What kind of physics engine does Blue Mars have?

Blue Mars uses the CryPhysics physics engine. The physics system supports character inverse kinematics, vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, and soft body effects. For cloth simulation, we use the SyFlex realtime cloth simulator.

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How many avatars can you see at once and how close do they have to be for them to be visable?

The number of Avatars you can see on screen at once and the distance at which you can see them depends on a number of variables like the speed of the computer and the speed of the Internet connection.  In general, you can see approximately the 50 avatars closest to you.

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Will Blue Mars support nVidia's PhysX?

We are exploring support for alternate physics engines like PhysX but they are not officially supported at this time.

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What technology standards do you support?

We support the COLLADA 3D data and animation format. Although it’s not an open source “standard,” we also support Flash files for GUI elements and in world signage. In addition, we support LUA based scripting, a very popular programming language in the games industry.

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What kind of scripting language does Blue Mars use?

We use LUA scripts. They are executed locally on each client machine.

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What firewall ports does Blue Mars use?

Blue Mars uses the same basic settings as Skype, with these outgoing ports:

• UDP: 8000
• UDP: 10000 to 20000 inclusive

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When will Beta phase of Blue Mars be finished? When will you release the final version?

When will we stop improving Blue Mars? Never. We will continue to build new features and improve the ones we have as part of our ongoing development process. That said, there are quite a few new features on our road map for this year like improved chat system, server side streaming, animation tools, web integration, more attachments and much more.

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