At this point, the Blue Mars beta client is very limited when it comes to customization. For the life of me, I could not find a screen to customize the graphic settings any further than this:

Rendering Quality is too general. And general is simpler, and simple is user-friendly, but there are better ways of implementing it. Take Second Life, for example, with its (customizable) presets of graphic settings.

My hardware is old and my wallet is empty (thank you, ex-fiancée!), and I bet I’m not the only one with those two issues, so perhaps it would be a good idea for the Blue Mars devs to consider increasing the level of customization in this regard. Unless they want to keep dirt-poor people like me out of their community, which wouldn’t surprise me – not because they’re mean, but because it seems they’re taking a very … exclusivist approach with their high community standards. Have you tried signing up as a developer? It’s rather frightening, yet promising. But I digress…

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The first time you run Blue Mars, it’ll create a series of files and folders, including game.cfg. This is the path to mine:

C:\Documents and Settings\Pablo\My Documents\My Games\BlueMars\game.cfg

Open it with your favorite editor and go to line 32, where you’ll find something like this:

By default, it runs at 1280×720. You can pick the resolution you wish, but the aspect ratio MUST be 16:9, otherwise things gets distorted. Here’s what I ended up with:

I changed the resolution to 960×540. Anything smaller would make the text illegible for me. But that was the only way I found to increase my FPS to… like, 10. Furthermore, I lowered some of the other graphic settings by replacing the 3s with 1s, as you can tell on the picture above. Apparently, Blue Mars reverted a couple of them on the following execution, but most stuck.

For my particular configuration of hardware, this modification turned the unplayable Blue Mars odyssey into a semi-playable educational experience. It allowed me to walk, run, figure out the camera and navigational controls (which are rather bizarre) and chat with some other members.

In conclusion, you need to buy all of this many times so I can buy a new computer!