Recently the developers in Blue Mars got this invitation from the Avatar Reality Technical Staff:

All in all, a very productive evening.

InWorldz is a user-created Virtual World, based on the OpenSim platform. Unlike other worlds based on OpenSim this world has an economy, and uses a currency called the I'z. Currently, US$1 buys you $500 I'z.

There are no membership fees for InWorldz, and all uploads are currently free, with no plans to change that in the future. Residents may create content (without the need to own or rent any land) by using the provided sandboxes.

Land is available to buy, and comes in two flavours, Mainland (named Sah'ra) and Private Isles. Mainland regions are a cheaper than Private Isles, are restricted to PG content only, do not have full Estate controls, with terraforming restricted to +/- 15m, and have a prim limit of 30,000. Private Islands are full regions that are not connected to the Mainland. Private Isles have far more functionality and management capabilities than a mainland region. Private Isles have no rating restrictions, allow estate managers, and have full use of the estate tools. Private Isles come with a range of prims from 35,000 to 45,000.

Residents may also rent land from land owners, or get their feet wet from the community starter parcels, on the Ruby Shores region, from just $10 a month.

New Residents can sign up for InWorldz and get a username and password here.

To connect to InWorldz all you need is a viewer, and you can use the InWorldz-provided viewer, available from here, or the Hippo Viewer, available from here.

To connect with Hippo, follow these instructions:

• Load the Viewer
• Select the Grids button at the bottom of the interface
• In the new window Hippo pops up, you'll see an Add button, press the button (this will clear all fields below)
• For the field Login URI: type in 'http://inworldz.com:8002/' (no apostrophes)
• Check the drop down box is set for OpenSim
• Click the Get Grid Info button
  
• Click Apply then OK 

To use just type in your User First name, Last name, and password, and Log In.

InWorldz comes with an active Resident's Forum, a Support Centre, a Mantis bug tracking system, and a Wiki. From the website you can see the World Map, and also add events to an Events Calendar.

Considering that this Virtual World has been in existance for less than a year, it is remarkably advanced and well thought-out in its concept. I was impressed enough to seek out its owners, and they agreed to an interview so I could find out more.
Interview with the Proprietors of InWorldz
The proprietors of InWorldz are Elenia Llewellyn and Legion Hienrichs, and soon joining them will be Tranquillity Dexler.

Q. Tell me something about the history of InWorldz.
A. It started out at the end of 2008 / beginning of 2009 with a few of us in a chat room discussing  if we could even DO a full virtual world, it was a testing phase for us. Then we had people who were actually interested in seeing if we could really pull it together, and lo and behold, we had a live world. I had the time and dedication to devote to it, so we started looking at what could be used, worked on, where it really was in grand scheme of things, and by February 2009 we started our testing, and by April 2009 we actually allowed residents to come in and take a look for themselves. We got our first paying customer that same month, talk about our celebration, we were amazed!

Q. What are your goals and aims for InWorldz?
A. First and foremost, to become a viable platform that is comparable to SL. Then move on to advancing that platform. This will include things that we've spoken about as far as physics, meshes, and so on. These are all things we'd like to tackle later on to improve the platform.

Q. InWorldz is based on the Opensim platform. Are you happy with this choice of platform?
A. OpenSim has alot of potential in the fact it's not so far along it can't be revamped to our tastes. So in that regard, yes. We have done many tweaks over time with the opensim code. Most of which are geared towards making it a more reliable and usable platform. The basics are all there for the most part and we've been able to use the hooks provided to add missing functionality.



We have added a new system for profiles and other user data, revamped some of the permissions system, and rewrote the entire script event engine This was done because the current code as it stood was unable to reliably process scripts on the very region you stand on. We did some profiling, took a look at where the code was having issues, and fixed those issues to make the script engine run more like SL's.

We're concentrating on core services such as the script engine, assets etc. to make this a solid platform for growth.

