Slashdot Mirror
Demos, Screenshots Of Cyan's Next Projects
"It is going to be an organic, realtime multiplayer game running on the same 'Headspin' 3D engine (which Cyan bought from the now-defunct Headspin Technologies along with a bunch of Headspin's programming staff)as realMyst and is going to take place in the Myst/Riven universe.
In the blizzard of Myst information, the sweetest snippet of all has basically gotten lost in the shuffle: a Screenshot of MUDPIE. People think at first it's a small chamber until the realize that the blob front and center is a person.
The engine is very pretty and relatively low on bugs, if a bit slow. Some people think the edges of the front pillars aren't soft enough, but they look fine to me :). For more info and clarification, see [this info page on Cyan's site]."
A friend of mine who's on the other side of the US didn't like it. He thinks that it's all boring fancy slide-show puzzle game. I thought it's interesting. Sure it didn't have any action but that's the point when you look at how much power a PC needs to render all that in real-time (which is now made possible via realMYST). I thought the puzzle was great, even though it took me a couple of months to actually finish the game.
Someone brought up the point that it had a rather shotty ending. Yes, it had a shotty ending and it blatently advertises a sequel to the next game which we now know as Riven. But there's backing to that, if anyone went out and bought the 3 supplemental novels that're published. Because of the success of MYST and because it raises so many questions to the history of the characters themselves, these 3 novels were created to add depth to the culture and personalities behind Atrus, Catherine, Gehn, Sirrus & Achenar, as well as background information to the D'ni culture itself.
The novels themselves explained how Gehn came to be. It also explained how the intro speech was created when you played MYST. These novels, to me, are essential to understanding more of Riven's background, to me that is.
I've read all 3 supplemental novels to the MYST game. They're great reading, IMO. I found myself more fascinated by the fictional D'ni culture as I read the books.
For Riven's ... uh, "substance" or core or plot or gameplay or puzzles (however you wanna define Riven in itself), I didn't find anything wrong with it other than the puzzles being harder than MYST was. Riven's puzzles were a lot more complicated in that it requires users to write down specific information or forever find yourself getting stuck at a particular point. But that's the only problem I ran into when playing it. And while Riven's ending brings a close to the MYST & Riven story, I thought that there won't be any more sequels. Guess I was wrong...
I viewed the MYST 3 trailer and looked through the credits. And I knew as I watched the trailer that something was missing. The Miller brothers who created the MYST & Riven world aren't doing the game. Somehow it seem to lack that authentic feel. Or maybe it's just my imagination. It just strangely doesn't seem right anymore to have a MYST 3. But that, and everything else, is, of course, my opinion.
~ Old Warriors Society
Realistic water, changing skies (day to night and back), and even realistic thunder make the demo something you just have to get, even if you didn't like the original.
The static screenshots don't really convey how insanely great this really is. All the effects are incredible, and really show how awesome 3D can be. Everything was so rich, I didn't even notice aliasing on any objects at 800x600x16 (yes, this is partly because everything was moving - even the water has realistic waves).
This game will sell a ton of GeForce2 cards, because the geometry behind every scene is pretty complex. It runs at about 15 fps on my slow system (TNT2Ultra, K62-350, 128MB, Win2000), and I can see how it would easily hit 60 fps on a newer system.
I was worried about how they would handle interaction before I tried it, but it's perfect. It's pretty intuitive, and extends the model used in the original game. And you can't fall off from tall places (it seems obvious, but sometimes developers don't get this right).
I think this would be a killer game to get on Indrema, if they can get someone to port it. It uses D3D instead of OpenGL, so it's non-trivial, but it sure would sell a lot of those boxes.
No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item! Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in appearance yet identical in content. No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item! Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in appearance yet identical in content.
Good: Copy. Paste. Submit.
Bad: Copy. Paste. Paste. Submit.
With the impending release of realMyst, a realtime 3D version of Myst, and the accompanying Demo and Trailer, quite a few editors are having trouble paying attention to what they're doing...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
- Low - 224x164 - 4.7Mb
- Medium - 344x224 - 8.9Mb
- High - 448x328 - 15.8Mb
NOTE: The trailers are ONLY in Quicktime 4 format. The links are the three right-hand pictures at the bottom of the page. And yes, you have to mouse-over them to even figure out what they are.I suggest taking a peak... quite cool looking.
And yes, if you're wondering, the links on the realmyst.com site link to video frames on apple.com which link to the video file at akamai.net.
Some day I hope to have a
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
No longer content to post the same story two times in a day, the editors decided this time to just post the duplicates together in one news item!
Everyone is, of course, required to submit comments subtly different in aperance yet identical in content.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> why were Myst and Riven ``notoriously controversial?'
Because Myst was an adventure games with no characters and feraturing only "nice" static graphics.
Myst had a very good athmosphere. *If* you liked it, you would like it much. Everything is very very logical, and is pretty immersive. Myst was plesant to people *not* attracted to traditional adventure games. But, well, compared to a *real* adventure game (say Zork or Day of the Tentacle), it is was so different that many adventure gamers just hated it.
Personally, I loved Myst because it was well thought and very original. The problem is that, after its success, everyone (including Cyan) thought that making nice graphics and impossible to understand plot was what adventure gamers wanted, so, basically, quality of traditional adventure games just went downhill (Riven was a big pile of shit, IMHO. Much less logical than Myst was, and without the novellty factor). Every moron under the sun, tried to duplicate Myst by merging lame puzzles with ugly 3D graphics.
And, as an aggraving point, Myst totally lacked humor, so did all those boring sequels and myst-wannabees...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
A buzzword used to describe 3D models with sufficient detail to look closely akin to real life; not chunky like doom, or often visibly broken down into simple geometric forms to reduce polygon count to something manageble [like the original quake, where much of the architecture was texture mapped rectangular prisms, peoples arms were not much more then extended pyrimids, etc]
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Personally, I think it's a little of both. There are some good ideas there and some nice art direction but the puzzles aren't very interesting or well integrated into the game. You can get the same effect by stopping every 5 minutes to play minesweeper.