Blue Mars - New Features on the Horizon

[glennsanders]

This is where you can discuss the New Features blog post: http://www.bluemars.com/blog/index.html#20100208

In this blog I describe many of the new features and enhancements that we are planning.

[danielravennest]

Instant messaging and avatar customization have been the biggest items missing in my opinion, and I am glad to see that they are coming soon.

Question, are all these items coming in the next release, or in stages in the next few months?

Here is my checklist of features I would like to see but you have not put on the near term roadmap:

* BLU display *in world* - Its hard to go shopping if you dont know how much is in your purse/wallet

* Direct Teleport via a landmark, URL or other pointer to locations besides the spawn point in a city, and the ability to TP a friend to your location.

* Search - to be able to find things in world at a local level like shops (the places browser lists cities, but in real life cities have a Yellow Pages directory)

* Map - aside from turning on the statistics console, we have a hard time knowing where we are, and no way to find other people right now in a city.

* In-world profiles

* In-world inventory

* Voice and possibly video chat

* Groups - made for any social or business purpose in-world, for example store staff, or members of a class being taught in-world. Group features like group IM, member list, and ability to post notices for the group.

* Event calendar

* Jump and Fly, unless those are part of the improved movement

* Land controls: Block and city access list, Eject and Ban for troublemakers and an Abuse reporting system when needed for you AR staff to deal with serious problems.

* User to user money transfer. This includes payment for services such as club or store staff, tipping live performers.

* User to user item transfers. This would include written notes and documents, photos, and gifts of items such as clothing. Right now you have to manually type everthing in chat.

* Snapshots and video capture

* Buying a set of items with one purchase

* Chat logging, for business, classroom, or to record bad behavior to report to you people

[Rsdworker]

Instant messaging and avatar customization have been the biggest items missing in my opinion, and I am glad to see that they are coming soon.

Question, are all these items coming in the next release, or in stages in the next few months?

Here is my checklist of features I would like to see but you have not put on the near term roadmap:

* BLU display *in world* - Its hard to go shopping if you dont know how much is in your purse/wallet

* Direct Teleport via a landmark, URL or other pointer to locations besides the spawn point in a city, and the ability to TP a friend to your location.

* Search - to be able to find things in world at a local level like shops (the places browser lists cities, but in real life cities have a Yellow Pages directory)

* Map - aside from turning on the statistics console, we have a hard time knowing where we are, and no way to find other people right now in a city.

* In-world profiles

* In-world inventory

* Voice and possibly video chat

* Groups - made for any social or business purpose in-world, for example store staff, or members of a class being taught in-world. Group features like group IM, member list, and ability to post notices for the group.

* Event calendar

* Jump and Fly, unless those are part of the improved movement

* Land controls: Block and city access list, Eject and Ban for troublemakers and an Abuse reporting system when needed for you AR staff to deal with serious problems.

* User to user money transfer. This includes payment for services such as club or store staff, tipping live performers.

* User to user item transfers. This would include written notes and documents, photos, and gifts of items such as clothing. Right now you have to manually type everthing in chat.

* Snapshots and video capture

* Buying a set of items with one purchase

* Chat logging, for business, classroom, or to record bad behavior to report to you people

i think its already on list - as = Select and copiable text in the Chat box which i asumble that is simllar but i prefer a full log

my suggestion: - map/mini map - that shows the area around you but can't show people locations inside the buildings unless if they are in shop or park area

[glennsanders]

Thanks for the suggestions. All of your items are already being discussed and planned.

As far as when these will be released, it varies from feature to feature.

Notice that i said that "we are planning" these items. Some will be coming soon, others will take a lot of development work. Trent (our new VP of Design) and I have spent many hours last in the past couple of weeks to prioritize each aspect of these features and many more.

