Virtual World News

Blue Mars Developer’s Tools Review

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Blue Mars Developer Tools
Blue Mars Block Editor

To create things in Blue Mars one must become a developer. So, how easy is it to register? No problem. How easy is it to build something in Blue Mars? Not very.

Registration

First, one registers on the Blue Mars site and gains access to the Developers’ section of the Blue Mars web site. The tools needed to build things for Blue Mars can be downloaded from within the section. The developer is getting a sub-licensed copy of CryEngine 2 MOD SDK*. Easy enough. Blue Mars is supposed to offer more control over ownership of created items. From the look of the info on your personal developer’s page it looks like that will be the case.

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Blue Mars Review & Tips

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Blue Mars Open Beta
Desktop Icon

I tend to agree with Kanomi of Tiny Dancing in her funny post about Playing Blue Mars. It’s for boys. I registered weeks ago and watched my email and the spam folder too. Still no invitation. I opened a yahoo email account using a boyish name and four days later I have my invite. That could be coincidence. …right.

Updated 10/13/2009 – New Blue Mars Review Stuff Here
Updated 12/17/2009 – Blue Mars Goes Open Beta

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Blue Mars Beta This Month

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If you have not heard, Blue Mars is a new virtual world using current state of the art tech, described as a Next Generation Virtual World. It will be along the lines of Second Life, with significant differences. It is in Beta now and at the end of August the Beta will expand to a larger more open Beta. Tools for learning to build within Blue Mars are available now.

One of the bigger differences is content creation. Property rights are supposed to be better protected. Builders are more controlled. There are 3 levels of builders/creators, City, Block and Content. It seems a City builder is somewhat like the SIM/Region owner in Second Life (SL). A Block creator is more like a Parcel Owner in SL. Blue Mars (BM) block builders are restricted by the city builder they lease or rent from. Pricing to join any of these groups has not been released.

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Bloggers Beware – FTC Control is Coming to a Blog Near You

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Federal Trade Commission
Federal Trade Commission

The FTC is planning to start regulating blogs. If you make money from your blog or Twitter micro-blog then you will be affected. Since the administration (America) loves to pass huge bills containing over a thousand pages written in legalese and submitted at 3AM and requiring a vote within 5 hours (I swear Obama said we would have at least 5 days…), we have no idea what we are getting. There will be possibly hundreds of pages tacked on just before the vote is called that no one has read, which is common practice now.

If these laws get passed, likely, they could go into effect by the end of summer 2009. So, is it little me they are after? No… as best I can tell. Big businesses have seen the benefit of using blogs. They are the target. But as incompetent as government is there is no telling what we will get. So, paying attention to what they are doing is important.

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Travel to Other Virtual Worlds

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Travel to other virtual worlds and look cool doing it. Cool as in wear your skin, shape and clothes. How is ths done? Answer: Dynamic Hypergrid Links or just Dynamic Links. Dynamic Links? What the heck is a dynamic link? In this case the Open Sim crowd means links between virtual worlds. The idea is a Second Life resident (player) can open the world map and select other worlds, not just regions.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIikPdQBsoI]

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Export from SL to OpenSim

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Anyone that is creating in Second Life now has the ability to export the things they have created in Second Life to Open Sim. For instance, in SL I have a house I built and a number of other things. I do not own land in SL so I really have no place to put the house. But, it would be fun to put it in OpenSim and landscape around it. I could make much better pictures, if I decide to sell the house.

I run my own little Open Sim world. But if I build something in SL, I have build it again in my Open Sim. If I could export it, I could build once and use twice.

Clothes I’ve made are not a big deal. Those I can easily take to Open Sim. But buildings and prim based things are a different story. At least until now. I’ll be playing with this over the new few days.

To export your builds from SL to Open Sim get the Meerkat Viewer.

See the viewer here: http://www.meerkatviewer.org/

See the Import/Export Instructions.