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.

Hello there everyone!

Today I am announcing the beginning of my Creator Showcase series of interviews.

Over the next several months I will be interviewing several city developers and showcasing a new city developer perhaps every week or so (or just about whenever I have the chance to interview someone, this will also be affected by the overall number of city devs available at the moment, so as of now there may not be too many at first, but I assure you that this series will be going on straight through public release and forwards.)

In these interviews I will be asking questions such as,

"What inspired you to start working with Blue Mars?"

"What is the theme of your city, and tell me a little about the storyline?"

"What are plans you have for your city?"

and questions similar to those. I hope to over time build a comprehensive list of city developers and a good several articles of interviews.

Here is a sneak preview of city developers I hope to interview as time goes on:

Desmond Shang of Caledonia

Corey Evans of Grid Rock City

Gus of WildWestGames

Rock Vacirca of Valles Marineris and Arabian Nights

Takuan Daikon

and many more as time goes on.

I am hoping to showcase atleast one of these developers before the week's end so keep checking back for more news!

(PS: If you are interested in being showcased please message me on the beta forums, the dev forums, or leave a comment here. If you are a content developer, but not a city developer, dont feel left out! I will happily interview you as well. I am also contactable by skype, my SN there is metthias- )

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!

http://www.bluemarsonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=475&p=3529#p3529

Hey guys, just learned that the new patch is on the way and will be here very soon! Just wanted to alert all of those following me that may not know this, also expect a detailed report on the new patch and all of its features coming from yours truly!

As soon as you come into Blue Mars, one of the first things that you will notice are the several boards ahead of you that upon clicking them will allow you to travel tot he currently available regions, amongst those boards are two games. The Waterfall Game which involves riding a ship through rings, and Golf of which's name is self explanatory. The later of which I will be reviewing right now.

I like the golf simulation presented to us by Blue Mars because it is a testament to the possibilities present within the platform. With the ability to play both single and multi player matches, as well as a choice of playing one hole matches or three hole matches, Golf in Blue Mars is a very competent rendition of this popular sport.Playing golf in blue mars is just like playing golf but in HD quality brought to us by the CryEngine. I bet the folks over at Crytek never thought golf would be played with such a powerful engine eh? Although when I had played the game, upon striking the ball and making my first hole, it was not as refined as lets say, a PlayStation game would be, but it was indeed comparable to such on a lower detailed scale in functions. To those on lower end machines(and possibly higher grade machines) that can still play Blue Mars, i experienced that the ball looks slightly off from where you hit it, but being that this is a beta and the options given are pretty much only to display the possibilities of the platform, i would still give golf in blue mars a very high rating. For those who are looking for a good pass time in Blue Mars I would recommend that you give golf a try. Out of 10, i would rate it a 6 mostly because of its success in displaying how useful this platform really will be for developers in the future, but also because it is indeed some fun. Below I have posted a flickr slide show of some nice shots within the golf simulator for your enjoyment ^__^

Until next time, take care all, and love my followers!

-Zetsumei Ieyashi

Edit: Added the new flickr ^__^