Exploring Blue Mars

Montage of the Blue Mars demo spaces, showing how the technology can be used for a community spaces and games. It uses CryEngine for the graphics, giving some impressive shaders for high quality graphics in a VW. Lots of potential for developers to create rich environments and online game content.

For Educators, this is no SL replacement in terms of casual idea development and experimenting.. it is a Dev Heavy technology, but has bags of potential for some Serious Games, or creating visually rich virtual campuses.

Also its now a good opportunity to consider bringing in students/staff on Games Design / Digital Media courses to help develop content for other departements.

Its hard to judge how useful Blue Mars will be based on these Demo's, as ultimately you can create whatever space you want, so its now down to some exciting developers and community building stuff going on, if it is to succeed.

Of the short time I've played with it , and looked at the other BM preview tools, my vibe is that it is more comparable with Multiverse - http://www.multiverse.net/index.html , than Second Life.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• virtual worlds
• VW
• education
• metaverse
• crysis
• cryengine
• machinima
• blue mars
• blue
• mars
• avatar
• angrybeth
• tech demo
• 3D
• virtual learning
• MMORPG
• multi user

[xcryingwolvesx]

this game is like the sims ._.

[635574]

the hair physics needs iprovements, it's good as a beta demo, but why did they style the terraformed mars that close to Earth?

[KatyPetLuvr]

CryEngine...I am dissapoint...

[Guitarplayer1469]

it's too laggy

[Renew3D]

@635574 The hair in Blue Mars pretty much acts like a cloth with a texture as you can see. But a new technology has already been developed for DirectX that makes very realistic looking hair - it actually renders individual strands and that's how it also looks like.

[lyricalheaven]

@LosSantosKilla my point exactly...the content is not left up to the creators but rather the players in secondlife where as in BM it isnt..im guess that BM is afraid too much content will be R-rated or above . Something that secondlife has plenty of ..Dont get me wrong I love secondlife but lets face it ..most of the ppl who spend time there are trying to use it a secondary tool for dating/sex . And lets not forget how Linden Labs overcharges for every thing :(...and the NOW grid wide mesh

[LosSantosKilla]

@lyricalheaven what are you talking about , you can literally do , design and take part in anything from your wildest imagination on secondlife, on blue mars you cant do a fucking thing

[Renew3D]

I tried it. I love the graphics and especially how the hair and water has turned out, but there's a few problems with the avatar's face and body tools. They're not yet good enough to modify the face, avatar shape or avatar height to make them individual enough.

There are ethnic options for the face, yes, but no matter which ethnicity you choose to have, the face will always end up having somewhat similar (asian) look. Could be because of the newbie skin, though. The stare is also bit creepy.

[MusicManiaBand]

@elmo1057 u can have sex in second life xD