Q. What is your stance on content theft, copybots, etc?
A. Copyright material needs to be protected. That's a clear cut situation for us, as we're content creators ourselves. We can't, however, police every upload, so we've made it clear, if DMCAs are filed, we will happily abide by them and remove the content from the world. We ask every resident who uploads here to abide by the wishes of the original content creator, or they will see themselves being banned from our world.

Thus far I've not run into anything that is blatant, but if I see something, I have no issues questioning the resident about the item(s). And residents will regularly ask me if "such and such is ok" to bring here, I routinely tell them, if in doubt, ask the creator first.



Q. I see you have your own viewer for InWorldz, in addition to the Hippo Viewer. Who designed your Viewer for you?
A. Legion Hienrichs: I did the viewer work. The information is freely available, so I basically did some text changes and added a few things a lot of other talented people created. Prim Backup, the permissions in the new 1.23 viewer, Worn Folder, etc. I am happy with this now, but it's as far as I can take it. We need someone with C++ skills to take this on. I am not a programmer.

Q. What avatar choices are available to a new resident?
A. A new resident only has the default (Ruth) avatar at present. they can change its sex, modify its shape, create hair, eyes, skin, shape and clothes for it, but there are no premade ones at present. A choice of premade avatars is something that has been sitting on my long list of to-do's for a while now, but when we did the web rework a couple months back, it fell further down my list. So at this point, choices are not available, but it is definitely slated to be available within the next 6 months.

Q. InWoldz has its own currency, the I'z. Is this currency convertible out, as well as in, and if not, do you have any plans to operate an exchange?
A. Yes, we have an ATM in SL and InWorldz where you can convert from I'z to L$ then back again. We have no operating exchange as of yet, but it is in our plans to provide one as the world grows.

Q. How many Regions does InWorldz currently have? How many residents?
A. We have a 25 region mainland, and then about 15 private isles outside of that... our current resident count is 620+, what we actually see as being logged in is around 1.5% to 2% of that during peak hours.



Q. How many staff does InWorldz have, apart from the Proprietors? What are your hours of operation?
A. You're looking at us! Other than our mentors who are a huge help and the residents who go out of their way to help new people. As for hours of operation, we have the US Daylight hours covered, then it goes to at least 10pm EST from there.

Q. Is InWorldz funded solely by the proprietors, or do you have external sources of funding?
A. Originally, was completely funded by the Proprietors, while Legion was a big part of that to get us going. As for external sources, we've discussed it, with no firm decisions on that yet. Our business plan is solid though as we're self-sustaining already

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add?
A. I would like to add that we have to give a huge thank you to our current residents. Without them, we would not have gotten as far as we have, and they deserve a nice mention for putting up with all our bugs over the last 8-9 months.

Good luck guys.

Thanks!

As the ability to import avatars into Blue Mars is looking fairly certain now, I thought now might be a good time to start looking around for cool male and female avatars that are currently available.

Of course you can create your own avatars, using free software such as Daz Studio, but for those, like me, who do not have the skill to create great-looking avatars, I have chosen 10 of the best from the Daz 3D Store, including a few fantasy figures. There are a number of other stores to choose from, such as Renderosity and Content Paradise, so choice should not be a problem.

So here are my Top Ten of each. Hope you like them :)

(All images are linked directly from the Daz 3D Stores and are the copyright of their respective owners)

Male Avatars

#10 Prince Albane for M4 H4
























#09 Elf Dancaire for M4 H4
























#08 Derek for M4
























#04 Caleb for M4
























#03 Alexander for M4 H4


Female Avatars

#10 Fairylicious for V4
























 #09 Seduction V4
























 
#08 Sparkel for V4
























 
#07 Ynes for V4
























#06 Alexa for V4
























#05 Kunoichi for V4
























 
#04 Julie V4
























 
#03 Angel for V4
























#02 RM Angelica for V4






















#01 Vanessa for V4

For those of you who are not too familiar with Legend City Online (LCO) here is a potted history of their rather chequered existance.

