Below is the text of the post I made to the OpenSim core-devs about my decision to leave the OpenSim project.

I have decided to leave the Opensim project. You will probably not even notice if I leave, as not being a programmer my only inputs were the writing of the step-by-step tutorials, the drafts of the OpenSim User Manual on the Forge, and helping out in the IRC channels, for newcomers. You may find my reasons for leaving Opensim interesting though (and please do not construe any of my reasons as an attack on anyone).

1. The Platform
I raised this several times in the past in IRC, and made posts on my blog about the product lifecycle of the platform. I believe that the platforms underpinning both Second Life and Opensim are quite long in the tooth now, and I questioned how much product lifecycle there was left, particularly given that Opensim is now nearing 3 years of development, is still in Alpha, and if the current release of 0.6.7 is any indicator, then still only around two thirds into the development cycle. With the (inevitable) coming of much superior platforms, such as Blue Mars (as a virtual world); and Unity, for browser-based Virtual Worlds; and now UDK (for creating sandboxes, standalones, and open grids), then I fear that Opensim has missed the boat as far as the remaining lifecycle of the platform is concerned. When you show people what is possible with these engines (for example this avatar editor for the forthcoming APB (using the Unreal Engine):  or this city  (using the CryEngine), then neither SL nor Opensim stands comparison.

2. Lack of Support for Currency in Opensim
I felt the impact of this when I first made the switch from SL to Opensim. I had a thriving RP sim in SL (over 50 people, mainly female) and they all agreed to follow me over to my Opensim and the OSGrid. However, within a month they had all left, citing the same reasons, the lack of places to shop to buy the quality stuff they wanted (skins, hair, clothes etc), as a quality appearance, and the fun of shopping is what all the females placed high on their requirements from a Virtual World. They drifted back to Second Life, and the guys followed them. I have always believed that the lack of support for currency in the core was a mistake, but that is just my opinion.

3. Marketing
I have also raised this issue several times, and blogged about it. It is far from clear just who an eventually released Opensim is actually aimed at. I think that any company that is interested in a firewalled corporate solution to collaboration and prototyping will already be looking at the Enterprise solution that is currently available from Second Life; that any indie group that is thinking of running a themed grid will need an economy to stay viable; and any individual who is looking for a private sandbox solution for their SL work will need full compatibility (which is not the case with the OS version of LSL diverging from the SL LSL). So, just who is the platform aimed at? I was also very disappointed in the view of one of the core devs who said that 'marketing is a null concept for us'.


I am currently designing and creating cities for Blue Mars, and involved in a team for proving the UDK as a platform for the design and creation of sandboxed or standalone Virtual Worlds (as opposed to purely games), and with so much documentation available for these mature engines (particularly for the UDK, Blue Mars lags behind somewhat in that department, but are working to put that right), I am achieving the productivity I want, building the worlds that I want, with stable crash-free platforms.

However, I do wish the Opensim team the very best in their endeavours, and I sincerely hope their goals are eventually achieved.

If anyone would like to take over the main Opensim Tutorials pages and the Additional Tutorials (they will need some updating following several changes) then I am more than willing to pass the posts over, and of course the Opensim User Manual is there in the Forge for anyone to develop further.

Best Regards and Good Luck

Rock

Blue Mars Progress Painfully Slow
I have been stalled in my city creation for weeks now. This has been mainly due to a lack of information on scripting, vehicle editing, and understanding the differences between the editors. I see in the Developer Forum poor Takuan has been soldiering on, with little or no support, in trying to get to grips with Lua scripting. He must be very frustrated.

I hope more resources become available soon so I can resume my build.

UDK Development Making Good Progress
I have been working on a proof-of-concept virtual world development using the Unreal Development Kit I blogged about earlier. With another developer from Blue Mars and a modder named Ridders from the UDK forum, we have been conducting experiments to establish a net-wide interface to enable a server running a map or game to be accessed remotely by another client across the net. I am happy to report that these experiments have been successful, and remote connections are now possible, and understood. The need for experimentation is also due to the lack of good quality step-by-step documentation, but in general the wealth of documentation available to UDK modders is huge, compared to the documentation available for Blue Mars.

Here are some of the resources I have been using:

UDK General Features with much useful Info

UDK Getting Started 

UDK Content Creation

UDK Programming Home

UDK Documentation Forum

Rock

Epic Games, Inc. announces the launch of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides community access to the award-winning toolset like never before. This software release is available to anyone interested in using 3D game engine technology, including game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations and simulations, and digital filmmakers. Anyone can start working with the industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 toolset by downloading UDK at www.udk.com, where detailed product features, technical documentation, commercial licensing terms, support resources and more are also available.

• Immediate access to Unreal Engine 3, the critically acclaimed 3D game engine technology for cross-platform game development.
• Easy content creation with the Unreal Editor, a fully integrated suite of top-tier development tools, which comes complete with:
• Unreal Content Browser, a revolutionary tool for browsing, searching and organizing game assets with collaborative metadata tagging system.
• UnrealScript object-oriented programming language and Unreal Kismet, a visual scripting system that enables rapid prototyping on the fly.
• Unreal Matinee, a powerful tool with movie director-class controls for building in-game cinematics and gorgeous cut scenes.
• Unreal Cascade, an advanced particle physics and environmental effects editor that aids the creation of fire, fog, explosions and other visuals.
• NVIDIA® PhysX®-powered physics system with Unreal PhAT visual modeling tool for creating character and object physics rigs.
• Unreal Lightmass, a global illumination system that dramatically lights and shadows with minimal effort required by artists and designers.
• AnimSet Viewer and AnimTree Editor, which give animators precise control over every muscle and bone movement.

• Time saved thanks to technology integrations with leading game development middleware tools including SpeedTree®, Bink Video®, and FaceFX®.
• Output of standalone applications: Games created with UDK run entirely on their own with no additional software required. This means anyone can make UDK content and distribute it for free.

