Blue Mars 2150 and OpenSim 2013

Back in 2008 Avatar Reality announced a virtual world under development on the CryEngine2 platform – Blue Mars 2150 – and showed a concept movie. The promotional movie promised…

“Everything you see here is created in high definition in real time” – “Everything else is just… Reality!”

Image-02-planet

Since that time the Second Life and OpenSimulator servers and viewers have come on by leaps and bounds and readily available systems with excellent graphics cards are now commonplace. 3D mesh import via the Collada 3D model format and materials rendering are in use, and improved “Windlight” visual effects, shadows handling and other atmospheric capabilities are in everyday use. Long draw distances are possible with real time rendering of even very complex 3D scenes. Physics, including for vehicles, has improved with the adoption of Havok in Second Life and Bullet in OpenSim.

It could be timely to look at some comparative images from the Blue Mars 2150 concept movie and the current OpenSim in 2013… first Blue Mars 2150…

Image-21-uw
Image-18-uw
Image-06-meet
Image-24-rig

And now OpenSim in 2013…

2013-05-14-OpenSim-Underwater-Observatory-3
2013-09-30-Marineville-1
2013-09-30-Marineville-3
2013-10-24-Undersea-in-UC-1
2013-10-24-Undersea-in-UC-3a
2013-10-25-UC-Meeting-Room-22013-10-25-UC-Meeting-Room-1
2013-10-25-Vue-Rig-Day-2


The Blue Mars system was later developed by Avatar Reality as an avatar styling system running on mobile and other devices – see Blue Mars Web Site. Images provided here as a convenient archive.

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7 Responses to Blue Mars 2150 and OpenSim 2013

  1. With havin so much written content do you ever run into any problems of plagorism or copyright violation?
    My website has a lot of unique content I’ve either authored myself or outsourced
    but it appears a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my authorization.

    Do you know any methods to help stop content from being
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    • bat says:

      Its always a problem, people just don’t appreciate that they should credit authors and respect their hard work to create things. I am afraid I don’t have a magic solution either.

  2. Vanish says:

    As much as I’d love to agree with you, if you do a visual comparison, then Blue Mars definitely had an edge as far as lighting/shading/mapping is concerned. Through all the server-side improvements we’ve seen, the rendering engine received surprisingly little updates. We still use the same shiny renderer, the same bumpmapping and the same shader as we did in Viewer 1, about 10 years (!) ago, and still no normal maps, speculative maps, no shine on transparent surfaces, etc. It’s somewhat disappointing.

  3. bat says:

    Vanish, you are right.. but its coming… “materials” capabilities are now available server side if the 3D modeller chooses to use them, and they are supported in the standard release SL viewer and the next versions of most of the third party viewers. My OpenSim images were taken with Firestorm 4.4.2 OpenSim Version with no “materials” in use.

    See some examples and information at

    http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/materials-processing-reaches-beta-overview-and-more/

    http://strawberrysingh.com/2013/06/01/materials-project-in-second-life/

    • Vanish says:

      Hmm, yes. I’ve seen that a few months ago, too. I just wonder how long it’ll take until it’s really “mainstream” and until OpenSim supports it. Well, given how fast we adopted mesh, I’m not too worried about the latter, and more about Third-party-viewer support for OpenSim.

  4. bat says:

    I believe that materials support is already in the latest release of OpenSim 0.7.6.

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