Our priorities are based on several things:
o Constructive feedback from the community. We want and need clear and constructive feedback from you.
(Remember, complaints only tell us what you don't like. We gotta know what you actually want...)
o Common sense (yes, we have a bit of that in our team) and business sense.
o Technology factors such as:
- dependencies (something else has to be developed first),
- time required
- how busy the engineer currently is with other development
- the priority of other tech the assigned engineer is currently developing

When we think about priorities, features, etc. we always keep your success, happiness, and ease of use in mind. We have a lot more work to do, and some things take more time than we would prefer, and just possibly we might make a few mistakes along the way. But at least you know we have your best interests at heart. And we're trying our darndest to get it right.

So keep the feedback coming and let us know what you think.

[Mako Magellan]

I think this list of features is pretty amazing and consequently I am neither surprised nor disappointed that it isn't all coming in the next release. just a quarter of these items would be a big step forward, and I look forward to seeing BM develop.

UI Improvements:
I'm pleased to see that all of these items are coming. I am actually quite well adjusted to the avatar movement system currently being used, but I know that many are struggling to adjust to it. Enhanced camera controls is the big plus for me, as it doesn't really make sense to have the ability to make wonderful things, the way you can in BM, without being able to get a good look at them. I look forward to being able to zoom in on details and zoom out to appreciate buildings properly. I thought avatar names were already displayed overhead, so I guess I am not sure what is being added there.

Communications:
Again, all good stuff!

Avatar Customization and Development Tools:
This is the area where I have qualms. I made my concerns known in an earlier post http://dev.bluemars.com/forum/viewtopic ... =930#p4935 so I won't go into them again. There are already some constructive suggestions on that thread. The good that might come out of this batch of changes is that the avatar proportions get improved (longer arms, smaller collar bones, and narrower feet, please!). What I am thinking of doing is designing clothes for one and only one avatar shape, and I would like it to be a good shape. The current avatar is not bad, but not ideal. It would be a pain, but I'm willing to redo all clothes I have already uploaded to fit the ideal avatar. If a customer wants to use a different avatar shape then they will just have to accept that things might not look perfect. I am very tall in real life and, while most people think this is a good way to be, one of the downsides is the difficulty of getting things to fit. Not just clothes, most things like vacuum cleaners and tables are too small or too low, too! I wish people who have very distorted avatars would accept this Finally, having hair and attachments presumable means that all the hat designs I have made will be uploadable. That'll be great. What about gloves, too?

Places Browser, Downloads:
I'm not sure what the problems being solved here are, so I can't really comment.

Developer MyPage:
Sounds all right.

Expanded User Mypage
I'd like to be able to delete people from the friends list. Over time you look at some names blankly, forget who they were and never see them again anyway.

Content, Residences:
I think I know where the shop is going to appear As soon as the methods are worked out for this I hope to be set up and in business.

On a more general note, I am concerned that the great majority of requested features are just like what we already have in SL. I am concerned about this for three reasons:

1. SL can be slow and unreliable and I think that this is partly because they originally attempted to do everything through the 3D interface and it is overloaded. Now, they are changing direction and putting functions like commerce and socialising offline in ordinary 2D websites. I think they were silly to implement voice, since it never had the quality of Skype, and most people I know simply use Skype in parallel with SL when they want to talk. I would be sad to see BM go the same way, overloading the viewer and servers with functions when a bit of enlightened co-opting of other services does a much better job.

2. I think BM needs to differentiate in more ways that just offering better graphics and less lag. I would like to see numerous design differences. I know that the common wisdom among SLers is that it will be the SL crowd who will populate BM, but I am not so sure. According to the owners of SL, it is still the case that 95% of first time users get turned off and never come back. SL has very poor retention, so it is clear that there are millions of people out there who are curious about 3D environments but didn't like SL. Also, SL appeals to those who like to potter around and make things inworld. BM is clearly not aimed at this sector, not yet anyway. BM appeals to people like me, who like the idea of accepting bigger 3D design challenges, and those who will just want to do more socially-oriented things like shopping and getting together. It will be very interesting to observe how the two populations overlap, but I am by no means convinced that BM's will be a subset of SL's or that the overlap will even be that great.