Yesterday, November 4th, 11:15 am - 12:00 pm PST, Doug Thompson (Dusan Writer in Second Life) moderated a mixed-reality panel at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco and Metanomics inworld with:

• Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab's CEO, 
• Neil Katz, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director IBM Virtual Spaces, CIO Office Innovation Initiatives, 
• Steve Aguiar, Program Manager at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center's (NUWC's) Metaverse Strategic Initiative,
• Douglas Maxwell, Program Technology Lead also at NUWC's Metaverse Strategic Initiative.

Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, unveiled “Nebraska”, the LL code-name for a stand-alone solution based on the technology that runs the popular Second Life virtual world. “Nebraska” is the much-anticipated behind-the-firewall solution which allows enterprises to host their own virtual world environments within their organizations, which was first introduced back in April.

Mark spoke about the benefits of the platform, the intended audience, and how it fits into the broader challenges and opportunities of “enterprise 2.0”. Mark was joined by a number of customers who had used Nebraska during the closed beta phase of development.

Nebraska consists of two rack-mounted servers, hosting two software packages: a world server and a voice server, which can be installed on an enterprise's network, and as it does not have to stream all the content that LL normally streams for Second Life, it is blazingly fast. Similar to the standalone version of Opensim, but much more polished.

The avatars in Nebraska are all 'suits', with none of the Pamela Anderson and Professional Wrestling lookalikes that seem to predominently populate Second Life. The package supports up to 800 avatars over 8 regions, each of which can be turned off, and replaced with another using a different theme. So, you could have training regions one week, then replace the regions with conference and show regions the next, saving to, and loading from, the region inventory at will.

But how much does all this cost? Well, the mooted price is US$55,000, plus US$14,000/year in fees, which should bring a big sigh of  relief to the open-source Opensim community.

Nebraska is aimed at providing enterprises with a SL-looking virtual space for their corporate activities, without the seedy association of SL itself.

In addition to Nebraska, Mark also introduced the Work Marketplace, where corporate customers could download ready-made regions, providing solutions for virtual conferences, events, exhibitions, training, marketing, etc., and a selection of business and work-related avatars, office suites, and much more, for their Nebraska customers, under a site license.

It remains to be seen whether this is a major new direction for Linden Labs.

Rock

Unity
Early in 2009 I mentioned the recent trend in Virtual World design that required little or no downloads, and where all content was streamed directly to your browser (basically, if you can watch streamed movies on your PC you can use streamed games and virtual worlds). As we approach the end of 2009 one company stands out as the leader of this trend, Unity Technologies.



The Unity software allows anyone, with no programming experience whatsoever, to quickly develop games and virtual worlds, that can be run in a browser, using simple drag and drop tools. A player can start a game or visit a world on their home PC, then continue on the move via their mobile phone!

Up until recently, the Unity software came in two main flavours: Unity Pro, at US$1,499 and a cut-down version, Unity Indie, at US$200. That has now changed. Unity Indie has now been renamed to simply 'Unity' and is now available at zero cost, while still allowing the user to create commercial applications. The main restriction between Unity and Unity Pro is that Unity is limited to a maximum of 20 avatars per 'world', which is ample for most applications. Unity is available in both Windows and Mac versions, and versions are also available for creating applications for both the iPhone and the Wii.

The Unity download comes complete with a simple but powerful Editor, and a sample project, Tropical Paradise, which is available to browse, along with other projects in Live Demo format on the Unity website.



Models and objects for your world can be created in almost all current 3d applications. A list of 3d formats, image formats, video and audio formats supported is available on the Unity Asset Importing page.

Of course, once you have created a virtual world you will need to host it so your customers/friends can access it through their browsers. Hosting can be on a dedicated server, a Virtual Private Server, or even on your home PC if your upload speed is fast enough. So, what do you do if your ISP does not quote your upload speed? The answer is - you measure it. Use one of the internet connection speed measurement services. The one I like best is SpeedTest.NET Just select the recommended server to test with (click on the yellow pyramid), and it will measure first your download speed, then your upload speed. My upload speed is 1Mb/sec and it handled myself and a visiting friend with no problem at all. I did not check how many avatars 1Mb/sec could handle (but hey, you have to have something to check yourself, right?).

FriendsHangout
Many Games, 3d Chat Rooms and Virtual Worlds have been built now using Unity, and  one such company that provides over 4000 chatrooms, virtual worlds, and custom 3D worlds, using Unity, is FriendsHangout (terrible, unimaginative name, I know). You select the World you wish to visit from a rotating set of destinations boards (think Blue Mars Destination Island here, but rotating).


You can also create your own custom chat room and virtual world and buy furniture and various props to add your own design to each and every item in their catalogue.

While the most visible faces of the Avatar-Reality team have been working on the Blue Mars Client, providing more and more functionality, squashing bugs, arranging Meet & Greets, gathering feedback etc, other teams have been busy creating the developer tools, and providing detailed manuals for their use on the Blue Mars wiki pages.

The Wiki team is led by Scott Matsuda, the CSR, QA, and QC Manager at Avatar Reality Inc.

The Getting Started section of the Developer Guidebook explains the different types of developer in Blue Mars:

The Item Editor
Made specifically to have everything an Item Creator needs

Sandbox Item Editor is a 3D geometry model viewer and material editor for Blue Mars Project. The primary purpose of this tool is to convert 3D models in Collada format into a Blue Mars internal data format, examine the results visually and edit material properties of converted models as desired. Sandbox Item Editor uses CryENGINE2 for rendering; thus, it displays objects exactly as they will appear in the game. The manual provides a detailed description of its menu commands and special functions.

Note: in some images and documents, linked to this page, the Item Editor is also called Sandbox Viewer, which is the old name of this tool.

The new Blue Mars client has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

The login screen now has buttons to link to the Tutorials pages, and for retrieving a lost password.

• Avatar draw distance has been doubled.
• Room customization UI has been changed.

• 1920 x 1080
• 1600 x 900
• 1440 x 810
• 1280 x 720 (Default)
• 1024 x 576

• Edit your account email and password.
• Edit your avatar name.
• Choose how you want your avatar name to be displayed in Blue Mars (first and last name, first name only, last name only, hide all).
• Reset your avatar's face.
• Reset your avatar data (including the face, cosmetics, clothing, and animation).
• View a list of your friends and their online status.
• Download the latest Blue Mars Player Client.
  

