Comments on: Life On Mars? Yes. Albeit Blue.

By: Rock Vacirca

Rock Vacirca — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:30:21 +0000

Blue Mars now has its own independent forum.

http://life-on-mars.proboards.com

Rock

By: Mongychops

Mongychops — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:31:27 +0000

Haha, stealthy editing there!

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:30:41 +0000

The Crysis engine is impressive and it ran fairly well on my MacBook Pro for the most part but (for me at least) seemed to have much more trouble rendering indoor scenes than outdoor. I gave up on the game near the end (I assume) on the boat as it seemed to fall apart as a game, both technically, story-wise and fun-wise…

I guess a second life style game could work and I think good graphics will be what makes ‘second life’ go main stream, but the CryEngine is overkill, at least for the next year or so.

By: Kadayi

Kadayi — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:14:19 +0000

So is the beta just for developers or players as well? There doesn’t seem to be any further details at their site unfortunately.

By: Ging

Ging — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:47:26 +0000

2177 certainly falls within the Blue Mars timeline, so it’s possible it’s a homage rather than a licensing thing.

By: Yhancik

Yhancik — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:46:16 +0000

Mhh.. not really convinced so far…

- The CryEngine 2 isn’t very “casual” in term of system requirements. Of course in a year or two, it will seem less spectacular than today. But Second Life can run on a 6 years old PC…

- Who will be those “actual developers” ? One of the interest of Second Life is that anyone can bring his own content to the game. For the worst, and the best, of course.

- It also mean that with a little bit of talent, you can live freely, building your own stuff. It doesn’t really sound like it will be possible in BM, so how much will it cost ?

- And even if, they’d need a great tool à la Spore to allow people to build complex things at least as easily as in SL (where such complexity isn’t required).

- It sounds like it will be mostly “realistic”. SL can be (well, within its own limits), or not (not possible irl), and that’s another of its appeal (to artists OR furries :p)

So yes, I realize that BM will have higher quality contents (not especially more interesting, though), and that will the selling point. I’m just not sure it will be enough, for now…

By: DigitalSignalX

DigitalSignalX — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:35:25 +0000

First thing I thought of was the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson too – not much room there for a game unless you include some hydrogen blimps to fly around in, and taking core samples for XP and SP is your thing. The politics though.. well, that’s another story, but you don’t use a super-bang world size FPS engine for a talking political thriller… OR DO YOU?

By: drunkymonkey

drunkymonkey — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:18:59 +0000

Those landscapes look shit hot. The detail on the mountains themselves is scarily impressive.

By: trioptimum

trioptimum — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:01:45 +0000

The drawback of measures like this is that someone innocuously surfing Google Images for screenshots (not to steal, just to look at) will find themselves looking at something rather different when clicking through for the full size image.

Such hotlink vigilantism provided me with my first exposure to tubgirl (DON’T INDULGE YOUR CURIOSITY), which after searching for pictures of Scafell Pike came as something of a shock.

By: phuzz

phuzz — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:44:34 +0000

^^^
It’s been done, with very entertaining results…
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000278.html
(the image being linked to had been included as a ‘kit’ for making myspace pages, without even bothering to host the image themselves, cue entertainment as ten thousand teens find their myspace backdrop has changed to goatse…)

By: Meat Circus

Meat Circus — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:25:51 +0000

@the_b:

Goatse, surely?

We can configure mod_rewrite to serve up goatse to any external image linky if needed.

By: Meat Circus

Meat Circus — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:14:43 +0000

Dear RPS people:

You can create mod_rewrite rules for your images that blocks access for people whose HTTP referer is not set to rockpapershotgun.com. That should strongly de-encouragise external hotlink bastardry.

Assuming Posi have your webserver set up as they used to, it should be simply a matter of adding them to your .htaccess file.

I’m sure a Posi redshirt could do it for you.

Updatery:

It would look something a lot like this:
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} .*jpg$|.*gif$|.*png$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !rockpapershotgun\.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]