Origins
Legend City Online was announced to the world on the 26th October 2008, and was created out of Central Grid, an Opensim-based virtual world. The team at that time was the proprietor Lala Xevious (aka Lala Legend), Asri Falcone, Sam Portocarrero, Aleister Holt, Melanie Miland (RL name Melanie Thielker, one of the core devs at Opensim, former CEO of Xumeo, a German continent/grid that was accessible by teleport from LCO, and current CEO of 3dHosting), Haplo Voss, Khalied Jameson (aka DocWes, see Trouble at Mill below), and others.

LCO had taken over Central Grid some 4 weeks previously, and pretty quickly established a hypergrid link to a German continent/grid called Xumeo, owned at that time by the aforementioned Melanie Miland/Thielker. Avatars could teleport between these two interconnected grids, and take their inventory with them. There was an initial small rush of sign-ups, especially when they announced that the regions they had for sale had more prims than Second Life, and was a lot cheaper. However, clouds were gathering.

Trouble At Mill
On the 16th November 2008 a very prophetic article was written by Prad Prathivi at metaversallyspeaking entitled, Why LCO is doomed to fail. Prad made the following observations:

The thing is, people don’t like change. Second Life has the market share and LCO is basically the “StarOffice” here. Yes, LCO offers you more prims on sims, a much lower tier and has avatars already made up. Yes it emphasises protection for designers, and it has cross platform connectivity with Second Life to transfer created content over.

But at the end of the day, it looks and feels exactly like Second Life. And the vast majority of SL users will see little appeal in moving over to this new grid. What would the point be when all their inventory is on SL? Additionally, there’s the lack of trust.. who is Legend City Online? Who is it owned by and what do we know about them? Their website is awfully basic, which doesn’t paint the greatest corporate image.. how do we know that it won’t be a “Here today, gone tomorrow” case? Despite all the flaws with Linden Lab, we’re pretty certain that they’re not going to be disappearing any time soon.

Why should we believe that you will not disappear overnight? People would invest in your grid, buy land, create content and set up shops... why should we believe that you will still be around in five years?

LaLa: Why would you believe that Second Life® would be? Our promise to our customer is this: We are working to create a lasting environment, where people can come and realize their goals and dreams at Legend City Online. We plan to be here for the long term.

As Blue Mars progresses through 2010 towards the full release one of the key features that users will be looking for is the ability to customise their avatar, or even import a custom one.

Right now users of Blue Mars may customise their avatar in one of three ways:

Gender
To change your gender in Blue Mars you must first log in to your User MyPage, from this link. After logging in click on the Edit button in the top-right corner of the My Profile window, then click on the Edit Avatar button.
To change your gender click on the Reset Avatar button and all settings will return to default values, including the gender, which can then be changed.

Face
To change your face in Blue Mars you go to the Welcome Area and use the Face Customization board. Clicking this will take you out of the Welcome Area level and into a separate FaceCustomization level, where you can start to customize your avatar's face. As this is a separate level it is not entirely clear why this is not an option in the Places Browser, so users can go there directly instead of through the Welcome Area.

The Face Cusomization window presents you with five tabs:

Variation
To start the process you first select a face that is closest to what you want from the nine choices available from the Variation tab. You can see what your face looks like from all angles by clicking the arrows underneath the main image. If you do not like any of the initial nine choices click on the Randomize button to get another set.

Selecting a face then presents you with another nine variations on that face, and so on, until you get the nearest you can. If you do not like the variations presented try the Variation button to get another selection to choose from.

You then go through a similar process with the Eyes, Eyebrows, Nose, Lips and Cheek options.

Montage
The next tab, the Montage tab, allows you to add further refinements, such as eye and skin colour, eyebrow height and shape, lip shape, etc.

Advanced
This tab gives sliders for making fine adjustments to the shape of the head: Light/Heavy; Gaunt/Round; Short/Tall; Thin/Wide; and Small/Large forehead.

Beware, use caution with the Head - Short/Tall slider, as moving this will change all other slider positions. Unfortunately there are no % gradations on the sliders so you cannot make a note of settings for future reference.

Once you are done with the Advanced settings you can click the Done tab, and your settings will be saved and applied. If you are not entirely happy with what you have achieved you can always use the Abort tab to return without any changes.