• Buy BLU!
• Click to see friends' profiles.
• Message your friends. 
• Manage your Residences (pay rent, register your friends as guests).

I shall post the link to MyPage as soon as the server is back up.

Have fun

Rock

Today saw a new release of both the Blue Mars server and client (version 0.0.5664.4). The first surprising thing about this new client release was the size. At 1.3Gb it is not any bigger than previous versions, despite including two extra cities, GridRock City and Soswaewon Garden. I will attempt to find out how this was achieved and report in an edit to this blog piece.

As part of the server updates one important change is that the registration of new player accounts is now automatic (rather than by the previous manual email notification system) so now when new applicants register, they will get access immediately.

So, what did this new client release include?

Well, there are two new Cities: Gridrock City and Soswaewon Garden. The Blue Mars Tweet said that there would be three, the missing one being Small Islands (maybe disappeared due to global warming?). More on the two new cities later.

As far as the UI is concerned, a number of changes have been made:

Avatar Names over the heads of avatars. It appears that it is the ID that that appears here (take user name, remove spaces, convert to lowercase). If you right click an avatar you get their ID followed by their User name. It would have been more preferable to have the User name over the avatar's head. One Blue Martian was complaining that his Password was over his head!

A Preference option, which allows you to choose the Screen Resolution and Rendering (graphics) Quality.

Several Blue Martians had problems following trying out the Screen Resolution settings. Once they had selected a resolution, and if it was not the right one, they could no longer click on any of the on-screen buttons, not even the Preferences button to change the Resolution back again. This neccessitated edits to the game.cfg file to get things back again, but as they had no idea what the settings for screen height and width  were prior to their experiment with the Preferences, they had to try several trial and error settings.

The Bubble Chat window has had the automatic scrolling and last line visibility problems fixed

Avatar head customization is now available in-world in the Welcome Area. where you can choose the style, shape, ethnicity and hair of your avatar. Unfortunately it is confusingly called Face Customization, when there is also a Face icon that does something completely different (it is more of a cosmetics editor. One of these two functions needs to be renamed, and I would suggest changing Face Customization to Avatar Customization.

The destination jewel that appears when you click the ground is now dark blue instead of light blue (why?)

The two new cities posed something of a problem for me:

In the Soswaewon Garden I found that moving outside of a very small area was just about impossible. Clicking the ground ahead had no effect outside of this area, and steep slopes hemmed you in on several sides, as did undergrowth. I must try harder.


In Gridrock City  I was lagged out completely. My fps fell from 18fps in the Welcome Area, and 15fps in Venezia, to 1.5fps or less in Gridrock City in several areas. Others did not have similar problems, so I guess it is down to my PC specs.




The last noticeable thing about the UI is the Log-Off screen, which now has a Twitter link and recent Twitter posts. Unfortunately you cannot click on the 'Yes' button to confirm your log-out until the Twitter has completed its retrieval, which meant I had to wait a further minute before I could confirm my log-out. It would be much better for the Yes/No buttons to be immeditaely available, and not have to wait until the Twitter posts are retrieved.

I thought I would share a little about what I am doing in Blue Mars.

My City is based on the Valles Marineris, that huge gash across the face of Mars.















Following the terraforming of Mars the Valles Marineris would be completely submerged, being a massive depression. Close up images of the VM from orbiting probes show that the terrain is very similar to a natural feature we have on earth, the Grand Canyon.















It was quite easy to get the heightfield data for the Grand Canyon from the US Geological Survey, and import that into the Blue Mars Sandbox to form my terrain. I then set the sea height so that the highest part of the plateaus surrounding the canyons were about 15m beneath the sea level, so there are some shallows, but also some gorges which are 150m below sea-level.

Into the cliff faces of the canyons and gorges are being built Volexes, these are caves, tunnels, caverns etc that can be built directly into the terrain. Some of the caves have a way in and a way out, some go for miles then result in a dead-end, and in some of the caves there is some company!

The idea behind this City is that it will be an attraction for those who like adventure both on the surface of the sea, and beneath it.

The build will consist of four blocks, each a mini-city, rising from the sea-bed on huge towers that will have marinas at sea-level, underwater viewing galleries, and glass-domed elevators riding in the flutes of the tower's column. Residencies will be at various heights up the column, each served by its own private elevator, and the main part of the city will be at the top level, where stores and entertainment venues will be present. The elevators also go all the way down to the ocean floor, opening into domed airlocks, where a resident can enter his submersible, open the external locks to flood the dome, then ride out to explore the canyons of the Valles Marineris.

The marinas will have all manner of craft, from tall sailing ships, to schooners, yachts, power boats, and jet-skis, some old-world, some futuristic. We are also looking into programming the sea, to give various wave heights, including storm and typhoon systems (that really will sink your boat if you get in the way of them).

The Valles Marineris is almost entirely Ocean, with just a few scattered islands. The names of the mini-cities give the clue to their actual location within the VM, i.e. Tithonium, Melas, Ophir and Eos, and we do plan in a later release to include maps.

Here is some work-in-progress on the first city, Eos:

















There is an underwater viewing gallery to enjoy the incredible sea-life, and below that the domed airlocks where the submersibles will be moored, while at the surface is the beginnings of the marina. Elevators take you up the central tower to the apartment levels, while at the top will be the main city, with its stores and entertainment venues.

The entire structure is about 200m in height, and the total navigable sea area is 64sq kms.

Anyone interested in leasing one of the other 3 blocks to develop an oceanic city, just let me know.

Rock

All-in-one multiplatform development solution now available for licensees

Frankfurt a. M. (Germany), October 14th 2009 - Crytek GmbH (“Crytek”) is excited to announce that their latest all-in-one development solution CryENGINE 3 is now available for all developers. CryENGINE 3 is the first game development platform for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, MMO, DX9/DX10 that also is truly Next-Gen-Ready - with scalable computation and graphics for all major upcoming platforms. It provides the complete game engine to create AAA quality next generation games, and includes the redesigned CryENGINE 3 Sandbox™ level editor, a production-proven, 3rd generation “What you see is what you play” (WYSIWYP) - tool designed by and for professional developers.

