As you might now by know, developers are all itching to jump into the Blue Mars bandwagon, the major reason being the disappointment with LL’s apparent lack of effort in keeping their 3D engine up to “modern day standards”, whatever they are. In any case, we have been told by the expert games developers how outdated and limited the LL engine is, over the years. Blue Mars has no such problem: it uses the CryEngine2 engine, which was designed for state-of-the-art game programming on Windows. That means that Blue Mars developers have no need to worry about the 3D rendering and only need to focus on making the game work. A huge advantage, specially if it means saving thousands of hours to keep up to date with the latest developments in 3D rendering.
Comments about Blue Mars gorgeous views have abounded all over the ‘net, and although I haven’t managed to get it installed in the few scattered Windows computers I have access to, I can’t tell from first experience what it looks like. I can only rely on what people with powerful enough computers have managed to say about it.
So, it’s time to spot the differences! KirstenLee Cinquetti has posted two snapshots, one from Second Life, one from Blue Mars, both taken with her machine (obviously, the one from Second Life uses her own viewer). Can you spot the differences?
Oh I forgot. Even after removing the interface elements, there is one dead give-away on one of the pictures 🙂
In any case, I’d say that the major difference is that the image from Blue Mars is created by a team of professional game developers who know what they’re doing to provide the best possible experience to Blue Mars beta testers; while the image from Second Life is created by talented amateurs and comes from a region in SL that is almost 5 years old. Take that into account when dissing the image you consider to have the lowest quality. And, of course, there is always the cosy feeling that the image from SL will very likely run on your old computer with a few dozens of FPS, while the one from Blue Mars, if it runs at all on your hardware, will be laggy as expected from a beta version.
More information on the above pictures is available on KirstenLee Cinquetti’s blog.