Cosmetics
To get up the Cosmetics Editor you select the second icon in the bottom middle icon set, called 'Face', within the Blue Mars client.

Twinity is a 3D online virtual world created by Metaversum GmbH of Berlin, Germany, and offers accurate virtual versions of real-world cities. It only runs natively on the Windows platform.

Twinity first opened its doors to public beta in September 2008, and I joined up for a looksee in November 2008. I must admit, I did not like it very much, and it used chat bubbles, which I hate (yes, I know Blue Mars uses chat bubbles, but there is a good chance they will give us the ability to switch that off). It uses the Global as the in-world currency, which you can use to buy new furniture and clothing.

So, what has changed in the 14 months since I last visited?

First Impressions
The first thing I was surprised to find was that Twinity is still in Beta.The next thing I noticed is that the number of cities has increased from 1 to 3. In December 2008 there was only Virtual Berlin, but now Virtual London, and Virtual Singapore have been added.There also appears to be lots of other locations added by tenants of Twinity.



A mini-map has now been added that uses Google maps, and shows the location of other avatars, places of interest and stores. Any of these can be deselected to clear up the map. It has a distinct GPS look to this map, as you see your avatar icon moving along the roads on the map as you explore the city.

Preferences
Also new is a System button that brings up various preferences:

•  
• The General tab allows you to select whether your name or other avatars' names are displayed or not.
• The Display tab allows you to select the resolution, windowed mode, anti-aliasing, texture quality (auto, high, medium or low), reflection mode (off, water only, mirror only, or all), mirror depth, and level of detail.
• The Sound tab is where you can set the sound master volume, enable your microphone for voice chat, set the voice and mike volume, and select your sound input and output devices.
• The Controls tab allows you to select Basic (normal keyboard characters are used for chatting in the chat window, and arrow keys are used for movement), or Action Games (you must press before chatting using the keyboard, else WASD are used for movement).
• The Record tab permits you to set the Screenshot folder, set the Screenshot hotkey, and a hotkey for hiding the GUI.

Toolbar
The lower toolbar has some nice features:








The first icon brings up the mini-map, next is the places browser, then the Messaging window. The Community icon is next, allowing you to see what events are on, join groups, and search for other residents, complete with their profile (from here you can also send them a Private Message, a Friendship Request, or teleport to them). The Instant Messaging and the Change Avatar (body and clothes) icons then follow. The final two icons bring up the Library (Inventory) and Animations browser.

Movement
You can use either the arrow keys or the WASD keys depending on which mode you select. You can walk faster by holding down the Shift key. The movement is smooth, however, when watching other avatars walking by they often suddenly rise into the air by a metre or so (not jumping), or walk into the floor, for no apparent reason. Many of the avatars around me appeared to be in running mode, but not actually moving. The mouse thumbwheel allowed me to zoom in and out with my camera, while holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse allowed me to pan and tilt my camera.

Conclusion
Twinity has many of the core features you could wish for in a Virtual World. However, there are no in-world building tools, but you can upload images and 3D objects (using the Collada format), at 1 Global per object. The avatars still look awful. You can buy or rent property in Twinity from the main website,

It will be interesting to see what the final feature set will include when Twinity eventually comes out of beta.

Now that Avatar Reality have released their special pioneer virtual land prices for Blue Mars a comparison can be made with with their already established competitor, Second Life, and its virtual land prices .

The main point of difference between land prices in Blue Mars and Second Life is that in Blue Mars the land size is user-defined (from 128m x 128m up to 16km x 16km, but see a note on this below), and you are essentially paying for concurrent user capacity, which gets cheaper the more you buy, while in Second Life you are paying for a fixed land size (256m x 256m) and 15,000 prims.