3. There is always a danger of thinking inside the square and applying already-known solutions to problems without first thinking that there may be a better way. Let's not just follow SL, let's go one better. Do we really need inworld groups, for example? Let's see if we can figure out whether there is a better way to serve all the needs that groups serve. Maybe we'll discover or invent something that the owners of SL will look at and wish they'd thought of! And are the downsides of being able to pass items around freely, such as hugely bloated inventories (and don't tell me that 60,000 items in a SL inventory is unusual, or that people really need all that stuff), a saturated market full of freebies of dubious quality, and so on, are actually bigger problems in the long run than the problem we are trying to solve? I'm not convinced that freely copiable and exchangeable inventory is a good idea. I can see some advantages to it, several of course, but let's take the opportunity to consider a better way. Did free teleporting kill the community hubs in SL, at the same time as making it easier to jump around? Some say it did. Those who paid to get land near hubs were certainly not impressed when hubs went away

I know I am not alone in wanting to see BM be very different from SL, but I also know that things tend naturally to converge if you let them.

[Zetsumeii]

I think this list of features is pretty amazing and consequently I am neither surprised nor disappointed that it isn't all coming in the next release. just a quarter of these items would be a big step forward, and I look forward to seeing BM develop.

UI Improvements:
I'm pleased to see that all of these items are coming. I am actually quite well adjusted to the avatar movement system currently being used, but I know that many are struggling to adjust to it. Enhanced camera controls is the big plus for me, as it doesn't really make sense to have the ability to make wonderful things, the way you can in BM, without being able to get a good look at them. I look forward to being able to zoom in on details and zoom out to appreciate buildings properly. I thought avatar names were already displayed overhead, so I guess I am not sure what is being added there.

Communications:
Again, all good stuff!

Avatar Customization and Development Tools:
This is the area where I have qualms. I made my concerns known in an earlier post http://dev.bluemars.com/forum/viewtopic ... =930#p4935 so I won't go into them again. There are already some constructive suggestions on that thread. The good that might come out of this batch of changes is that the avatar proportions get improved (longer arms, smaller collar bones, and narrower feet, please!). What I am thinking of doing is designing clothes for one and only one avatar shape, and I would like it to be a good shape. The current avatar is not bad, but not ideal. It would be a pain, but I'm willing to redo all clothes I have already uploaded to fit the ideal avatar. If a customer wants to use a different avatar shape then they will just have to accept that things might not look perfect. I am very tall in real life and, while most people think this is a good way to be, one of the downsides is the difficulty of getting things to fit. Not just clothes, most things like vacuum cleaners and tables are too small or too low, too! I wish people who have very distorted avatars would accept this Finally, having hair and attachments presumable means that all the hat designs I have made will be uploadable. That'll be great. What about gloves, too?

Places Browser, Downloads:
I'm not sure what the problems being solved here are, so I can't really comment.

Developer MyPage:
Sounds all right.

Expanded User Mypage
I'd like to be able to delete people from the friends list. Over time you look at some names blankly, forget who they were and never see them again anyway.

Content, Residences:
I think I know where the shop is going to appear As soon as the methods are worked out for this I hope to be set up and in business.

On a more general note, I am concerned that the great majority of requested features are just like what we already have in SL. I am concerned about this for three reasons:

1. SL can be slow and unreliable and I think that this is partly because they originally attempted to do everything through the 3D interface and it is overloaded. Now, they are changing direction and putting functions like commerce and socialising offline in ordinary 2D websites. I think they were silly to implement voice, since it never had the quality of Skype, and most people I know simply use Skype in parallel with SL when they want to talk. I would be sad to see BM go the same way, overloading the viewer and servers with functions when a bit of enlightened co-opting of other services does a much better job.

