Rock

Hi,

I am involved in Blue Mars, both as a beta tester and as a developer. I recently interviewed Jim Sink of Blue Mars for my blog, Chapter & Metaverse: Interview with Jim Sink of Avatar-Reality

I hope this thread can be a placeholder for a continued discussion of Blue Mars and its progression through beta testing and deployment.

Rock

Cristiano

I haven't had a chance to read through it yet, but Chapter & Metaverse is a great blog name.

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Hypatia Callisto

thanks! I've applied for the developer program myself, I am looking very forward to Blue Mars

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Ariane

Been following this with interest for a while as well. Signed up for the beta.

For multiple reasons this looks to be a more advanced version of There, rather than Second Life.

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Cristiano

I just went to sign up for the beta and it told me I already had lol.

I found it interesting that it said it has been developed for Vista - are they shutting out XP users or will it run on XP?

Hypatia Callisto

CryEngine2 runs fine on both XP and Vista... although all the eyecandy is designed for DX10

Hypatia Callisto

I don't really think its much like either one... we'll see I guess.

Lucifer Baphomet

Will there be s..... awwww ferget it

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Humps

It's called BLUE mars for a reason!

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Miriel Enfield

I signed up for beta. I didn't apply for developer status, mostly because I wasn't sure if it was really appropriate for someone as tiny and amateur as me. Also, I didn't want the developers snickering at me if it wasn't.

Oooh. From the interview:

Unlike the interviewer's intended audience, what I'm excited about is the prospect of lots and lots of land. A chance to make an immersive environment, and one that's not an island, to boot!

Maybe I should pluck up my courage, after all.

Cincia Singh

So, I can have a 2km x 2km space that will accommodate 160 concurrent users for one price, let's use the example of $100 USD, while someone else has an identical sized space but wedges 1600 users on it for a much higher price like $1000? Explain to me how that's going to work when our spaces share a cpu on a server.

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Miriel Enfield

I would assume that computing power would also be rationed by user capacity, rather than by landmass size.

Khamon

That kind of processing distribution is more easily done when the grid supports an actual presence system separate from the simulator vm. The Second Life model requires the sim code to perform all of the hosting duties with only one processor and shared everything else.

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Hypatia Callisto

do so, because its open to anyone. And you are definitely good enough.

Rock

The way the developer model works is this:

1. There is no creation within Blue Mars. All creation is done externally, then uploaded.

2. The SDK contains a heavily modified CryEngine Sandbox, which sits on your own PC. When you have finished creating, and you are happy with the way it looks (the SDK is 100% WYSIWYG) then you can upload it into Blue Mars.

3. AR will be making available for download from their website a preview editor (a cut-down version of the SDK), which is also WYSIWYG, very shortly.

Rock

Khashai Steinbeck

In the long-run, Rock, will development be limited to developers, or will it be more available to the userbase at large?

To further the question a bit, if it is limited to developers, will it cost developers to actually develop (a la IMVU), or will it be a freely available perk to those who want to undertake it?

Hypatia Callisto

it looks free to me, you pay a percentage back to Blue Mars out of your sales. Shop space you have to pay for, but that's not any different from SL.

Hypatia Callisto

Note I am talking about content creators, not city developers - that's totally different.

Miriel Enfield

Sent!

*crosses fingers* I want my shinies...

CaleVinson

From the Blue Mars Dev website at BLUE MARS DEV:

I could very well be completely wrong, but this doesn't read to me like they're interested in the "microbusiness" ("nanobusiness" in my case ) model that SL supports so well.

Personally, I'm disappointed if that's the case because I would very gladly trade off the SL features of a contiguous world and in-world creation, for better performance and better coding options (my understanding is that CryEngine2 supports Lua for scripting, and C++ for "total conversion" type mods).

Miriel Enfield

Yes, that was a concern of mine as well. Still is, really. On the other hand, elsewhere, they say:

Hypatia Callisto

there is a form which is for the content devs, the email is city developers mainly... the content dev stuff is pretty open to anyone who wants to do it, from what I can tell from interviews with Jim Sink.

CaleVinson

( Spot the person who is working through the ramifications of the Blue Mars approach as she goes. )

How does the above model work for scripted objects? Can scripts be tested in the Sandbox, or will they only run on the actual servers? Put another way, what is the development pipeline for scripted objects?

Hypatia Callisto

If its like the game modding (which is highly likely) probably all runs in the sandbox editor.

Cryengine2 uses Lua IIRC

CaleVinson

That was my first guess too. But then I got to thinking that if the Sandbox was sufficiently powerful to test all aspects of the scripting (including for example interaction of scripted objects), it might almost be reasonably seen as an offline-server, and in the interview they wrote: