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Myst - In Realtime?
"Personal Musings: After downloading the Serious Sam demo -- excuse me, technology test -- last weekend, and marveling at the rendering quality, it occurred to me that technology has finally advanced to the point where we could do Myst in realtime. Here it is three days later, and I discover it's being worked on. Just amazing.
I'm interested to see how they address certain issues in the game. One thing that made some of Myst's puzzles work at all was that you didn't have complete freedom of movement. For example, the clock tower at one end of the main island was only accessible after you fiddled with the knobs and got the walkway to appear. But in realtime Myst, what's to prevent you from just wading over? It can't be more than three feet deep there. Likewise, what if you walk off the dock and into the water at the beginning of the game? Will you drown immediately, will there be an obvious way back out, or will they contrive that You Just Can't Go There? Oh, and if I crank the boiler pressure really high, can I launch the tree off the island? :-)
However they address these issues, I'm interested in seeing the result."
Terminus is a space flight simulator, with trading and a dynamic storyline. It also features advanced AI and runs on win32, macos and linux.
It is *not* a fps.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I hope its as good as elite. (my favourite game of all time)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Why do gamers always totally bash Cyan and the Myst line of games? When I first saw Myst, I fell in love with it. It's not just pretty pictures as most people think it is. It's one of the few games that makes you think about what to do next. If Cyan had put in a time limit on the game (though that might have been unnatural to the idea of "go explore this place"), I think it would have been even more challenging.
However, here's a thought: Myst is the best selling game of all time. It has sold more copies than Quake, and was the first game to sell a million copies. Not a single game has surpassed Myst in this way. It's also the first game to, IMO, really appeal to the average non-gamer.
That's my rant for today...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
After a few years, you really do forget a lot of the puzzles and things, although it does come back quickly, and you can never forget how the ending works.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Ok, do we have a concensous here? Can we all agree that all games, including chess, zork, head games, foreplay, thermonuclear war, and bridge, all would be inproved by the introduction of either a rocket launcher or a chainsaw?
Doing C first negates the entire point of the game, though. If I can simply 'Open the Hole' in the begining, well why in the heck play the game!??!!
There is also another fact. Millions of people disagree with you, in that Myst and Riven where pretty much all-time best sellers.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. Fairly simple. You made your statement, and perhaps they'll pay attention when they notice only 1,999,999 copies sold, instead of 2,000,000.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Welp, I have a whole shelf full, and I can say I honestly enjoyed them. I'd say Riven more then Myst, but they where both well worth it..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
A realtime engine does not necessarily remove all constraints. A locked door is still a locked door; the engine can prevent you from wading into water, etc.
There are dozens of examples of realtime 3D games which present puzzles which rely on movement constraints: Sonic Adventure won't let you into the casino until you learn to spin-dash onto a ledge where there's a button which opens the door; Silent Hill sees you blocked by crevasses in the street, so you have to find your way through houses and their back yards instead.
Part of this is that the capabilities of the protagonist are carefully limited. Silent Hill's main character *can't* rocket-jump over the crevasse as he might in Quake.
Incidentally, DOOM!'s movement is severely limited compared to Quake's, and I'd argue it makes for a better (at least, more immediately enjoyable) game, when combined with sympathetic level design.
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I wonder. I went to http://members.aol.com/mystsequel7/m3d/ yesterday and they had a lot more shots and information available. Seems like someone didn't like the information being available. :(
I recall the page said the game publisher's going to be Mattel. Is this good/bad?
sulka
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
The original was of considerably higher rendering quality if you look at the screenshots they give you. The second one looks good, but the first one looked great, mainly because the first one was tediously rendered scene by scene. To get this game playable on anything but the sweetest of machines they will likely have to drop the resolution considerably, and also use smaller textures and fewer polygons.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
How long ago was that? Hm ... 11 or 12 years ago. Well guess what, apart from the network multiplayer stuff, it still beats Everquest and compares quite well to QuakeIII or what have you in terms of playability, me thinks. Gee, I wish I could find it and play it on some emulator. And it fitted in 1Meg of ram and a few floppies ... amazing.
is a rocket launcher. I'm convinced that any game can be improved with the introduction of a rocket launcher.
A really *good* baseball game where you can play any position plus batter or baserunner -- let an AI handle the each of other ones. Hell, have some AIs to act as coaches and the managers,too.
Bench-clearing brawls, arguments with umpires, and encounters with drunken spectators wouldn't be allowed, of course. "Let's keep it clean out there, kids..."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
http://www.cyan.com/arachnid/sneakpeek. html has a video (though in Quicktime) of realtime Myst. These are older videos, and the image quality of it may have gotten better... but there is some kinda idea what it will look like.
http://www.cyan.com/arachnid/jpgs/scre en.jpg An older screenshot of it.
SB.
Just what I've been waiting for: boredom at 30fps. Myst was ok for its day, when PC multimedia was a relatively new thing ( I was kickin' it with my proprietary interface, x2 CD-ROM ); but am I the only one who thought Myst was more a slide show than a game?
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Kinds like EverQuest on Valium.
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Look, I know the road is rough, and the work is hard; But we'll burn every bridge as we get to it, OK?
Well, the only experience I have with the company making Myst 3 is with the Journeyman Project 3 demo from the Riven CDs. But I played that demo and I thought it was terrible. I'm disappointed that the Cyan guys aren't working on Myst 3 instead of this bizarre Myst rehash.
The Myst 3 web page seems to imply that they're using the same horrible interface from JP3 (360 degree view?)
I could be wrong - Presto might do a good job with this. But many people have tried to imitate Myst and failed. It's a lot harder to get right than it seems. Sure, anybody can string pretty pictures together and throw some puzzles in, but Myst and especially Riven were so much more than that...
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
Millions of people got Myst and Riven included with their computer or in CD-ROM kits. A few hundred thousand bought it retail because it had pretty screenshots and everybody told them it was the best selling game around.
I've never heard anyone who's purchased more than three computer games say that either Myst or Riven was worth the full retail price.
In the game business, this is sometimes called "the Granny Factor": a game which sells because it is highly visible on shelves and has a pleasant, non-violent cover (like Granny might buy for her grandkid's birthday).
Damn, ANOTHER version of Myst? First it's Myst, then Riven, then Myst Gold, Myst Online Edition, Myst Still the Same Edition, Myst We've Played this Enough Already
Now Myst 3d? Give me a break. The only thing worse than a boring serial plotline...is repeating that over and over...
Couldn't they have made a new story at least? All those images look straight out of the original Myst. Who wants to play Myst all over *again* but just in 3D?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Um, the screenshots prove that the game is in real-time? Apparently the original was in real-time too, because it looked exactly the same in screenshots.
A Couple cyan employees posted on a Riven mailing list info on how these shots were rendered:
:) The one marked difference I've seen between the cards is
Bill Slease wrote:
"I took the shots of mechanical that you've seen on a PIII 500 with a GeForce
card. The other shots were done on similar machines. But my work machine is
a PII 450 with a Viper770 and the game looks just as good...and we're not
done yet...
rendering of fog. I like the GeForce's fog better but that doesn't mean the
Viper's is bad - just different. And probably imperceptible to someone who
isn't living in Selenitic for months at a time on multiple machines.
Note: Direct3D doesn't currently do anti-aliasing so what you're
interpreting as anti-aliasing in those images is probably just a result of
resizing the images for the web."
Doug McBride wrote:
"For the most part, the specs on
the computer realMyst was running on when these screenshots were taken are
P3 500's, with 32Meg GeForce video cards. About half of us have GeForce cards
(D3D), and the rest have Voodoo 2 cards (Glide). Some of our computers have 256
megs of ram, others have 128. Keep in mind that these aren't the minimum hardware
requirements to run realMyst. That hasn't been decided on yet. Those specs I mention
are our development machines, and we have faster computers to help speed the creation
process. We need that much processing horsepower and memory because we
all typically keep several programs, such as 3dsMAX and Photoshop, open at the same
time as we're running the game.
Again, being a real-time game, these images are rendered "on-the-fly" several times
a second in our proprietary Plasma engine (the one Cyan now owns, since we acquired [it from]
Headspin), so it's not like these are rendered with some commercially available software,
such as Bryce 3D. They were taken by hitting a single keyboard key, and the engine
writes the current frame out as a targa image. That's exactly what you are seeing.
Is this the quality you'll experience at home? That depends on your computer. We do
have a "mere mortal" testing machine here at the office that is used to show how well
the engine runs on a computer more typical of what people have at home. On many of
the Ages, we're in the optimizing phase, trying to squeeze as high of a framerate as
possible without losing the quality we want.
The exciting thing about these screenshots is that what you see is a screenshot
directly from the game. It shows not only what our development team can do, but also
what our engine is capable of. I don't care what crazy, unreleased hardware you give any
other 3d engine from any genre of computer gaming. I doubt you'll find one that looks as
good as those 3d screenshots. Yes, it comes at a hardware price, but it shows what
you have to look forward to."
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The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
You were not actually walking through the world. You were walking along defined paths with defined restrictions as to what you could do and where you could go.
That's what made it fun. You had to find a way to do such and such to get to somewhere or other.
Not much fun if you just walk over to the goal and win is it?
(I know I'm generalizing and that NO company that made such good games as MYST and RIVEN would do something stupid like that.)
Rami
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rJames.org - illustration
[Rant mode off]
IMHO Myst was designed to be pretty first and playable second. I really hope the "realtime 3D" remake does things better. I really want a game I can play rather than just impressing the luddite masses with the pretty pictures.
I fully understand and appreciate the fact that for a game to be any decent, you have to have a fairly well defined end goal and keep proding the player along in that direction, but there are ways and means of doing it without being so one dimentional. A good example of this was The Elder Scrolls Chapter 2: DaggerFall. There was a storyline to follow, but it really didn't matter what you did - storyline or not. Admittedly other than this, the game was somewhat ordinary.
I think the game would actually hit it off quite well. The idea of the game and the way they worked it out is such that it could be put to 3d quite well. I don't think the puzzles would suffer in quality. The whole way it was constructed was to let you think you were walking through a 3d world anyways. What I think they would achiever here is that a whole generation of new players could start and play this game. Heck, this really is one of those games where you hope that one day your children can play it and you can snigger about their attempts to finish the game by themselves :-)
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It's about time the games companies realised that the only use for 1st person 3D is not just Doom/Quake style blasters. I honestly can't think of a 1st person game where it doesn't involve killing things (If i am wrong, please correct me).
;)
Now, all i want to see is Monkey Island in 1st person, and i'll be a happy man
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Riven has been release on CD and DVD, and I won't be surprised if they come up with some way to rerelease it in a few years...
Personally, I think they should work on a new game...continuing the Myst/Riven storyline (prequel, sequel, whatever). Having read all three Myst books, I think it's a really neat universe full of possibilities, and full of really neat fantasies and dreams. At times I wish it were true... I'd kinda like to see what Dni really looked like, but I guess that might spoil the imaginative image they've worked so hard to build (well, they described so that we could build in our minds, however we liked), but they could create a world linked from Dni anywhere/anytime to start a story....the possibilities are endless.
I don't know exactly what concept of Real-Time they're using, but there was a game like Myst which allow you to turn and pitch in real-time, Amerzone. Sorta like a bunch of linked Quicktime-VRs. Quality was a little poorer than it could have been, and the distortion from the panning-software was a little irritating. Kinda neat to see, but I perferred Myst's immersive sound-track, haunting visuals, and quality. The look of the RT 3D stuff just isn't the same (getting better than it used to be though!)
On a side-note, Amerzone *is* pretty cool, espc if you can pick it up for cheap (Walmart Canada was sellin em off a few months ago). Quality is not as good, plot was a little on the cheesy side, I found a non-recoverable bug, and it was way too short. (3 cds, but only took me 3 days....Myst was 1 cd and took me 2 weeks, course I was 14 or so at the time...) Still neat.
And is it just me, or is the intro to Myst one of the coolest (and simplest!!!) ever. I am forever haunted by that perfect voice starting "I realized the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned..."
Myst III Now this, I'm really looking forward too...hope they can keep up with Cyan's vision.
Hmm, I'm not too sure about this. Whilst real-time adventure games can be great, part of the whole "look and feel" of Myst was the fact that you couldn't just go anywhere or do anything. As ewhac says, sometimes that makes the game what it was - does anyone remember a game called Dungeon Master for the Atari ST/Amiga? Classic dungeon bash with some evil puzzles, but those puzzles wouldn't have been possible without the constraints on movement inherent in the game.
Sometimes real-time and flexibility work for a game - I don't think anyone is going to argue that Quake had a better engine than Wolfeinstein, but when it comes to adventure and strategy games these features aren't necessary, or even warrented in some cases. Civilisation wouldn't have been what it was if it was real time as was originally planned.
I'll certainly have a look at it when it comes out, but until then, I'm remaining dubious about the whole thing. Still, hopefully this won't kill a great game.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
To be able to run MS Word in realtime.
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.