Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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."
is a rocket launcher. I'm convinced that any game can be improved with the introduction of a rocket launcher.
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.
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."
-------------
The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
[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.
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
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.
---
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.