How to Salvage Blue Mars PC: 1. Rebuild the Welcome Area

[Traveller ID:Travelle]

After discussing in the Welcome Area today, it should be redone to make it more compelling.
It should be some form of urban, clubby environment. My thoughts were taht it should be dark and flashy. JamT thought Beach City should become the welcome area.

Whatever it is, it needs:

Buildings
Scripters ( for syncrhonization and other stuff)
Animating (Dances and others)
Music
Face and Body Building Center (Cosmetic Surgery Clinic)
Shopping (Shops by category Clothes, Accessories, etc)
Techie stuff to use and bu
Community Support (reception/people presence/bots)

These should be divied up and worked on as a project with specialized team members. Once fully built we need to have staff there.

[VR Hacks]

No bots, please. The bots in the welcome area are annoying.

[jamt ID:jamt]

Hi!! Its me pain in butt!! Well to make things simpler, can you make the WA in Beach City?!! You have shops, bowling, golf, Apts, mountain climb, turn that beautiful hotel into meeting place, a bar and back courtyard into a dance place , beach parties, boat races, etc. etc ! The old WA would be the learning center, let people choose if they want to learn or jump into Beach city! Ohhh dare I say like dani's movie theater have one in beach city, with special movies in Tharsis!! AND the cities can advertise, like Misty Hollow, say ohh hmm join us in a special land, rent houses, and shop! Say shade city, you can shop till u drop, Estelles for fine museums and clothes, and a beach to die for visit here! Caledonia, hmm Mako no yelling!! Turn of the century and now, fashions clothes, furniture, be in style shop caledonia!!! ok my spelling is bad but u get the drift!! Cloud city, ummm don't get stuck in the heavens, sigh! Wildwood come play games!! Seee put this in beach city, then say download to visit here! That will get people going and if u can in diff languages! Come on guys we can do this Mars is way toooo special, we must make this work! your jamt the trouble maker

[VR Hacks]

I agree, Beach City would be a good welcome area.

[estelleparnall ID:estellep]

I also think I agree. People should be able to retain their cities if they want, but a vibrant meeting place with things to do and see would be excellent. I think the initial idea of the present WA is that it would be low lag for computers with not much grunt. But we wouldnt have retained those ppl anyway if they ventured beyond it.. I am sure most of us would be interested in contributing (in both a commercial and non-commercial sense) to Beach city.

[DanielRavenNest ID:DanielRa]

My thought is the Welcome area should be tutorial area for how to use the software, but move activities to BC. Let us take over spots occupied by the empty buildings and start filling out with more shops, games, cafe, dance club, etc. One or two people would need to take over the city-level tasks like creating blocks, since the AR staff likely won't put in time to do that. They would only have
to do the QA and publish the update. We already have an editable copy of Beach City in the Sample Data to work from, and we can organize ourselves with a forum section here, a project email list, or something, whatever works.

If this goes forward, I will be happy to contribute what I can to the project. We could also attract new developers wanting to learn game design, as this would effectively be a "building a game level" project that would give them some experience on the technical side and working in a team.

[NCARalph ID:NCARalph]

I like the drift of this, making Beach City the main city with developers working at the Block level.
However, the problem I see is that without having scripting and similar capabilities that are currently City Developer only, the whole thing is going to be pretty crippled.

[Traveller ID:Travelle]

I agree it might be crippled.

However, the alternative is BM will go away as we know it. I'd love to work on a project like this and see what could be done.
I think that the welcome area was pretty fun at times, because everyone congregated there.


An increase in numbers who are in world all the time would certainly wake people up. If we don't do it...we'll never know.

[jamt ID:jamt]

Hi! Just to let you know there are some Martians left working on Mars! Give them time to sort things out, we don't want to put them in shock, Earth is a long way to go to get oxygen! Love and hugs jamt

[Traveller ID:Travelle]

Okay, first step.

Animators...how hard would it be to animate and script a synchronized couple's dance? I'm guessing real hard, but we would need that to get dancing going, particularly the synch script.

Can it even be done?