Blue Mars
Blue Mars has 4 standard packages, (but other packages may be negotiated as needed). These are:

• Outpost: 5 concurrent users, setup fee of $100, monthly hosting of $30
• Village: 50 concurrent users, setup fee of $750, monthly hosting of $275
• City: 250 concurrent users, setup fee of $2,000, monthly hosting of $1,000
• Metropolis: 1,500 concurrent users, setup fee of $7,500, monthly hosting of $5,000

For each package the land size is user-defined, and can be anything from 128m x 128m up to 16km x 16km. In practice I have found the best size is 2km x 2km, as the resolution of terrain textures are optimum at that size, while the higher sizes tend to suffer from instability on low-spec machines.

Although not strictly part of the land cost, it should also be noted that where land is used for commercial purposes (stores, etc) Avatar reality takes 25% of all transactions, with the land owner retaining 75%.

While Avatar Reality does not use the concept of prim limits in their land prices, there is a physical compressed file size limit of between 250MB and 500MB for all City Data, which is currently extended to 1GB until February 1st, 2010.

Second Life
Second Life has two pricing structures for virtual land, determined by whether the land is 'mainland region', i.e. it is part of a larger continent, so you may have neighbours on all four sides of your region, or 'private island region', where your region has no neighbours on any side. A region has a fixed size of 256m x 256m. In order to own mainland land a premium account is required, which incurs a monthly fee of US$9.95/month. In order to make as close a comparison as possible to land prices in Blue Mars, only the private island region prices will be used.

Second Life offers three private island region product offerings:

• Full Region: 15,000 prims, 100 concurrent avatars*, setup fee of $1000, monthly tier fee of $295
• Homesteads: 3,750 prims, 20 concurrent avatars, setup fee of $375, monthly tier fee of $125
• Openspaces: 750 prims, 10 concurrent avatars, setup fee of $250, monthly tier fee of $75

* It should be noted that the maximum allowed concurrent avatars is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in practice. Many residents of Second Life report that lag starts to become very noticeable when around 20 avatars are present in one region (20% of the maximum), and is similar to wading in mud when around 30 are present (30%), and few get to 40 avatars present (40%) without crashing.

In addition to the above prices, Linden Labs will apply Value Added Tax (VAT) for residents of the European Union.

Both Homestead regions and Openspace regions may only be owned by residents who currently own at least one Full Region.

Homestead regions have a lower performance than a Full Region and are intended for low-density rentals, quiet residential, or light commercial use.

Openspace regions are intended for very low-impact scenic use, such as ocean, forest, or countryside. No habitation, sub-rentals, or events are permitted.

Full details of all restrictions are here.

Comparison
Making a direct comparison is not so straighforward, due to the different concepts involved, so I will provide an illustrative example.

A Blue Mars City is 2km x 2km of virtual land (4 sq km), and comes with a guaranteed support for 250 concurrent avatars.
The cost will be a setup fee of $2,000, and a monthly fee of $1,000.

To achieve the same with Second Life you will need initially a Full Region, plus 60 Openspace Regions. This will provide 61 x 256 x 256 = 3.99 sq km. You will get then get a maximum concurrent avatar capacity of 710, but no guaranteed lag-free support, although applying the practical lag-free limit of 20% the useable avatar concurrency is probably nearer 142.
The cost will be a setup fee of $16,500 and a monthly fee of $4,870.

Conclusion
Many people in the Second Life forums and over at SLU predicted high prices for Blue Mars land. I think the above example shows quite clearly that they got that wrong, big time. However, the Blue Mars prices are special pioneer rates for early adopters, and will likely be revised sometime in 2010, so I would recommend getting in early here, especially with the added bonus of up to 1GB of City Data to those who buy before the 1st February 2010, and with 2km x 2km of land starting from as low as $30/month (that is 62 times the amount of land you get with a SL region, and at almost 1/10 of the monthly price), now could never be a better time!

Member MyPage
Today sees the launch of the member MyPage. The link is here.

• Change your User account email address.
• Change your User account password.
• Buy inworld currency, the BLU.
• See a list of friends in your Friends List and their online status.
• Download the latest Blue Mars Client and patches.

• An image of the item
• Its name
• Category of item
• Type of Item
• Description
• Date of Acquisition

General
The new Blue Mars release is now much smaller, at around 320MB compared with the previous download size of 1.3GB. This is mainly due to no longer bundling Cities in the download. See the City Browser section below for further details.

