I have been looking at Blue Mars again, now that the full transcript of the Metanomics show with Jim Sink has been published. Sink is Vice President of Business Development at Avatar Reality, the company behind Blue Mars.
Blue Mars wants to offer “richly rendered” 3D environments, worlds wich outperform in graphical and animation-qualities Second Life or World of Warcraft. This comes at a price: specific hardware is needed to use this world, and of course sufficient bandwidth.
However, it is important to look into more detail what this world is about. In this post I’ll try to tell a bit more than usual about the tech-stuff, because what I learn from this all is that fully immersive and scalable environments are maybe something which can be realized in a near future.
But first, here is new teaser trailer:
- The most spectacular aspect is of course is the fidelity of the visuals, for which the company created and enhanced a version of the CryENGINE, a very sophisticated real-time graphics engine. Here’s a wonderful real time example of the physics engine used to mimic the famous Bravia advertisement: Blue Mars Cryengine sample.
- There is another very important aspect, concurrency: Blue Mars wants to allow people to create social spaces that would contain a lot of users. A big event with many thousands of people will be possible, in one space.
- The downside is that the system is partly not compatible with OS X because of the CryENGINE. As soon as that is solved, a Mac edition will be launched.
- But, looking closer, there are solutions: users could use the Boot Camp software included with Mac OS X that lets them run compatible versions of Microsoft Windows on an Intel-based Mac.
- But what about Windows XP users? The Blue Mars client is built for Vista based machines with dedicated 3D graphics… In the questions&answers which went on after the show on the Metanomics site, Sink said: “We are aggressively exploring server side rendering technologies like OnLive which promise to bring advanced 3D to virtually every device with a fast internet connection.” Wikipedia learns me that OnLive is a gaming equivalent of cloud computing: the game is synchronized, rendered, and stored on a remote server and delivered online. The service is currently in closed beta with plans to have an open beta during the summer of 2009. The service is planned for release in the winter of 2009.
- What about the graphics cards? It seems there are low-cost cards (around a hundred dollars) that are doing really well for Blue Mars. “We expect, within a year and a half, that virtually every machine sold in the world will have plenty of rendering power to run Blue Mars”, Sink explained. Very interesting is that the iPhone is putting programmable graphics hardware in that is “a big steps towards running stuff like Blue Mars”.
- There are already more machines on the market today that will run Blue Mars well than there are Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s combined.”
- Those machines do not have to be terribly expensive: Sink claims they built machines for 450 dollar that run Blue Mars quite well.
- Another important technological issue is whether the developers have to use expensive tools such as 3ds Max or ZBrush or Maya. Sink explained that anything that exports in COLLADA can be brought into the world (there is no in-world collaborative building): cheap or free tools such as Blender can be used as well.
- Creating games does not have to be total rocket science. Blue Mars created a Casual Game API to streamline a lot of the common functions game developers need. “Our goal is to make the complexity of 3D game development in Blue Mars comparable to 2D Flash based games. As an example, our Golf game is just a few hundred lines of code.” Virtual items which are put into the virtual world get a unique registration code and time stamp which should help protecting that content.
- What about the integration of social media? Blue Mars wants to embrace the networks the users have already established. “In other words, the easier we make it to communicate both into and out of Blue Mars with friends regardless of network they are on, the happier our users will be and the more useful Blue Mars will become”, so Sink said.
- What is a bit odd though is that Blue Mars does not support platform wide voice. “It is on our road map and we hope to integrate it at the platform level as soon as possible. Individual developers can offer VOIP options in their regions through LUA scripted objects”, so it was explained.
On the Metanomics site a lot more interesting stuff can be found about the business model and other aspects. What fascinates me is that even though the platform is very ambitious in high quality rendering and concurrency (the number of people attending), the technological requirements for users and developers don’t seem to be that totally futuristic.
Once again, it is early stage of course. I don’t see me using Blue Mars for our newspaper community as long as XP and Mac-users cannot have access in a very easy way – but it seems solutions may be not too far away.
Roland Legrand
