May be this information will be somewhat useful for a Project Sansar team. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If someone remembers back in 2009 there was a "Blue Mars" virtual world, that promised good graphics and physics (it was based on Cryengine-2). So, at autumn of 2009, I have signed NDA as a creator and started building my own virutal world. But six months later I have lost any hope because of some really obvious problems. Here they are (all IMHO of course): 1)Creating 3D levels must be as simple as possible (user friendly UI & all happens in-game); good examples are G-MOD or Lumion3D - via graphical catalogue you just drag&drop around level any 3D-meshes, lights, materials, sounds, particle effects and so on + library of good presets for any type of level environment (desert/rocks/hills/etc). What I got in BlueMars was around 9 versions of Sandbox2 editor (!!!) one for each task - building level/interior/cityblock/etc. They had same UI as original Crysis Sandbox-2 game editor - designed for offline work by team of dedicated professional game developers (each one for each task - material artist, particle artist, etc) or geeks (it was familiar for me because of some experience with Crysis modding but headache for most of the developers). As result 99% of potential creators were cut off because of too high bar & tons of english documentation (not everyone speaks english) & Blue Mars team spending a lot of time not on their job but on writing a documentation and helping creators on forums dig through complicated level building process. 2)There must be a marketplace for all types of assets (lib's of 3D-meshes, sounds, mateirals, particle effects and so on) integrated in engine (web-only version is not enough!) & for smooth start of new virtual world platform this marketplace must contain decent amount of common stuff. In Blue Mars creators was able only to sell some bipedal avatars& clothes. All other content must be created from scratch by each developer individually - all models, textures, sounds, particles, scripts... That's simply killed most of the projects - 99% of people can't be creative more than month or two, decent result must be achieved in that time or they stop/leave. My motivation died after around 6 month, at that time there was left less than 10 active projects/teams. 3)Team behind the virtual world platform must be professional. Yep, obvious, but two major mistakes described above were only possible because of non-professional dev team of Blue Mars. They bought Cryengine-2 licence instead of writing engine from scratch - that was realy good decision because that saves 4-5 years of developing, but after that BlueMars bosses hire team of "generic programmers/UI designers" and these people simply were not able to see huge errors in project's main concept + couldn't seriously change Cryengine2 (it was too complicated for them because it was written by CryTek professionals (best in realtime engines business, but there are some things in engine what must be re-written from scratch for virtual world needs)).