CryENGINE 3 also introduces CryENGINE 3 Live Create™. It allows developers to work with a single editor, but see and play the results in real-time on PC, PS3 and Xbox360, hooked up to a single dev PC.  The engine takes care of the conversion and optimization of assets in real-time; enables instant, cross-platform changes to any part of game creation and as a result materially increases the speed, quality and significantly reduces the risk of multiplatform development.

“With CryENGINE 3 we are releasing the best development solution available today and tomorrow. With its scalable graphics and computation it is next-gen ready and with new features like CryENGINE 3 Live Create the best choice for game developers and companies developing serious games applications alike. It is the only game engine solution that enables real-time development and can ensure teams are able to maximise their own creativity, save budget and create greater gaming experiences.” said  Cevat Yerli, CEO & President of Crytek.

“We’re delighted to launch CryENGINE 3 and we look forward to seeing what developers achieve with our all-new technology. CryENGINE 3 isn’t just about providing our trademark highest-quality graphics and our out of the box AI and physics for the first time on consoles – it also delivers real benefits to all disciplines in games development.  Programmers will create awesome new effects and gameplay; art, design and audio teams can play as they create with the fastest, entirely real-time WYSIWYP pipeline ever, materially reducing development time and risk – even producers, project managers and suits will love CryENGINE 3!  Of course, our international team of more than 20 dedicated support staff are available right now to help our licensees make the most of CryENGINE 3; at their studio or at one of our support centres around the world.” added Carl Jones, Director of Business Development CryENGINE.

CryENGINE® is the underlying technology for Crytek’s critically acclaimed games Far Cry, Crysis, Crysis Warhead and NC Soft’s recently released MMORPG blockbuster AION. It has already been licensed to a number of major game companies around the globe, including several recent serious games training and simulation projects.  CryENGINE®3 is the underlying technology for the highly anticipated Crysis®2.


About Crytek GmbH
Crytek GmbH ("Crytek") is one of the world’s leading independent development studios for interactive entertainment with its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and additional studios in Kiev (Ukraine), Budapest (Hungary), Sofia (Bulgaria), Seoul (South Korea) and Nottingham (UK).Crytek is dedicated to creating exceptionally high quality video games for the PC and next-generation consoles, powered by their proprietary cutting edge 3D-Game-Technology CryENGINE®. Since its foundation in 1999, Crytek created the multi-award winning PC titles Far Cry®, Crysis®, awarded best PC Game of E3 2007 and Best Technology at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards and Crysis Warhead®, awarded Best Graphics Technology at IGN Best of 2008 Awards.

Crytek, Crysis, Crysis Warhead and CryENGINE are registered trademarks or trademarks of Crytek GmbH in the USA, Germany and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Second Life
A defining moment for me while I was a resident of Second Life, came with my first public event, after acquiring my first Class 5 sim. The sim was a rental sim, named Hoini, themed on the 1001 Arabian Nights, and one of my  tenants had asked if she could have a marrriage ceremony/party in the sim. I agreed, and she and her partner made their plans, and drew up their guest list.

On the arranged day, at the arranged time, the guests started to arrive. When we got to around 10 avatars in the sim, I started to notice some lag creeping into avatar movements. This got progressively worse as more guests arrived, and when we arrived at 20 avatars in the sim it was like wading in mud. At 30 avatars, movement was impossible, and we never got to 40, as the sim crashed. Of course, this ruined the day for the happy couple and their guests.

I must admit, I had been a little naive. The Second Life website had said (and it still says today), that a full private island region had a concurrent avatar limit of 100. I thought the guest list of 50 would be handled without any problem.

OpenSim
I also saw in today's Opensim-dev mailing list all the excitement caused by a test in which over 50 avatars managed to get into a single region:

In case you are missing all the excitement, this morning we were able to pile 52 people-driven avies in OSGrid's Wright Plaza under 600M of RAM, and after that sim had been up for 10 hours, with a previous peak presence of 36. This sim is running on average hardware, nothing fancy. It eventually crashed, likely due to an overly conservative lock still present somewhere. But I think we just turned an important corner on the way to 1.0

They did not report if avatar movements were laggy as a result of this load test, but nonetheless, it is an important milestone. If they can fix the cause of the crash, all the better.


Blue Mars
What first really caught my eye (apart from the amazing graphics) of Blue Mars, was the claim from Avatar Reality that a single city could support thousands of avatars. This claim was backed up by Richard Childers of VSE who witnessed load tests there, who said:

We did load tests inside Blue Mars in the Avatar Reality labs, and getting 10,000 avatars into a single city was just awesome. It was impressive stuff.

Concurrency has always been a hot topic in Virtual Worlds, so how does Blue Mars succeed where others have failed? The answer is in the way that data is presented to the client (the viewer). In Second Life and OpenSim all the data concerning the current scene (and beyond), i.e. the terrain, the objects, the avatars, and all their textures, etc. are held on central servers and is streamed to the client.

In Blue Mars almost all the scene data is stored on the hard-drive of the user, and so does not need to be streamed. Only dynamic data (vehicle movements, new objects being introduced, and things like avatar movements) need to be streamed. This allows their servers to deliver streamed data for several thousand avatars, concurrently, in one City.

In fact, Glenn Sanders, Community Director for Avatar Reality, enthused that due to some re-engineering work by one of their intrepid developers, the actual number of avatars that they thought could be streamed had been seriously underestimated!

Implications
Of course, the greatest implication is for City and Block developers in Blue Mars who wish to develop venues such as crowded nightclubs, concert halls, sports stadiums, convention and conference centres, and all manner of attractions that could attract a large spectator base.

