Life In Blue Mars

Hey everyone! Its your friendly neighborhood blogger Zetsumei! We've got a big update for Blue Mars that came to us late at night on the 18th/19th of February. Both the client and the developer tools got updated this time around.

Here are the release notes for the developer SDK update:

Changes since the 0.0.7366.0 (Feb. 11, 2010) build:

All Editors
• Developer tools and client now identify themselves as "developer build" as opposed to "city_developer build".
• Materials created by bmImport and bmImportCmd properly assign a default Surface Type ("mat_blank" for a physicalized/proxy sub-material, otherwise no Surface Type assignment).

[NEW] Body Editor
• Import custom shapes.
• Import custom skins.
• Test custom shapes, skin, clothing, and animations.
• Upload custom body data (coming soon).

Shop Editor
• Clone instances of decorations.
• Control for camera speed.
• Enable saving of work in progress.


As I'm sure its obvious to anyone reading this right now, the biggest part of this update was the new Body Editor! The body editor is the very first stepping stone towards character customization in Blue Mars. Like several other things in Blue Mars, documentation is a bit light at the moment but if you are interested in what the Body Editor can offer you at the beginning stages of development, please dont hesitate to check out the developer forums at http://dev.bluemars.com/forum/index.php myself and a few other developers have asked some questions, started some threads and there is some good information going around about what we can do so far with the Body Editor. Also, this coming Tuesday there is going to be a developer Q&A with Andrei, the genius programmer that has been creating all of the editors for us. Check out this thread for more informatoin http://dev.bluemars.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=959

Moving on, the release notes for the client that we also recieved are a bit to long to post here, so you can find those here: http://www.bluemars.com/BetaClientDownload/readme.html

Some notable highlights however are:

Shade City by eFrontier now has a Shop! Purchasable T-shirts will be available on the second floor of Shade City.
Welcome Area 2010 has been added.
The old welcome area has been retired.
AR_Shelter has been added. This is a minimalist level to be used as a meeting area in case there are problems with the new welcome area.
VSE_TERC has been added.
Avatar names are now displayed above the avatar instead of the avatar ID.
If you change your Avatar Name display option in the User MyPage, it will now be reflected in the overhead avatar name display as well as the chat box.
New and updated City data can now be downloaded directly from the Places Browser--no need to install City patches.
User interface update
New look for the Places Browser!
Preferences Menu update
New Click Sound option in the Settings menu will let you turn the pointer sound on or off (default: Off).Refresh button in the Places Browser allows you to enter your downloaded City (except New Venice) without having to close and reopen Blue Mars.
New Display Name option will let you hide the overhead Avatar Name display of your avatar and the avatars around you.

Many more and more detailed pictures and details can be found by following the link above.

Well thats all for this update guys, Ill be doing some further updates after this with some pictures and reviews of the latest additions to Blue Mars, and hope you all have a great day!