And by “same content” I would definitely like to see how well Cryengine (or any other engine) deals with 100 avatars with 7,500 polygons each (base) and perhaps 20-50,000 additional polygons for all attachments they have Dealing with “millions of polygons” per scene, 50+ FPS, is not a simple task. I remember the first time I played Spore with the default settings. Oh sure, it got 70 or so FPS easily — but it was clear that each scene had just a handful of polygons to render

So, yes, this would be a much fairer comparison: how well does CryEngine2 or Unity or whatever is felt to be the “best” engine out there do when they have scenes with 20-50 million polygons to render?

And by “same content” I would definitely like to see how well Cryengine (or any other engine) deals with 100 avatars with 7,500 polygons each (base) and perhaps 20-50,000 additional polygons for all attachments they have Dealing with “millions of polygons” per scene, 50+ FPS, is not a simple task. I remember the first time I played Spore with the default settings. Oh sure, it got 70 or so FPS easily — but it was clear that each scene had just a handful of polygons to render

So, yes, this would be a much fairer comparison: how well does CryEngine2 or Unity or whatever is felt to be the “best” engine out there do when they have scenes with 20-50 million polygons to render?

we don't use our renderer because we're infatuated with it. we use it because it's better.

I always find your insight to be mesmerizing (that's a good thing)

I intend to put my own perspective on the Blue Mars “experience” up today at my blog. My only complaint and also why I really won;t hold my breath on ever seeing it native on the Mac: Adobe Flash Active-X based.

I also suspect this has uch to do with the “runs better on some systems and not so well on others” issue you've mentioned.

I'm really not impressed with the “eye candy” because I happen to know that it's unfair to compare a scene on the SL mainland on low settings (but high FPS) with professionally-created content in Blue Mars on the highest possible settings I can only suggest that people try other viewers, ramp up their settings in SL, upgrade graphic drivers, tweak their card's and PC's settings, spend some time in tweaking performance, and then jump to the thousands upon thousands of professionally-created areas in SL. The difference will be small and mostly small details; dissing LL's engine as “old and outdated” is actually quite unfair. LL's engine is almost up to the highest standards — there are just 2 or 3 missing things, currently under development (and I'm NDA'd not to reveal them ), but it's by no means “lagging behind the competition”.

They have just two problems. One is supporting legacy content, as I commented on the Blue Mars forums. This mostly means that we can't “suddenly” get 50,000-polygon-avatars with a wide variety of skeletons, not because LL's engine doesn't support it, but because it would totally and completely break millions of skins and billions of articles of clothing LL's not insane enough to do that. Sure, Blue Mars's hair looks way nicer; but once flexisculpties become a feature of the main viewer (it has been a feature on several alternative viewers for over half a year now…), you won't spot any differences between SL hair and BM hair.

Besides supporting legacy content, there is the whole aspect of the target. SL started also by being a “developer's environment”, but LL quickly understood that the mainstream users also wish to have fun developing their own content. Collaborative, real-time user-content generation without limitations or pre-approval, in a contiguous environment, requires quite different techniques for the rendering engine to deal with. I'm absolutely flabbergasted with the way SL calculates shadows from multiple sources on dynamically changing content so quickly! It seems a miracle to engineering to me — since as a matter of fact I haven't seen any 3D rendering engine that can handle that. And on top of that you can dynamically change the lighting and the way the light sources affect the shadows using the Windlight settings — again, in real time. If in my college days I'd describe what SL's engine is able to do on a relatively normal (as in 2-year-old) desktop computer to my teachers, they'd think I'd be insane and would label it as “science fiction” — specially when I'd explained to them that this is not ray-tracing

Blue Mars, by contrast, uses the much more safer and less resource-intensive (and also way more researched and deployed) method of assuming most content is static and pre-loaded, so you can pre-render a lot of things before the first avatar steps into a city. Cities are isolated environments in the sense that there is no visual contiguity; you don't need to worry if, for instance, on a neighbouring city someone has just uploaded a huge building and now you need to figure out what happens to the shadows and lights on your city Instead, you know in advance which objects are dynamic — avatars, 'bots, vehicles — and even limited-dynamic items (doors opening/closing — which in fact I haven't seen yet in Blue Mars, but I haven't fully explored it yet) can be pre-rendered effectively. This makes things so much easier for the BM developers — and the result is that for the users the experience is more fluid, more immersive, and the platform more stable.

