Blue Mars News
A new release is expected on the 15th or 16th December, and it promises to introduce a lot more content and a revamp to the UI. Also expected are a release of pricing info, a new website, and updated wiki and FAQ.

The T-shirts and apartments for volunteers, along with a volunteer training guide, are also expected this coming week.

The differences between the Blue Mars City Editor and the Crysis Sandbox has also been added to the Wiki now. The current state of compatibility is as follows:

Continuing this summary of currently available Virtual World platforms and engines, my final five are among the lesser-known, but do check them out.

Alice
Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
http://www.alice.org/

NeL
NeL is a toolkit for the development of massively online universes. It provides the base technologies and a set of development methodologies for the development of both client and server code.

NeL contains the following libraries:

• Miscellaneous library
• 3D engine
• Network engine
• Sound engine
• Collision engine (PACS)
• Form management (Georges)
• Landscape management (LIGO)
• Logic engine

NeL works on Windows, Linux and Mac under the GNU General Public License.
http://dev.ryzom.com/projects/nel/wiki

OpenSceneGraph
 The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems. The OpenSceneGraph is now well established as the world leading scene graph technology, used widely in the vis-sim, space, scientific, oil-gas, games and virtual reality industries.
http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg


Solipsis
Solipsis  is a French R&D project (ANR-RIAM) leaded by Orange Labs, funded by ANR and Media & Networks cluster of Brittany, launched in January 2007 and based on prior works dating from 2000. Five partners are involved:

• IRISA - Peer-to-peer networks & distributed systems
• Archivideo - Auto generation of 3D models & declarative method
• Artefacto - Avatars, contents & enhanced 3D modelling tools
• Rennes 2 University - Sociology of Community
• Orange Labs - Navigator, node and a bit of everything

Solipsis aims to create a public, massively-shared and user-generated unbound digital universe, sustained by a dedicated Peer-to-Peer protocol, with a modern day rendering engine and some great and accessible 3D modelling tools. In other words: a decentralized Metaverse platform. 

http://www.solipsis.org/

 

Syzygy
Syzygy is a programming toolkit for writing virtual reality or other graphical applications. Syzygy applications can run on a single computer, but it is especially designed for the creation of applications to run on clusters of networked computers. Programs or instances of the same program running on different computers in the cluster communicate with one another and share data.
Syzygy runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS X, and Irix. A cluster can be heterogeneous, i.e. you can mix different operating systems. Installation varies somewhat between operating systems.
The Syzygy libraries themselves are written in C++.

http://syzygy.isl.uiuc.edu/szg/index.html

Introduction
With 2009 rapidly coming to a close, we have seen a number of changes in open-source Virtual World platforms and engines, with the noticeable departure of M.U.P.P.E.T., the arrival of Unity, and the no-show of Myst Online. This is the year-end round-up of the current state of play.

Changes through 2009
Visitors to the M.U.P.P.P.E.T home page are informed that the website is down for maintenance, as they get ready for the next version. However, that message has been there since at least August 2008, and neither of the two links on the home page, to the latest version of the software, and to the SIGGRAPH documentation, currently work. I think we can safely say that after more than a one year absence it is unlikely that they will return.

The big news during 2009 was the introduction of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) from Epic Games, although it is still to be determined if this free games engine can be utilised to support Virtual Worlds. For this reason it is not included in this current list, but it has been the subject of separate articles in this blog. Also during 2009 came the announcement that the Unity multiplatform game development tool, was to be made available for free. Unity does appear to have all the ingredients necessary to support the building of Virtual Worlds, so I have included it in the current list.

Missing from the list is Myst Online, who made the following announcement more than a year ago:

Cyan Worlds, Inc. has agreed to put the program code sources for Myst Online: Uru Live into open source. The code sources that will be included are the code for the client, all the servers and tools. With the source to the client and the servers, fans should be able to set up and run Myst Online: Uru Live and bring Uru community back online.

However, there is still no sign of this being followed through.

Current Platforms

Croquet
The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of the Croquet open source software development kit, for creating and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. Implemented in Squeak Smalltalk, Croquet supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Applications created with the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (SDK) can be used to support highly scalable collaborative data visualization, virtual learning and problem solving environments, 3D wikis, online gaming environments (MMORPGs), and privately maintained/interconnected multiuser virtual environments. Since release of the Croquet SDK in 2007, the SDK has not been under active development. All continued development of the technology has taken place under the very active Open Cobalt effort.



Croquet is MIT licensed.
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Main_Page

The Metaverse Project
The Open Source Metaverse Project, or OSMP, was a multi-participant shared virtual world online platform. This platform was free and open source software co-founded in 2004 by Hugh Perkins and Jorge Lima.

OSMP is loosely modeled on the World Wide Web borrowing ideas from existing worlds such as Second Life, Active Worlds, and There. This project aimed to produce an open source engine for the creation of streamed 3D worlds, also making it possible to interconnect existing worlds into a single open, standards-based Metaverse.

As of 2008, the project was no longer active. Most developers shifted focus to development of open source software compatible with Second Life, but the software is still available on SourceForge.
http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/

Ogre

OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine) written in C++ designed to make it easier and intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. The class library abstracts the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other high level classes.