And Next
Blue Mars have instigated a whole series of Meet and Greet gatherings (I reported on the 1st of these previously), on a weekly basis, to continue these get-to-know-you sessions, and double as load tests (using real avatars rather than the ai test bots during lab testing) to thoroughly test the concurrency figures.

I shall report the results as they come in.

Rock

Back in mid-September one of the Blue Mars beta testers, Marlii, creator of the excellent The Martian Mouthpiece website, had this idea:

Since there's a growing number of us around consistently, why don't we have a weekly meet and greet in-world? I'm thinking that we meet in different cities (like the seats in Shade City, different spots in Venezia, the hotel pool in Beach City, etc.) and someone could set up a streaming "playlist" (maybe an IMEEM playlist or something) that we can all listen to. It would be a cool way to meet the other colonists, explore the cities, and chit chat about stuff we talk about on the boards. How about it?

The suggestion was met with great enthusiasm by the rest of the beta testers, and would also serve as a real load-test on a single City. In a subsequent post in the Blue Mars forum, the date, time and location for the first Meet & Greet was fixed:

Date: October 4th, 2009
Time: 8pm GMT
Location: Shade City World Center

The Meet & Greet was a great success, and I managed to meet many people I had only see post in the forums. At one point, in the seafront lounge area we had 42 avatars within my draw-range (of 20m currently in Blue Mars). We even had a member of the Avatar Reality Team, Tiffany, aka Summer Studio, show up, doing a sterling job of welcoming everyone and keeping the conversations going.

I managed to either friend or chat with:

• Briarmelle Quintessa
• GoSpeed Racer
• Doc Holiday
• Phantium Longwell
• Ubik Rayna
• Chris Remspecher
• Dawny Cinquetti
• peruka
• Dazz Anvil
• Zetsumei Ieyashi
• Taarna Welles Taarna Welles
• Summer Studio
• Cadae Jewell
• Insomnia Sleepless
• Esprite Xavier
• Trayben Allegro
• Veron Helstein
• Reginald Beck
• Azure Sweetwater
• Hendrick Schroeder
• Atashi Yue
  

Two names there, peruka and Taarna Welles Taarna Welles, show that you can have just one name in Blue Mars, or even four!

My fps dipped down to 3fps at peak, which is not bad considering I have an aged Pentium 4, others were quoting 50fps! But come Christmas.... :)

I hope Avatar Reality can now check their logs and give us the peak concurrency figure. It should be interesting.

Tiffany Nahinu is the latest recruit to the Avatar Reality Community team.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, and if you are not from Hawaii, can you say how you ended up there.

TN: I was born and raised on Oahu and was pulled in to the concepts of virtual online world creation earlier this year. I just find working for Avatar Reality to be an amazing opportunity! ... And in the next beta update I’ll probably change the way my avatar looks so I’ll keep ya posted on that.

Q: As one of the latest recruits to the Blue Mars team, can you tell me how all that came about?

TN: One name. Glenn Sanders. He stood at the welcome portal greeting everyone… but I was engaged in another conversation with a few other avatars about computer specs. We had been chit-chatting about how we first heard about Blue Mars and I mentioned my involvement with a summer school class at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. The summer school class is a long story, but cutting to the chase, I had mentioned a few names and I guess Glenn followed up on that lead. A couple of days later I get an email from him asking if I’d like to work for Avatar Reality!

Q: What is your job title, and what responsibilities have you been given?

TN: (lol) yeah, they had to make something up for me . . . Community Development Associate. My responsibilities are to assist Glenn in monitoring the Blue Mars Client Forum, Facebook page, Blue Mars Blog and do in-world Q&A. It’s a part time gig that I’m really stoked about! Glenn is pretty much GLUED to answering questions, taking phone calls (sometimes skyping 3 people at once), relaying information to and from everyone within the company . . . my presence within AR makes it a little easier for Glenn to focus on the top priority issues (and it’s a growing list!)

Q: What did you know about Blue Mars before joining them?

TN: Jim Sink came to the School of Architecture at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in early February this year to talk about Blue Mars and Avatar Reality. That was where I was first learned about them . . . So up until that fateful day in February, I hadn’t heard of them at all.

Q: What is the working environment like at Avatar Reality? (mad/businesslike; relaxed/frenetic; smooth/chaotic; needs more women, the sandwiches could be better, etc)

TN: I’ve got to be honest with you - the office is very casual and I’m only there one day a week. I’d like to think there’s chaos but I’ve only been working for them about two weeks. The office is conscientious about their energy consumption and runs some pretty cool task lights . . .


Q: What strengths do you think you will bring to your position?

TN: Mediation hopefully! Because of my involvement with that summer school class mentioned earlier, I can definitely relate to the developers who are creating content. You’re probably going to be reading about this later in a press release . . . but I was auditing the summer school class whose main project was to replicate the Soswaewon Garden in South Korea. I worked with the instructor Kris Palagi and the students to import their models and specific data to the Blue Mars version of the Sandbox 2 Editor. So I have firsthand experience with working with all the tools and necessary plug-ins. . . my weapon of choice happens to be 3d Studio Max 9 and 2010 when it comes to modeling.

Q: Do you go in world much? (and if so, when, and what do you do?)

TN: I try to be in-world at least an hour a day to meet and greet people, answer basic questions, answer not so basic questions. Some days it’s really packed and on others it’s slow.

Q: Have you been a resident of any other Virtual Worlds before coming to Blue Mars?

TN: If you count the 34 minutes and some odd seconds I was in Second Life . . . yes.

Q: You have probably seen a lot of wish lists presented in the Blue Mars forums. If you could wave a magic wand, which are the top three wishes would you grant?

TN: The top three wishes huh? . . .

1. Chat bubbles organized NUMERO UNO!!
2. Pet bots or companion bots
3. Free health-care! … wait … wrong world, ummm, I would give people the option to continuously run around or jump extremely far. (Mass transit systems have to be made by City Developers)

Q: Do you go with the comments in the forum that Blue (boy) Mars (war) and the Blue Mars symbol (male) are way too masculine, and might put off some females from joining?

TN: No, and I think it’s hilarious.

