel to any corner from any other corner in 3 seconds (maximum of 3 clicks, at one click per sec). And like most cities, I have done the obvious thing and put the shopping street close to the arrival point.

I already have a bus station and city map. So if vehicles are not ready by the time my city gets filled up enough to need them, I will just set up more teleporters, and link them off the map. We dont actually need them right now, cause the only developed area is right around the landing point.

Hypatia Callisto

shrug, its not a replacement Daniel. It's only working for people who are nerds like us. Can't think like nerds. Need to think like people who may be barely computer literate.

The horrible truth is that many average users don't get the difference between Google and Facebook. Going back to teleporters around a city is so Worldsaway 1995, and it didnt work that great then either. Apartments only worked because we had an apartment block where everyone went.

We are no longer 2D toons in front of a backdrop, that could only handle six rezzed avatars at a time. (we had ghosts, which could pile up there to well over 100 back in the good old days - I still think ghosts may not be a bad idea for really massive events)

And that was akin to Argent's "little skyboxes", as was in Myst. We have a very different world now.

When is someone going to put the bad ideas of F. Randall Farmer (the braniac behind the telehub of WorldsAway) out of their misery? When he made communities.com out of the Palace (and it failed, miserably), that proved to most of us once and for all that he really wasn't always the guru who knew it better.

Beebo Brink

If the "immersion" argument against flight has any validity, then this current condition is unacceptable as well. There is nothing immersive about logging on at the town square when you were last nestled in your bed several miles from town.

I've visited Caledon just over a half-dozen times now, not so very many really, but I'm already finding the trek out of the very familiar town square to be tedious. That will improve with the introduction of vehicles, but if I log off at the seashore, I really do not relish having to bike my way all the way back there to continue exploring.

__________________
Noob: "okay.... im in a house with cages and people in gags and the door just locked and i cant get out :c"

Masami Kuramoto

If the Blue Mars client was available for Linux, I would join immediately. One thing that has always bothered me about SL is that the "space" metaphor has not been properly implemented. There is no sense of distance or location in SL; everything is right next to everything.

I think Daniel is right. People who can't stand the limitations of physics and the sense of distance in a 3D virtual world are not looking for a virtual world in the first place.

It's OK to have vehicles. Even teleporters are OK as long as they work like a network of railways between a few selected locations. But teleporting from anywhere to anywhere, going through walls, defying gravity, getting blocked by invisible banlines, all these things disrupt the "world" experience.

Chalice Yao

As much as I love being able to TP around in a sim or between them, I think SL mainland would find much more use and have more people living there if people had to, you know, travel through it to see places. I kind of liked the old concept of telehubs...alas.

__________________
"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

Argent Stonecutter

Telehubs don't scale.

Telehubs were full of people waiting to rez, surrounded by malls with cup-shaped traps to catch people trying to fly out of the telehub and get where they were actually going before they'd fully rezzed. One of the biggest complaints was that most telehub roofs weren't phantom, so people had to fly blind sideways out of the building and knock other avatars around. For estate sims it was worse, because if the estate's telehub sim was down you couldn't get in at all.

If you couldn't fly, it would be even worse.

It's probably a good thing that BM only has a concurrency of 10 people per city, max. Even with avatars phantom to each other it sounds like it'd be terribly unpleasant.