Life In Blue Mars

Hello everyone! I cant even begin to explain how excited I am, and how mutually excited the entire Blue Mars community must be to finally see this amazing development put into play! First of all, the most important thing that I should announce is the new preferences panel that allows you to change your preferences in world to High or Low quality as well as now supporting different resolutions from directly within the client. No more messing with config files my friends! From here on its smooth sailing. Not to mention! I have a big boost in FPS with this update when I switch to low, which makes me unbelievably happy.

Moving onto the next feature addition would be the option to modify the change of your face. I personally love this feature, not only because the interface for using it is intuitive, but because it's just one more step closer to having fully customizable avatars. A concise mix of facial modifications with this new feature, and the facial painting system that was introduced at the beginning of beta could lead to some very interesting and unique combinations. Especially considering the number of people that have already decided to take advantage of the facial painting feature and have created some amazing appearances.

Another interesting feature worth mentioning is when you right click on someone, you now see two extra clickable options. One is their username, the other is their display name. They are indeed clickable, but as of yet nothing happens when you do so. Nametags were also implemented within this release! Myself and many other people in the beta community were hoping this one would be coming soon and we have been pleased by them coming in this release. They are very simple, minimalistic in design and I think are a perfect addition into Blue Mars. Of course, I cant forget about the biggest additions, the new cities! Ill be reviewing each new city separately in different blog posts to be sure I get all of the important technical information out in this blog, but GridRock City and the Soswaewon Garden are sure be two of the hottest places in Blue Mars for a while as brand new content. Especially GridRock city, with which the next Meet and Greet will be held at!

Although this release is not without it's share of bugs, as I have encountered them most can be fixed simply with a relog or a change of setting. An example of, well I dont think this qualifies as a bug but more of an 'issue', would be that although the nametags are an amazing addition it seems that we have forgone our display names for our registered usernames. Although as mentioned before, your display name still exists somewhere because it is shown on the right click menu, it isn't in the nametag which is really the whole reason for having the nametags in the first place. However, as we are in beta still, in due time these things shall be fixed and as testers our jobs are to find these bugs and report them so the good workers over at AR can take care of them :D. Overall, this patch has been very helpful if only for the neat new preferences tab included in this release. With the addition of new cities, I think it would be safe to project more cities coming into existence soon and the economy to be kickstarted soon as well. Let's all hope for content uploads and such as soon as possible! :D

As always, love my followers and my readers and don't hesitate to tell your friends about my blog or follow me on twitter for smaller updates and news.

Until next time, take care all.

- Zetsumei Ieyashi, your friendly neighborhood blogger :D

Edit: Just finished organizing the new shots I took especially for this blog post! Here is a brand new slide show everyone. Please note i sized it up a bit to accommodate the UI shots. Enjoy!