Blue World Notes: How Blue Mars Can (and Will) Run on Macs and iPads

"Three Ways Blue Mars Can (and Will) Run on Macs & iPads" is my latest post on the Blue Mars blog, giving some background to my recent announcement on becoming a consultant for Blue Mars. While it's not currently possible to run the developer version of Blue Mars on the Mac with "a few tweaks" (my poor wording, which Mac users rightly knocked me for), there are a couple ways to get it running on the Mac. More importantly, the cloud-based version of Blue Mars will be available for Mac users in the next few months, on the native OS, without requiring a Windows installation. Not just on the Mac, but on iPads too. That version will run on is OTOY, which just announced the partnership with Blue Mars on VentureBeat.

Comments

[Trinity Dejavu]

So Tweak has been revised to "Vapourware" or buy a new OS and dual boot / Voodoo.

Nice. Fair to say - DOES NOT RUN ON A MAC !!

[ZenRascal Mandelbrot]

So what you're saying is that these workarounds are what is (and will be) available. And is it correct to say that there are *NO* plans for a native Mac client analagous to the Win version?

[Jim Sorrento]

Hamlet,

Have you actually seen Blue Mars running on anything OTOY has produced, or are these dates just hopeful indications from both companies? I don't believe OTOY has done any live demonstrations of the technology they claim will be ready to release before the end of the year.

[Nat Merit]

So it works on Macs if you buy a copy of Windows and dual boot it? Wow by that logic it works on Linux too! ;)

[Nat Merit]

But in all seriousness, server side rendering actually tends to be quite poor for applications with a point and click style interface like Blue Mars or Second Life (Blue Mars more so due to its click to move system). While you can ignore a slight delay in response in something like a racing game, it becomes immediately obvious that you're limited by your broadband connection once you're seeing a lag in the response of your mouse pointer.

Most people's Internet connections are too slow to handle a remote desktop session to a machine in a different location running Blue Mars, I don't see how having Blue Mars running on a server will be massively different.

If you ever have to wait for HD video to buffer before you can view it, you're not going to be able to use Blue Mars 'in the cloud' without at least reductions in graphics quality. Having your mouse clicks register in the wrong place is probably an even more frustrating type of lag than the sort Second Life users experience...

[Hamlet Au]

Jim, updates that'll answer your question soon.

Nat, the cloud rendered version of Blue Mars will NOT require Windows or a dual boot to run on the Mac.

[Psion]

Native Linux or not interested.

[Jim Sorrento]

Hamlet,

The question was pretty simple: have you seen Blue Mars streaming over OTOY? Both companies have "announced" that this is coming, so you wouldn't be violating any embargoes or NDAs by providing a simple answer to that. But your reply above ("updates that'll answer your question soon") doesn't answer the question at all... The tech world is full of "real soon now" vaporware and I'm hoping your "embedded" relationship with Avatar Reality will allow you to speak honestly and openly about what you're seeing. Your reply was a hedge, not an answer.

You were the one who wrote the headline "How Blue Mars Can (and Will) Run on Macs and iPads" -- I'm just asking how you actually know that. Have you seen it?

By the way, I'll take your response as a "no" for now.