OGRE has a very active community, and was Sourceforge.net's project of the month in March 2005.[2] It has been used in some commercial games such as Ankh and Torchlight.
http://www.ogre3d.org/

Open Cobalt
Open Cobalt is a free and open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application for accessing, creating, publishing, and hyperlinking avatar-based multi-user virtual worlds that are accessible both on local area networks or across the Internet. It is designed to enable the deployment of secure virtual world spaces that support education, research, and the activities of virtual organizations. The Open Cobalt application is a type of 3D browser that can be used to define and access a network of interlinked 3D virtual environments in much the same way that web browsers are used to define and access web based content on web pages.
http://www.duke.edu/~julian/Cobalt/Home.html

OpenMASK
http://www.openmask.org/

Opensimulator
OpenSimulator is a 3D Application Server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. OpenSimulator allows you to develop your environment using the technologies you feel work best - we've designed the software to be easily extendable through loadable modules to build completely custom configurations. OpenSimulator is released under a BSD License, making it both open source, and commercially friendly to embed in products.
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar is an open source MMOG middleware solution written in Java by the Project Darkstar team at Sun Microsystems. It is a research project currently headed by Sun Microsystems engineer Jim Waldo that was publicly released on August 30, 2007[1], and "aims to help developers and operators avoid a range of serious, yet typical, problems associated with massive scale online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications today, including zone overloading, data corruption, and server underutilization."
http://projectdarkstar.com/

Project Wonderland

Project Wonderland is a 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entire new worlds and new features in existing worlds.
https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/
https://wonderland.dev.java.net/index.html

Sirikata
Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. They aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds.



http://www.sirikata.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Unity

Unity is a multiplatform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation. A fully integrated professional application, Unity just happens to contain the most powerful engine this side of a million dollars, but now available for free!
http://unity3d.com/unity/

VastPark

VastPark is virtual worlds technology done right. The framework is simple, distributed and extensible. It's not a single virtual world. Instead, it provides free software tools, APIs and open source libraries so you can deploy (and even monetize) your own virtual worlds and add ons for all kinds of organizations and purposes.
http://www.vastpark.com/

vr juggler

The VR Juggler project was started in 1997 by Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira and a team of students at Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center. This ongoing work has produced a freely available open source, community-oriented virtual reality application development framework. VR Juggler is released under the GNU LGPL and will always be available for anyone and everyone to use free of charge.
http://www.vrjuggler.org/

Wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy and propersous 2010.

Rock

As I mentioned in my Diary entry for the 13th November I have been involved with a small team of seven developers to establish whether the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) can be successfully used as a platform for creating standalone virtual worlds as opposed to just game modding.

With this purpose in mind, we started off by defining what users would normally expect from a Virtual World, then we investigated those definitions to see if the UDK supported them or not, then formulated tests to demonstrate compliance.

The definitions we used were that a Virtual World should be a virtual space, that is persistent, and where its residents can:

• Change their environment, either with inworld or offworld building tools
• Change their appearance, in terms of shape, skin, hair and clothing
  
• Teleport from one area, or one zone, to another
• Communicate with Chat, IMs, VoIP, Friending and Friends List
• Fly, run, walk, jump in a smooth and intuitive manner
• Have an economy, where virtual goods may be bought, sold and traded

I believe those are the 'core' functions of any virtual world that hopes to be successful, and it is these core functions that need to verified and validated to determine if the UDK can indeed be used to create Virtual Worlds.

Each of the developers took on an area from the above list to investigate, and the initial results are now in.

Building Tools
The UDK has no provision for inworld building (like SL), and objects are built offworld in 3d apps then uploaded. We are currently looking at a hybrid approach where there will be a low-def building toolbox within the world, using primitives similar to SL, but with the prim set extended, and with the ability to import far more detailed meshes from external 3d apps. We are encouraged by the amazing work of Gary's Mod.

Avatar Appearance
I don't think I have seen anything better than the one in APB, a game built on the Unreal Engine. It just shows what is possible with this awesome engine.




















Teleporting
We now know that a teleport system is available in the UDK, as a good example of this is in the "DM-Deck" map, where you can teleport from a low ground position to a high platform.


We will start looking at maintaining avatar appearance and inventory across teleports next.

Communications and Friending
Only basic console chat is available in the UDK. In UT3 and other Unreal games, VoIP, chat, IMs, Friending etc, was achieved by their tie-up with GameSpy, which became an integrated partner. Alternatives to GameSpy, such as Raptr, and Xfire are being investigated, but also possibly an in-house solution. At the very least, Skype could be used.

Movement
Walking, running and jumping are all included in the UDK, and the controls are what users of games expect. There is no native support for flying (as in SL) so this will need to be coded.

Economy
There is no provision in the UDK for an inworld economy, so offworld economy models are currently being researched (similar to XStreetSL). Inworld, money can be treated as just another inventory item, and be earned, paid, spent etc as normal. If the 'rezzing' of objects inworld can be solved, then inworld stores would be feasible.

Rock

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