Q: When Glenn is out to lunch, go to his desk, third drawer down on the right, that Memo concerning the next client release date: what does it say?

TN: I would but Glenn doesn’t have any filing cabinets! He’s a digital dude. LOL!

Q: Are there any plans to merge the developer and player forums?

TN: No, because they need to remain separate so members don’t have to wade through technical posts, and dev’s don’t have to wade thru posts about how masculine the Blue Mars logo is …

Q: What is the largest number of concurrent avatars that have been seen in any one City in Blue mars so far in the beta?

TN: I’m not privy to that information.

Q: Tell me three things about Blue Mars I probably don't know?

TN:

1. If you have a dedicated number pad on your keyboard and you tap the 1 key near water in the New Venice world, these random blue balls emerge out of nowhere and bounce all over the place. No one else can see them (except you) and the blue balls go away when you exit from New Venice. Fun right?
2. REALLY good mentors (volunteers) will be able to live in a GORGEOUS 4 story house in beach city (after it’s all been set up of course)
3. . . . . that’s all I can divulge for the moment Rock

Thanks Tiffany

Rock

A native of Montreal, Canada, Corey Evans is foremost a father and husband. His passion for 3d games and virtual worlds began to take shape in Second Life where he had his own business. He is expanding his 3d content and hosting services into Blue Mars in the form of 'GridRock City' a virtual environment for creative people to collaborate on virtual world / casual gaming experiences.

Q: How long have you been involved in virtual worlds, Corey?
CE: Well I started out in Second Life where I had a business selling sculpted prims. While I was in Second Life I met some amazing, creative people, and one of those, Gypsy Paz teamed up with me to explore a concept we had for the emerging Opensim. We ran our own Opensim, which we called Gridrock (derived partly from my name reversed, yeroc > yroc > Gridrock). However, problems with the lack of currency support in Opensim, and concerns over the Hypergrid, led us to look for alternatives. At one point we looked at the Exit Reality VRML plug-in, which you could say was phase 2 of Gridrock.

Another amazing person I came across was Romsey Homewood, and we collaborated together on a sci-fi project called Nebula West, which was exhibited in the Second Life 6th Anniversary celebrations.




All along I had been evaluating other virtual world platforms, such as Vast Parks, until finally, around April 2009, I heard about Blue Mars via a Google search for virtual worlds, and reading more about it in an SLU forum post. I signed up for the City Developer program, downloaded the City Editor and loaded up Taki. That was the defining moment for me. I had always been a fan of Crysis, but Taki demonstrated that the leap from gaming engine to virtual world engine was indeed possible, and the CryEngine2 was probably the best gaming engine out there.

Gypsy was heading in another direction at this time, so along with Romsey I teamed up with Luna Bliss, another SL resident who has a garden business there, and who mentored me in my early days in SL, and we started to plan Gridrock City on the Blue Mars platform. Luna now takes care of the business side of Gridrock City and is also our City designer.

We also have a fourth member of our team, Iain, who you may know from his alphaklata-marsdev Blue Mars blog, who concentrates on the architectural aspects of Gridrock City.

Q: So what kind of City will Gridrock City be?
CE: Well at first I toyed with the idea of being normal, corporate, but someone introduced me to the story of Nikola Tesla. This hidden genius, this truly great man, standing behind the curtains while others such as Marconi and Edison stole the limelight. This story gave me inspiration for the theme for Gridrock City.

The City will have four Blocks, which will be divided into Guilds. Each Guild will be dedicated to a particular craft, and the Tailors' Guild will be the first, headed by a Guild Steward, and Romsey will fill that first role. Other Guilds are yet to be finalised, but an Authors' Guild is likely. Each Guild Steward will have shared ownership of the Block, and will champion that particular Guild skill.

Q: What is the future Schedule for Gridrock City?
CE: Well I hope to get Gridrock City included in the next major build of the Blue Mars client, and I hope to have Block developers included in that build.

Good luck, and thanks very much Corey.
CE: You're welcome.

Further information on Gridrock City, and a teaser trailer, is available on the official website.

Rock

The folks over at Opensim have been developing their code for more than two years now (it will be in its third year in January 2010), and it is still very much in the alpha software phase.

One of the reasons for this lengthy alpha phase is due in no small part to all the extra work in creating cross-platform code (Opensim is available in Windows and Linux versions, and can be run on Macs using the Mono package for OS X)

Unfortunately, further delays are likely due to ongoing problems with Mono. One of the core developers at Opensim, Melanie, made this post in the Opensim Developers Mailing List:

after discovering a bug in the 2.0.1 version of mono, which causes frequent crashing of regions, we have taken the step to bump the minimum required mono version to 2.4.2+.

This has become necessary because the bug is rather difficult to isolate and therefore impossible to work around reliably.

We do understand that this may cause difficulties for some people, who have been relying on packaged binary versions of Mono. Version 2.4.2 is recent enough to have no binary packages, so it will be necessary to build Mono from source. However, we feel it is unavoidable at this time, as we can't recommend or endorse a Mono version that we know to contain a showstopper bug.

On the upside, 2.4.2 has much better performance and stability, compared to 2.0.1.

However, Nebadon Izumi, who operates the OSGrid, the largest Opensim grid, had this to say in response:

I hate to say this, but there is absolutly no safe or stable version of mono from my perspective, it doesnt matter what version of mono OSgrid is running, our plazas are crashing all day long, we are lucky to get 30 minutes in a region that has people in it.. for well over a month now our Speedbuilds and Primwords games on Sunday and our Tuesday Meetings have been absolutely terrible. I honestly dont think it matters what version of mono your running, they are all quite terrible in terms of providing any kind of stability or performance. So i have to -1 this bump theory, I dont think its valid honestly. Can you be more specfic about the bug and why you dont think its present in later versions of mono? and maybe you can explain why our Windows based regions can run for weeks at a time, while our Mono plazas cant even seem to run a full hour?

So for now it appears that the Linux version of Opensim has gone off the MonoRails, let's hope it gets back on track before too long.

