Live Music Launches in Blue Mars, Here's the Video!

Via Metaverse TV, here's a clip from last night's inaugural live music performance in Blue Mars (where I sometimes consult.) While I'm profoundly biased, I thought the show went fairly well (for a first time thing), with a modest house of about 25. And even if you aren't impressed by the visuals, do give a listen to Anekretia, who rocks hard. My hope is to quickly see more performer and audience animations, lighting systems and visual effects, an in-world tipping system, and all the things we've come to expect from metaverse-based live shows. But as it's written in the haiku of Kobayashi Issa (or maybe this was Lemmy of Motörhead), Oh snail / climb the Mountain of Rock / but slowly, slowly!

Comments

[Robustus Hax]

Thanks for posting this Hamlet, just wanted to chime in with some notes here about Blue Mars mainly from the pure machinima aspect.

1) The graphics are great, and it is very refreshing to not have green ghosts or grey unrezzed avatars standing around.

2) The camera controls are better than they were a few months ago, which is a step, but these controls still need to be revised and/or options added. With the point and click movement of the avatars, and the mouse clicking using alt-control etc, I found my avatar kept getting up and running around while trying to maneuver the camera to get the shots I wanted. Definitely need to have an option to turn off the mouse click movement on the avatar. In a virtual world where you are trying to click on stuff to see what it is or cam around and explore, it is not always the greatest thing to have your avatar on point and click movement.

3) Space Navigator support, or free cam mode. In a world where most of what you can do is just explore, it is very very difficult when your camera is limited. Even with the better camera controls the camera is still limited in what you can do and what kind of shots you can get. Also noticed this as a big hurdle when Im actually walking around Blue Mars trying to explore, I have to walk my avatar around and use these akward camera controls. This is especially annoying since even when you turn your avatar into running mode it is like a slow walk compared to SL. I think some of the Blue Mars cities do have the free floating camera mode, not all of them though.

4) the audio streaming was coming from an object on the other side of the welcome center which was not easy to spot, and even when I did I was unable to get it to work. They could really do themselves a favor to put an audio button on the UI menu or something. I ended up just having to record off the web.

5) Couldn't get the UI to hide naturally with the control-h, and while filming everytime my mouse cursor crossed an avatar or chair/object it lit up, you can probably see that in the video. Need to be able to turn it off.

Otherwise it is great to see the progress Blue Mars is making and the avatars look great, and most of the animations for the avatar look great as well.

Anyway, that is my feed back, i hope someone working on the controls at Blue Mars is listening, because if these things are fixed I could see it being an amazing place to shoot machinima.

[Red]

Interesting that music is FINALLY happening in there, but it does seem inordinately difficult to sort out.

I'm in Redzone (we play regularly in SL) and we WANT to play in Blue Mars, but the show would be impossible to do at present due to the complexity (it would be quite time consuming to translate to the environment) and the hardware requirements (we would need about 4 new PCs to do it properly).

If someone from Blue Mars wants to HELP us get in there then please get in touch with us...we're happy to discuss some kind of collaboration.

We will watch developments in BM with interest...

[Anek Fuchs]

I actively search out places to bring music, so speak up if you are in need. On the whole "is Blue Mar" listening? yes they are, there have been many modifications over the last six months just to bring music there, and I hope to help create a stable music economy, there, and across the rest of the Meta verse.