Blue mars

Very little is known about the plot of the game at the moment. It is known that the events of the game will develop in 2177 on the terraformed Mars . As a result, Mars was colonized by people who resettled from Earth. ^[one]

The development of “Blue Mars” was launched in early 2007.

On March 7, Avatar Reality licensed the CryEngine 2 game engine , developed by the German company Crytek, for Blue Mars. A beta version was scheduled for late 2008 and a release for 2009. ^{[2] [3]}

In March 2008, “Blue Mars” was officially announced at the Game Developers Conference 2008 conference of game developers ^[1]

In mid-November 2008, Avatar Reality, in an interview with Eurogamer, announced that Blue Mars would enter the beta phase not at the end of 2008, as it had been planned earlier, but in January 2009. The developers said that beta testing of the game will last about three months, and the release will occur in April 2009. ^[one]

Open testing began in the fall of 2009. As of May 2010, the game entered the stage of public beta (v0.8666).

Blue Mars offers tools and hosting for those who want to create their own 3D world, and for Internet users the opportunity to travel through these 3D worlds, interacting / communicating with others. The toolkit for creating a 3D world (Blue Mars SDK) is free and available for download after registration as a developer (as developer) on the official website ; To host the created 3D project on Blue Mars servers, you need to purchase hosting on the company's servers. For a user who wants to visit Blue Mars, you need to register on the official website and download a free 3D client application through which you can access the virtual worlds of the project.

In addition to tools for creating an environment (world), the developer SDK also includes tools for importing clothes and other accessories for avatars. The world economy is under development: on May 10, 2010 the opportunity is available to purchase in-game currency (BLU) through the Visa payment system and withdraw it to real currency through PayPal / Bank Transfer; You can buy and sell accessories for avatars, rent stores and entire sections of your 3D world.

In general, on May 10, 2010, “Blue Mars” is in an early stage of development - the visitor’s capabilities are limited by chatting in an uncomfortable chat and buying accessories for a person’s avatar, as well as customizing the face for your avatar; toolkit location developer is very demanding (inaccessible link) (English) to the professionalism of the developer, which affected the quality and number of user worlds. The development of clothes and accessories for avatars, however, is implemented much easier and more convenient.

Blue Mars is developed on the basis of a modified game engine CryEngine 2 , which was created by the German company Crytek ^{[2] [3]} . It provides support for dynamic shadows, depth of field and motion blur effects, texture resolution up to 4096x4096 pixels in * .dds format, dynamic change of time of day, volumetric clouds, particle system , more than 15 shaders for realistic simulation of various materials, import of high-polygon geometry ( up to 65536 polygons per model), support for LODs for models, inverse kinematics for skeletal animation, modern WYSWYG editors based on modified Sandbox2 , location size up to 8x8 km, weight up to 4GB uncompressed, Lua scripts.

Technology StreamBase Systems Complex Event Processing ( rus. Complex for event processing ) provides online interaction of up to 10 thousand visitors simultaneously in one location.

Scaleform technology provides support for Flash applications (full support for Flash 8.0 + AS2) and Flash interfaces (HUDs) within the game.

The compression format for the downloadable content is 7-zip .

Blue Mars needs the following system requirements: ^[4]

• Platform: x86-compatible PC or Mac (via Boot Camp )
• Operating system: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (both x86 and x64 versions are supported)
• Processor: from 2 GHz AMD / Intel
• RAM: from 2GB for Windows XP, from 4GB for Windows Vista / Windows 7
• Video card: DirectX 10 with 512MB of video memory; NVIDIA - from 9600GT and higher; ATI - from Radeon 3870 and higher
• Monitor: resolution 1280x960 pix and higher.
• Disk space: at least 4 GB for installing the client part.

OTOY support has been announced - the ability to visit Blue Mars from any device that supports an Internet connection, including a PDA and a smartphone . ^[five]

List of expected improvements and innovations ^{[6] [7]} :

• Flexible settings for text chat
• Improved internal movement and camera control
• Copy / paste support and clickable links in text chat
• Improved default look / animation of avatars
• The ability to modify the proportions and addition of avatars through the developer SDK
• Ability to upload your animations for avatars through the developer SDK + documentation
• Ability to sell modified avatars and animations
• Advanced avatar face settings
• Autoconvert jpg textures to game format (dds) in any editor from the SDK.
• Convenient background loading of locations in the location browser.

• Project Photo Album
• Official site of the project (English)
• Blue Mars SDK Reference
• Developer Website
• An article about the game on the Gigaom website
• An article about a game on the Virtual Worlds News website .