City Browser
The new City Browser lists all cities that you currently have on your HD and lists all the other cities available on the AR servers. Selecting a city in the browser will now download it in the background. The time to download will depend on your broadband speed. City file sizes will typically be in the 200MB - 500MB range. You must restart Blue Mars to be able to visit any City you have downloaded.
New Cities
The new Blue Mars release comes with two new Cities to explore, an update to an existing City, and a new bowling game.

Caledonia
Desmond Shang, well known in Second Life with his Caledon Victoriana sim, has established a colony now on Blue Mars, and named it Caledonia.

If Victorian Caledonia isn't quite your cup of tea, check out Pavonis, a tropical archipelago under the same management but with large islands available for development, not subject to Caledonia's 19th century thematic restrictions.

• Improved Communications Panel
• Purchased items go into Inventory
• Clicking the ground to walk no longer makes a sound
• New icon set

BlueMarsDev.com > dev.bluemars.com

Updated developer tools (editors)
All the Wiki pages for Item, Cloth, Shop and Furniture Editors have been updated, with new examples on how to create cloth and furniture.

All Editors will now display version number, build type, and build date on the window title bars, and you can also see this information in the Editors' splash windows and About windows.

Right-clicking on the Bluemars.exe file and viewing the Properties should now show the same version information.

Blue Mars City Editor
The City Editor is now available to everyone though the Dev MyPage. City developers can now:

• Load block layer files and export pak files.
• Upload pak (CTY) files to Avatar Reality through Dev MyPage.
• Upload pak (CTY) files to Avatar Reality through FTP
• Set an area that requires an item.
• Define a block

Flash functionality

• ARFlashEntity makes it easy to incorporate Flash anywhere in Blue Mars.
• Just drag and drop the entity to create a resizable panel, type the URL, then hit the Enter key.

How-to included on the wiki.

Blue Mars Block Editor

• Block Developers can now use Flowgraph.
  

Blue Mars Shop Editor
Shop owners can now:

• Create custom Shop interiors in the Shop Editor.

• Set Shelves on leased Shop through Dev MyPage.

Blue Mars Furniture Editor

• Developers can create furniture items and upload them for QA approval through MyPage, in the same way as in the Item and Cloth Editors.

New Female Avatar Mesh
Updated female avatar face and body mesh included in this release:

• Beautifully-formed
• Better animation
• Optimized for skin texture matching

COMING SOON

Pricing information
Expected tomorrow, 18th December. Check this page.

User MyPage ( http://member.bluemars.com/MyPage/ )
This will enable you to:

• Change your User account email address.
• Change your User account password.
• See a list of friends in your Friends List and their online status.
• Download the latest Blue Mars Client and patches.

Edit Avatar feature:

• Change your avatar's first and last name.
• Choose how you want your avatar's name to be displayed in the chatbox in Blue Mars (hiding both avatar names will show your User ID).
• Reset Face: Reset your avatar's face to default, while keeping customized cosmetics, animation and clothing intact.
• Reset Avatar: Reset your avatar's face, cosmetics animation, and gender to a default state. You will then be able to change your avatar's gender.

Even More

• Buy Blue Mars currency (BLU) to purchase items and rent Residences.
• Inventory page will show items you purchased with your BLU.
• Room page will show Residences you are renting, and a Guest List where you can give your friends access to your Residence.
• Message page to send and receive messages to and from your friends.

Today sees the start of a series of Blue Mars releases that promise to be the biggest yet. Of course, not everything that people want from Blue Mars will be included, that will have to wait for future releases (that is the nature of this beta period), so I intend to concentrate in these articles on what is included.  Do check back often over the next few days.

New Wiki


Blue Mars has now opened its wiki to all, including the previously off-limits City Editor sections, so no password is now required to access the City Editor information.

The Wiki is now also a true wiki, where everyone, developers and users alike can contribute. Initially, everyone can create 'draft' pages, and after review will be posted by the wiki admins.

Blue Mars Wiki