2. I think BM needs to differentiate in more ways that just offering better graphics and less lag. I would like to see numerous design differences. I know that the common wisdom among SLers is that it will be the SL crowd who will populate BM, but I am not so sure. According to the owners of SL, it is still the case that 95% of first time users get turned off and never come back. SL has very poor retention, so it is clear that there are millions of people out there who are curious about 3D environments but didn't like SL. Also, SL appeals to those who like to potter around and make things inworld. BM is clearly not aimed at this sector, not yet anyway. BM appeals to people like me, who like the idea of accepting bigger 3D design challenges, and those who will just want to do more socially-oriented things like shopping and getting together. It will be very interesting to observe how the two populations overlap, but I am by no means convinced that BM's will be a subset of SL's or that the overlap will even be that great.

3. There is always a danger of thinking inside the square and applying already-known solutions to problems without first thinking that there may be a better way. Let's not just follow SL, let's go one better. Do we really need inworld groups, for example? Let's see if we can figure out whether there is a better way to serve all the needs that groups serve. Maybe we'll discover or invent something that the owners of SL will look at and wish they'd thought of! And are the downsides of being able to pass items around freely, such as hugely bloated inventories (and don't tell me that 60,000 items in a SL inventory is unusual, or that people really need all that stuff), a saturated market full of freebies of dubious quality, and so on, are actually bigger problems in the long run than the problem we are trying to solve? I'm not convinced that freely copiable and exchangeable inventory is a good idea. I can see some advantages to it, several of course, but let's take the opportunity to consider a better way. Did free teleporting kill the community hubs in SL, at the same time as making it easier to jump around? Some say it did. Those who paid to get land near hubs were certainly not impressed when hubs went away

I know I am not alone in wanting to see BM be very different from SL, but I also know that things tend naturally to converge if you let them.

Hiya Mako, I'm going to have to disagree with you on some points here, but your overall statement of "Lets make it unique and better than SL" I can atleast go with. I personally think that freedom should be the number one thing that is put into a game. SL's range of freedom is very high, you can cam around wherever you'd like, create mostly wherever you'd like and do just about whatever you'd like. Chances are very high that there is something you will like there if you can get past the initial sign up and getting in process. I personally think that the Group system that SL has is one of the best ways of organization for such a group concept, and also think its counter intuitive to limit groups because of that. I think Blue Mars can learn alot of SL's advantages and disadvantages and shape them to fit the overall populous much better than SL.

As of right now, the SL to other places ratio of who is interested in BM is still on the side of SL, as the most of the skilled people who were already modeling, and doing their own things in SL saw BM as another opportunity for expanding their limits and being able to do much more with a city than you could ever wish to do with a sim.

As far as voice chat goes, i do think that co-opping with Skype is pretty much the best you are going to get, and unless BM can partner with Skype over this, I doubt the quality will be as good inworld. Nevertheless though, alot of people still enjoyed the voice option in SL and it is very popular there as opposed to using Skype. I believe if BM wanted to offer voice that would be a good idea for those who arent interested in co-opping another program. There should be options, not restrictions. Try to offer as much as possible, and see what happens.

However, I am also convinced that if Blue Mars adopted several of the current SL features, they would do it 20x better and have it be amazing, because the staff behind the scenes are extremely competent and know what they are doing. In SL its more like "hire some linden to do some crap around SL" but in BM it feels more like "we need engineers, and these people are really interested in what they want to do, lets hire them" because on all occasions interacting with the staff, they seem to really like what they are doing and creating within Blue Mars. Something you cant see in SL. Try being friends with a Linden, or try talking to M Linden. The chances are really low you'll get a one to one with them. Where as, almost ANYONE at Avatar Reality is very open to being friendly and -wants- to hear from us. I believe there are two dynamics at play here, the one i previously explained and then the SL Dynamic. SL feels that they've established themselves, and as such no longer cares nearly as much as they should for their customers, because they are already happy with the profits they've generated and are only concerned about increasing profit margins, not increasing customer happyness.

