Life In Blue Mars

Before we start, I would like to apologize for my absence from the scene in recent days, as life over her eon my side has gotten a bit hectic and has prevented me from being as involved as I would have liked to have been over the past few months. But moving on from that, wow! Just look at this update. The Blue Mars Marketplace has opened, which allows developers to list their shops for sale and their blocks for sale. Blue Mars got voice, using the excellent Vivox service (which also provides Second Life with their voice). Users are now able to preview items before they buy them, and it is now possible to upload shapes and skins! Quite alot has happened in my absence, but I am coming back full force! One of the things that I will be focusing on in my return, is volunteering. When I first signed up for Blue Mars, I had also applied to become a volunteer because I had been a Mentor in the past in SL and always had a great experience with that venture. Although I unfortunately missed Monday's meeting, I will certainly be at thursdays, so if any of my fellow volunteers are reading this, I'll see you there! Also expect to see some city reviews and more updates from me as I make my rounds to new cities and new places.

As always, love my readers and i'll keep you updated!

Till next time,
Your friendly neighborhood blogger Zetsu.

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!

Hey Everyone! Its your friendly neighborhood blogger Zetsu! Blue Mars just got a small, but still awesome update yesterday! For all those who haven'tchecked out the newest update or been to the site yet, two new cities have been added to the places browser!

Dragon City by Lex4Art

and

Digital DNA by VRHacks

I had the chance to go in and take some pictures and video of both of these cities! (these are coming at the bottom of the blog post)

First of all, I would just like to say that both of these cities are getting off to an absolutely great start! Although these are only the first versions of Dragon City and Digital DNA they look pretty good so far.

Dragon City: As stated in the city description, Dragon City is a futuristic city that is a Work In Progress (WIP) and although it is a WIP the welcome area to this city is certainly a great showing of what is to come here. The detail in the small preview area of this city is absolutely amazing, i beleive we are really starting to see how great things can look in Blue Mars with the CryEngine backing it up and the amazing toolset.

Digital DNA: Although this city may not be as detailed as Dragon City is when it comes to structures, the detail that Digital DNA offers with it's amazing foliage, fun pathways to walk down and check what's available in this first glance of the city, is pretty cool in its own right.

Overall, I enjoyed both of these cities and cant wait to see them grow as Blue Mars does as well.

As promised, here are the pics/vids of the new cities:

(If the videos look a little slow, thats cause I lost some FPS through recording, so I apologize for that.)

Dragon City Video:

Life In Blue Mars Presents - Dragon City Walkthrough from Zetsumei Ieyashi on Vimeo.

Life In Blue Mars Presents - Digital DNA Walkthrough from Zetsumei Ieyashi on Vimeo.

Hey there everyone, after a little while of hush hush around the forums and blue mars in general lately, it seems that there are things indeed happening behind closed doors hehe!

http://www.bluemarsonline.com/forum/download/file.php?id=99

http://www.bluemarsonline.com/forum/download/file.php?id=98

http://www.bluemarsonline.com/forum/download/file.php?id=97

http://www.bluemarsonline.com/forum/download/file.php?id=95

As you can see from those photos there it seems that the name Martian Mentor has won the volunteer naming poll! This is a great day, as it marks the beginning of the recognition for all those who have helped and will continue to help out new users in Blue Mars. As a volunteer I cant express my excitedness enough, but it could just be because there are some awesome new shirts coming out =P Not to mention that the Volunteer apartments are almost done hehe! Well thats about it for this update, I wish all of my fellow Volunteers and readers a good day and a pleasant night.

As always, love you guys <3

Zetsumei Ieyashi

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!