No, “eye-candy” is not what will make BM a success, but the kind of developers they attract to create compelling content and games on the cities. Imagine Blizzard doing a small-scale WoW on a city — but with the stunning graphics of Blue Mars, as opposed to the low-polygon engine that drives WoW Now that will certainly attract people And I believe that's what Avatar Reality is really after: high-level, professional content developers, that get a hosting service with a nice licensing system, and includes an economy which will allow developers to not only charge for access, but for buying items in Blue Mars. So it's like Multiverse/VastPark with a slightly different revenue model. If you wish, you cold imagine access to Azeroth in Blue Mars where users would not be charged anything monthly, but would use Blu's (BM's currency) to buy the items they need I can imagine that this would be appealing to a vast crowd of gamers and consumers.

For us SL residents, the social stratification of Blue Mars might feel too constraining. Money flows from the bottom to the top only: colonists (the users in BM) go to shops and buy items with Blu's. Shop owners pay rent to use the shops, from shop designers. Shop designers lease land from Block owners. Block owners lease space from City owners. Since City owners require a special agreement with Avatar Reality, and will not be sold to “anyone” with a credit card, but only to whom AR wants, the hierarchy is solidified. There is no “upwards mobility”. Even if you start spending lots of Blu's and finally sign an agreement to become a developer, you'll need to rent a shop. You can't simply say, “oh, I'll buy my own city and create as many shops as I wish” — because access to whole cities is limited by AR. There is also a question of transferable content between cities, I have no idea how that works.

In SL, by contrast, we have an equalitarian society. Everyone, from the very instant they logged in, is automatically a consumer, an explorer, a designer, a content creator/artist, a land owner — there are no restrictions, no limitations, no “special agreements” to sign, and everybody can be whatever they wish, and change their minds every day. The result? The anarchic mainland But that's the price you have to pay if you give people freedom. Avatar Reality wants to avoid “bad content” on Blue Mars, so I understand their choices…

I just find it jocular how it is looked upon as the 'next big thing' by so many – based solely on it's eye-candy.

I'm in there,too – and I have a rather high-end system. It runs along okay and it's pretty. But the main concern is that they are looking for “developers” to “develop” content. That's good if you already are a “power creator'.

Until they allow user-created content – even in a limited way, they'll be 'just another' MMO environment. Like Gatheryn (also in public beta) and several others. Simply modeling after Linden Lab's paradigm for Second Life won;t do it. Linden Lab has stumbled upon some kind of “sweet spot” recipe.

Of course it always comes down to monetizing these things. So I suppose we'll see how it goes.

My point was (and I apologize I didn't make it clear at first) – is how the SLogosphere is falling all over itself all star-struck over the eye-candy aspect. No – not your column… but so many others. Yours is probably the best of all the perspectives on it I've read.

Also, although Second Life back then was also targeted to attract developers, like Blue Mars now. But old-time Second Life veterans are looking for a platform that might attract consumers, not developers. Blue Mars has not yet any compelling reason to attract consumers — simply because independent developers have not had time yet to develop complete games/social areas in it, so that the consumers might have a feeling of what Blue Mars can actually offer.

Imagine that Blizzard joins up the developer programme and creates an independent city in Blue Mars with their teams, creating a “demo” MMORPG that looks like WoW on steroids. I'm quite sure that the visual impact of Blue Mars (compared with WoW!), fully exploited by the best graphic designers and best game designers in the world, would be more than compelling for the mainstream users So we'll have to wait until they start to develop things seriously in Blue Mars and see what happens.

Right now, Blue Mars' open beta is simply at a too early stage (no content from independent developers yet) to be worth of any comparison…

This is what seems to escape all the commenters on Blue Mars and all the other “eye-candy' technologies. I rememeber when Unreal was release. Like Second Life it was laggy and buggy and miserable to use in any kind of multi-player mode. But I…we stuck with it because it was enjoyable.

Then along came “Rainbow Six”. As far as “eye-candy” went, we were stepping backward 10, yes really, 10-years. The graphics were blocky and cheesy and look worse that the worst builds you can find in Second Life to this day.

But it was number one on all the charts.Why?

Because of the *play*.

It's about the immersiveness of it all. Sure, Blue Mars is pretty. But what “freedoms” (according to code-law) do the participants really have? Because it's not about pose-balls, it's about the interraction between people.

IThe interraction between people is the source of the pixiedust that makes any environment magical.

As for interraction between people, I won;t go into my diatribe about why bots and campers are evil. LOL