Blue Mars is a platform technology

[glennsanders]

Thanks for the feedback and especially the suggestions, everyone! It's great to see such a thriving, active and energetic community growing up around Blue Mars. I love how involved and passionate you are.

Here’s something to help you understand more about Avatar Reality and Blue Mars.

Blue Mars is a platform technology. We are not really content creators or a content company.

As a platform technology development company, everything we have built is simply to:

+ Technically demonstrate what the technology can do, and

+ Provide examples for 3rd-party developers who will use our platform to create a wide variety of worlds, environments, businesses, games, entertainment venues, artwork, and more.

Therefore our buildings, content, animations, A.I., clothing, avatars, etc. are all designed to test the capabilities of the technology, and as examples to show developers how to create them.
None of this content is intended to make any kind of statement, nor should they be interpreted as making any kind of social, sexual, architectural, animation, or any other statement. These are simply technical examples created by nerdy engineers (the vast majority of them are guys). Avatar Reality will not be making much more in the way of content because we need to focus on finishing the platform and development tools. Also, we will not compete with our 3rd-party devs by creating content.

From now on, content creation is up to the many talented 3rd-party developers (the vast majority of whom are individuals and small indie groups) who are building cities and content for Blue Mars right now. So, suggestions related to content, media, animations, city features, environments, games, etc. are read with great interest by them.

We love to hear all of your suggestions, especially those about the UI, functionality, and basic features of the Blue Mars platform like instant messaging, avatar names, profiles, groups, money, and developer tools, etc. I check the forums, social media sites and talk with you in-world every day to learn what you want and need. Then I meet daily with the other directors in Avatar Reality to raise issues from the community and make sure your needs are included in our planning and prioritization. And guess what, they listen very sincerely to you!

Tiffany, our new Community Dev Associate will be posting and replying regularly on this forum as "tnahinu". She is often in Blue Mars in the afternoons Hawaii time. I post daily to Twitter because it's quick and easy. I usually post in the evenings, after I “finish” work. So if you want to get the latest news and keep in daily contact with me, you should follow http://twitter.com/bluemarsonline/ . Also, I'm usually in-world in Blue Mars for several hours every day. So drop by and say Hi!

[Sorina Garrigus]

Keep up the good work Glenn and the rest of you martians. Is there any 3rd party developers that might be close enough to beta test themselves? I know a lot of people myself included would love to see at least see sneak peaks of things to come.

[RockVacirca]

All your efforts to bring the concerns, aspirations, and suggestions of the devs and players to the attention of the other Directors is much appreciated.

In the case of conflicting requirements from forum members, I would just remind that often they can both be implemented, via Options (ie Avatar names over the head, or not, switchable; Bubble Chat on/off switchable, etc)

Rock

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Thanks for officially explaining this, loud and clear, so that there are no further doubts.

[DaleInnis]

Good post, thanks very much! I think some people (or at least me!) were a bit confused about this, especially when the open beta first started up, and that led to some mismatches of expectations.

(In my own defense the website doesn't make that entirely clear, when it says stuff like "Blue Mars is a free to play massively multiplayer virtual world featuring stunning graphics, realistic characters, and endless social bonding activities." But I guess saying that it's a platform on which such a thing will eventually be built would have sounded sort of boring!)

Can you tell us anything about the things that we should expect to see soon from city devs? Or can you estimate when the content developer NDA might go away?

[Marlii]

YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY GLENN! OUR SAVIOR!

Thanks for this post...I'm sure it will clear up the mass of questions people have when the first enter BM and scream "This is boring! Where are the clothes!!!!"

Having a platform such as this is FAR from boring...anything anyone could ever imagine is possible to create...my homie Xydian shared with us an AWESOME link of something he'd like to see someone interpret: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQJVr8Lvce0


Thanks again for the post. Makes being a volunteer volunteer (we call ourselves the V2 [volunteer squared] squad) a little easier.

[ryanschultz]

Thanks for the update and the clarifications, Glenn. I personally cannot wait to see what the first wave of content developers is going to make available within BM, not to mention what new worlds and games and exhibits are forthcoming!

[Bettinatizzy]

Totally terrific.

[Thoria]

Predicts that, while this post may clear things up for us current newbies in BM, within a week, or a day (an hour?) there will be new newbies who make the same complaints all over again.

[kaseido]

Thanks for the news and clarifications, Glenn!

It looks like Hawaii time is GMT-10, for those of us who had *no clue* That's 2 hours behind US-Pacific and 5 behind US Eastern. And, um, 10 behind GMT