Rock

Full thread here (Mono Minimum Version Bump, 28th Sept 2009)

A new patch has been issued for Blue Mars, 4910.5, which adds a floor and trees for the welcome area, and fixes a bug so new clothes are now displayed in the female avatar inventory, plus other bug fixes. There are also butterflies flying around now too, which gave me an idea for a bit of mischief, as the caption picture shows :)

A new Blue Mars platform and developer tools are being finalised right now, and Blue Martians are being advised to watch the Blue Mars Online website and keep an eye on the Blue Mars Twitter for the release date, which could be this week!

We also had some further clarifications this week from Glenn Sanders, on the BM Vision:

Cities will be places where the City dev set the overall design, then they lease space to a Block dev.

Block devs will lease space from City devs. Then the Block devs will lease space to shops, residences for members, gateways to game devs, buildings to clubs, gardens, museums, theatres for screening movies (making sure they have the rights to share the movie content), auditoriums for live or recorded music concerts, etc. Game levels will be a separate ‘instance’ from the City level. But a city could provide a portal to a game.

Here are some projects underway or being planned, based on discussions with developers in-world and via email, forums, chat, etc:

• Numerous themed cities, ranging from historic regions hundreds of years old, to cities set 1000 years in the future.
• Several types of racing games.
• Exhibits based on real life tombs, museums, historic cities.
• Interactive art exhibits.
• Various types of vehicles.
• Clothing of all sorts.
• Avatar skins.
• Avatar hair.
• Avatar shapes.
• A.I. bots for shops, tour guides, FAQs, and more.
• Houses, apartments, condominiums, hotels.
• Themed environments designed to provide a unique experience or mood.
• A building set on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars.
• A building made from clouds.
• An underwater building with a sea life attraction.
• Numerous avatar animations and interactions.
• Various local and international school projects.
• Simulations and lessons that will bring together students from several nations.

Are you starting to get the picture?

This, this is what we want to create… a platform and tool set that the developer and member communities want. One that will enable amazing projects that just aren’t possible today.

And to do so securely, with scalability and great visual fidelity, now and into the future.

I hope to get an interview with one these City Devs in the next few days.

Rock

I thought I would put a little collection of snippets from conversations and forum posts from Avatar Reality staff members together to get an idea of the planned features that are currently in the works.

Welcome Area
The welcome area/staging area/destination island (no fixed name as yet) needs to be improved, and Glenn Sanders has indicated that some improvements are in the pipeline, with a floor (instead of walking on the surface of a sea) and trees. Glenn also mentioned that some devs were building candidates for the welcome area. I can say a little more about this, as I am one of the devs involved.

We are currently building an Acclimatisation Facility comprising a huge tower, with corridors leading off of three levels to hubs. Each hub is in a different language, and the information presented on video screens will start with the basics of movement, camera use, making friends, chatting and IMs, then moving on to more advanced topics such as building, creating clothing and hair, scripting etc. The Facility is being built on a replica of Phobos, the first moon of Mars, with the ability to let visitors leave the Facility in moon buggies and explore the surface of Phobos, driving in and out of the craters, including the famous Stickney Crater. The sky will show Mars going through various phases of terraforming, from 0% to 100% over the course of a day.

Platform-related
Glenn Sanders wrote (22 Sep 2009):

Based on what you and the rest of the community has been asking for, we are prioritizing:

• Display of many kinds of media, including streaming
• Voice
• Access control
• We have heard from many people that they want cameras restricted for privacy and business.
• Instant messaging
• Avatar names
• Friends list
• Improved UI. There likely will be a consistent UI throughout Blue Mars, unless a City dev wants to override it for a game, or specific design reason

I hope any camera restrictions will not be platform wide. It would be much more preferable to let the City developers have control over any camera restrictions, as I can think of many city developments (especially non-residential cities, where privacy is not an issue) where unrestricted cameras would be a huge benefit, such as in exhibition cities, where the ability to fly your camera quickly over all the exhibition areas for a quick check-out before deciding which areas are of the most interest.

I do hope they test avatar names over the head first. I am concerned that in crowded venues such as concerts, the mass of avatar names would look awful and really detract from the atmosphere.

If it does look awful under test when they put several hundred avatars in close proximity, then I would suggest having the avatar name over a head appear only briefly (say 10 seconds) when someone appears in a scene for the first time, and their name can be found again by either a mouse roll-over of the avatar, or on right-click.

Concurrency
Glenn Sanders wrote (22 Sep 2009):

The concurrency is definitely there. We are doing tests that exceed what we originally claimed for concurrency/ 98% of rendering and data handling is done locally. Our server just streams a minimal set of data about the position of avatars and moveable objects. The rest is done on your pc. So we can handle many concurrent users without lag.

I would still like to know the current peak concurrency that has been seen within any city since the open beta began, under 'real' conditions (i.e. real accounts rather than bot tests).

Currency
Tiffany Nahinu wrote (22 Sep 2009):

The exchange rate between the Blue Mars Currency (during the closed beta this currency was called the BLU) and US dollars is still a work in progress.

Chat Bubbles
Tiffany Nahinu wrote (22 Sep 2009):

Chat bubbles, yes, being worked on definitely.

I hope they are not just tinkering with the colours or transparency. Chat bubbles need to be confined to the annals of Blue Mars folklore.

Rock

If you need to check your current Frames per Second, or which version of DirectX your card is using, or your current location, etc you need to enable your Statistics.

Go to your Blue Mars, Game, Config folder, on most machines this will be at C:\Program Files\Blue Mars\Game\Config, and in there create a blank text file. Inside the text file type the single command:

r_displayinfo = 1

Then rename the text file to system.cfg

Restart your Blue Mars client, and your statistics will be available to you. To inhibit the statistics just rename your system.cfg file to system.cfg.off you can always rename it back easily then whenever you need the info again.

So what information is provided?

First Line
CamPos: The current camera position in terms of X, Y and Z (height). If you want the current avatar position then use the camera control to get you into 1st person view first.
Angl=: Gives the orientation in X, Y, Z, of the camera.
ZN: Near Depth of Field Distance.
ZF: Far Depth of Field Distance.