SL is a 10 year old platform that has been slapped around so many times, it's really starting to show. Alot of the abilities in SL when it first came out were pretty ground breaking, but now as time has passed SL has done very little to improve the -core platform- and have only been slapping features and features on to hide the fact that their platform is grossly antiquated. Alot of what SL has, could really be amazing in Blue Mars, a very new platform that is just begging to be developed in full and to be embraced by the people.

So as much as I understand why you may be wary of SL-like features in Blue Mars, one thing you should realize is that the Blue Mars platform is no many times more robust than the SL platform that it could handle most if not all of SL's features, and do it fairly well ontop of that.

Debates like these are going to be what gets things done in Blue Mars here, as Avatar Reality is very receptive and very active within their own user community, something you dont see often at all.

[Mako Magellan]

Zetsumeii

I think you've misinterpreted my main point. I am not arguing against groups or voice or any particular feature being discussed. All I want to say is these features of SL are not beyond question. Let's question what they really do (both pros and cons), and use them only if we can't come up with better ideas for doing the same thing.

I am also keenly aware of the differences in the way the two companies relate to their customers. For all its features, SL is in a bad way: users are very resentful, if the forums and blog comments that follow any SL announcement are any indication. It is probably as bad a relationship as I have ever seen between a company and its customers, all the more so for being conducted through public correspondence. But it wasn't always so. There was a time when you could chat amicably with Lindens inworld. And despite its shortcomings, I am still amazed at what SL is capable of doing. But when a company of a few hundred employees has to look after millions of users playing with a ton of inhouse features, even with the best intentions in the world, the service inevitably becomes a little less personal. We are still in the halcyon days with BM; we ought to enjoy them while they last

You raise freedom as a principle, with which I have no argument - but when you come down to practicalities, to take an SL example, which freedom do you most cherish, the freedom to wear 1,000 prims in attachments, or the freedom to not have your sim lagged by others wearing 1,000 prims there?

[Zetsumeii]

Zetsumeii

I think you've misinterpreted my main point. I am not arguing against groups or voice or any particular feature being discussed. All I want to say is these features of SL are not beyond question. Let's question what they really do (both pros and cons), and use them only if we can't come up with better ideas for doing the same thing.

I am also keenly aware of the differences in the way the two companies relate to their customers. For all its features, SL is in a bad way: users are very resentful, if the forums and blog comments that follow any SL announcement are any indication. It is probably as bad a relationship as I have ever seen between a company and its customers, all the more so for being conducted through public correspondence. But it wasn't always so. There was a time when you could chat amicably with Lindens inworld. And despite its shortcomings, I am still amazed at what SL is capable of doing. But when a company of a few hundred employees has to look after millions of users playing with a ton of inhouse features, even with the best intentions in the world, the service inevitably becomes a little less personal. We are still in the halcyon days with BM; we ought to enjoy them while they last

You raise freedom as a principle, with which I have no argument - but when you come down to practicalities, to take an SL example, which freedom do you most cherish, the freedom to wear 1,000 prims in attachments, or the freedom to not have your sim lagged by others wearing 1,000 prims there?

Ah yes, I agree with you now. However on your last comment, I do believe that as a sim/property owner in SL you take some risk and understanding that you could very easily come across that other person wearing the 1,000 prim avi. I would cherish the freedom to wear the 1,000 prim attachments more than the freedom not to have my sim lagged by those, as i know if i was in the users place i would want that same freedom. However, BM will not have those issues because of the ingenious local loading.

[Geenz]

How about removing the point light source that's seemingly welded to the camera. That tends to make a lot of things look kinda... weird at certain angles, and overbright when there's light sources nearby, or if you're in the sun. It also makes skin look like cheap plastic, or like nothing but blocks of wax.