Sunday, 29 March 2009
Blue Mars Beta & Vast Parks Changes
12:06 | 
Posted by
Rock
Blue Mars signing up Beta Testers
Avatar Reality, the company behind Blue Mars, is currently accepting applications for beta testers and content developers.
They have revamped their website into three distinct sections (and 3 separate domains):
Avatar, for the Avatar Reality company itself;
BlueMars, including an About and FAQ sections, and the Beta signup page;
BlueMarsDev, including details on Content Development for Blue mars and a sign-up page.
There is also an Art Competition and in the next few weeks, they will be releasing an offline preview editor that will let artists see exactly how their content will appear in the online world.
Changes at Vast Parks
Yesterday VastPark's open source Player and Server code was made available online with instructions for developers on how to create builds.
Also yesterday the first version of the newly named Player was released online. The Player supercedes Codename Imp as the default VastPark client application and is edging forwards in terms of stability and functionality. More here..
Vast Parks recently hosted an inworld event that coincided with the "Virtual Worlds Down Under" event in Melbourne, Australia. Six speakers were talking from five different physical locations and spoke about their work on projects including VastPark, Badumna, RMIT and Planet Postmoderna. The event was filmed by the wonderful SLCN, with the new image on the front of the Vast Parks website being taken from the event. Given that this was their first ever inworld conference event, it ran smoothly, although the quality of the voice in the videos isn't as good as it seemed on the day. You can view the event videos in their Vimeo video channel. I especially recommend viewing Greg More's talk about architecture in virtual worlds.
Avatar Reality, the company behind Blue Mars, is currently accepting applications for beta testers and content developers.
They have revamped their website into three distinct sections (and 3 separate domains):
Avatar, for the Avatar Reality company itself;
BlueMars, including an About and FAQ sections, and the Beta signup page;
BlueMarsDev, including details on Content Development for Blue mars and a sign-up page.
There is also an Art Competition and in the next few weeks, they will be releasing an offline preview editor that will let artists see exactly how their content will appear in the online world.
Changes at Vast Parks
Yesterday VastPark's open source Player and Server code was made available online with instructions for developers on how to create builds.
Also yesterday the first version of the newly named Player was released online. The Player supercedes Codename Imp as the default VastPark client application and is edging forwards in terms of stability and functionality. More here..
Vast Parks recently hosted an inworld event that coincided with the "Virtual Worlds Down Under" event in Melbourne, Australia. Six speakers were talking from five different physical locations and spoke about their work on projects including VastPark, Badumna, RMIT and Planet Postmoderna. The event was filmed by the wonderful SLCN, with the new image on the front of the Vast Parks website being taken from the event. Given that this was their first ever inworld conference event, it ran smoothly, although the quality of the voice in the videos isn't as good as it seemed on the day. You can view the event videos in their Vimeo video channel. I especially recommend viewing Greg More's talk about architecture in virtual worlds.
Rock