Second Line
This line starts off with the current version of DirectX your graphics card is using, and whether you are operating in 32 bit or 64 bit mode.
HDR: High Dynamic Range lighting is enabled.
FSAA: Full Screen Anti-Aliasing is enabled.
Build: The current build of the Client.
Level: The name of the Level, or City that you are in.

Third Line
Tris: The number of triangles currently being rendered.
DP: The DrawPoints being processed, should be <= 3000.

Fourth Line
FPS: The average Frames per Second (higher the better). The figures in the parentheses after the FPS value is the Min and Max values.

Fifth Line
Mem: Amount of RAM the Blue Mars client is using.
LuaMem: Amount of RAM that running scripts are using.
Dlights: Number of Dynamic Lights currently rendered.

Rock

Kevin Alderman, aka Stroker Serpentine in Second Life, maker of the popular Sexgen Beds, and Shannon Grei, an individual who creates and sells clothing under the name Munchflower Zaius and the business name "Nomine" in Second Life, have begun a Class Action against Linden Research Inc., the owners of Second Life, for permitting the infringement of the Plaintiff's intellectual property rights, trademarks and copyrights, by providing to its residents the tools necessary for copying their products.

However, proving that LL are liable may not be so easy, given the Safe-Harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which protects the providers of on-line services from litigation providing they remove offending content once they have been notified of it. The recent Veoh decision is a case in point. However the DMCA does not afford protection against claims of trademark infringement.

This will be a very interesting case to follow.

The full court papers are on the SecondLifeHerald website.

Rock

Blue Mars has in-built Artifical Intelligence (AI, for creating a range of bots), and the demo AI system currently employed in Beach City is called the AI Chatbot.

Details on the Chatbot, who Blue Mars have termed their exclusive resident 'Suzette', can be found on the Blue Mars wiki.

Upon entering Beach City yesterday I was subjected to the attentions of 12 of these Chatbots, who called themselves the 'Suzettes', and announced that I was a Rock Star and that they were going to cheer me for the next five minutes. During that time I was 'treated' to cries of 'Oh, isn't he handsome', 'I 3> you', 'Wow', 'Woo-hoo', 'Oh my', 'Oh look', and with the bots variously sitting on my table, jumping up and down and clapping in delight.



This behaviour has already incurred the displeasure of one Blue Mars beta tester, Ryan Schultz, who started a thread on the subject in the Blue Mars Beta forums, entitled 'Sexist Stereotypes in Blue Mars'.

So, apart from 'portraying women as simpering, primping bimbos', what can bots be usefully employed for? According to the wiki:-

1. entertainment - engaging in conversation with a user
2. assistance – providing useful information to a user
3. education – teaching material to a user
4. propaganda – delivering advertising to a user
5. sales – virtual sales assistance to a user

The Chatbox technology is one of the most advanced systems available today. It can parse user input and/or perform keyword matching against it. This input is matched against relevant topic scripts to decide how to respond. The response can intermix text speech output with control over the avatar body's actions.

The chatbot not only carries on a current conversation with you, but it stores information about you across chats, so it can sustain a relationship lasting from first encounter through to the current interaction. This same ability allows the chatbot to act as your replacement when you are off-line.

The Chatbot can carry on conversations across several hundred topics. A topic for the chatbot is a script written in CHAT-L that lets the chatbot react to questions or statements in a subject area, as well as allowing it to volunteer information on its own. Topics are independent and allow you to organize your information and responses in whatever way seems natural and convenient to you. The script of a topic can be created using a simple text editor.

Beta testers can currently test the Chatbot system by having a Chat with a bot on one of two servers, at http://66.192.217.122/chat/ and http://66.150.245.139/chat/

Developers who wish to customise a bot for their own server are provided with a how-to, but the debugging section is still to be completed.

Rock

In a recent interview with Tateru Nino on the Massively website, Jim Sink, CEO of Avatar Reality, the company behind Blue Mars, had this to say on the subject of Adult content:

We don't allow securities markets, banking services, content that depicts minors or apparent minors engaged in sexual activity, or content that depicts torture.

Regarding Mature and Adult content, it certainly is a hot-button issue. As such, we're moving very carefully. Before we conclude how to proceed with mature content, we need to see how our community develops and to think carefully about how we balance the issues at hand. For now, we don't allow "mature and adult" content.

Blue Mars have only explicity excluded ageplay and torture, and we can expect those exclusions to be in the TOS.

However, on the general subject of adult or mature content, Blue Mars needs to assess the demand for this kind of content. This is what Second Life had to say about the amount of Adult content on their platform:

Based on our research, we estimate that around 2-4% of content on the mainland would be considered Adult according to our current thinking on defining that. For all of Second Life, our content research shows it is around 5%. In other words, 95% of Second Life either mature or PG.

So, should Blue Mars dispense with Adult content and keep BM family-friendly, and let those that want it hang out in SL?

There is also the problem of screening. How do you prevent a teen or pre-teen from visiting Blue Mars cities that have adult content. Should the screening be done by Avatar Reality or by the City developer? Screening has been an ongoing problem in Second Life, and is still far from foolproof.

Then Blue Mars has to think about the effect of Adult content on their major educational and scientific players. How would the Smithsonian and National Geographic and the the various schools projects feel about sharing space with the BDSM community? Can Blue Mars afford the kind of bad publicity that dogged Second Life?

And what about Mature content? Should residents of Blue Mars be banned from engaging in sexual activity within their own virtual homes? Should Blue Mars allow activity that is legal in real life and only ban that sort of activity that is illegal in real life? That sounds like a nice compromise, but then the subject of jurisdiction crops up. Illegal 'where' exactly? What is legal in one State in the US may be illegal in another (brothels in Nevada versus brothels in Salt lake City, for example), there are different ages of consent in different States too. And to what extent should Avatar Reality take into account the various laws in countries around the world where they expect many of their residents to come from?

This is a huge minefield, and I am not surprised that they are taking the cautious approach.

Rock