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!”
- Blue Mars 2150 Clips on YouTube
- Blue Mars 2150 Movie Overview (52MB QT MOV 640×320)
- Blue Mars 2150 Movie (52MB MP4 1280×720)
- Blue Mars 2150 Movie Hi-Res (1.4GB QT MOV 1280×720)
- Gallery of images from 720p movie
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…
And now OpenSim in 2013…
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.
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
ripped off? I’d genuinely appreciate it.
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.
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.
*specular* maps. Speculative maps are probably something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OrteliusWorldMap1570.jpg
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/
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.
I believe that materials support is already in the latest release of OpenSim 0.7.6.