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Myst Online Trailer
Allaran writes "The latest installment in the Myst story, an online experience entitled URU: Ages of Myst, is ramping up to its release. This has been up and coming for some time, but a trailer (Warning:20MB) [BitTorrent link via GameTab] has just been released, made entirely from within the game engine. Apparently, there is a significant offline game that can be played, with the option to subscribe as well."
Erhm. Perhaps Myst was born on the Mac, but it was the PC sales that broke software (and CD-ROM) sales records.
It's a retail industry term for a physical item. After all, you have 1 game on multiple platforms and sometimes multiple versions per platform (PAL vs NTSC, original vs greatest hits reissue and so on) but it's likely they all have the same general description or title but each would be considered a distinct SKU for inventory tracking and so on.
Hope that helps explain it.
Graham
I toured Cyan's studio a few months back, as it's local to the area. The sound engineers and artists primarily still use Macs, but the programmers have entirely shifted over to MSVC/Win32 platforms, to speed up the release cycle and avoid cross-platform issues. The game is based entirely on DirectX libraries, so doing other platforms wouldn't be an easy task. It's hard enough to find competent programmers at all in Spokane, let alone ones that can write cross-platform 3D games.
And it never would have had the chance for such popularity had it not broken all the records on the Mac, first. No offense, but, um, duh.
Err, that would be Riven, the sequel to Myst.
"Hmmm. I guess its O.K. when Apple shuns other platforms(quicktime for linux *cough*) but its not O.K. when someone does the same to Apple?" No, its not okay, because Apple made MPEG4 Quicktime, which means... they not only made it for Linux... they made it for everybody. You must be talking about sorenson because Quicktime is just a container format.
Thanks to suprnova hosting! This torrent originates from my home machine on a cable connection. Shadow's client is in use, and super-seeding is active.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
The site is slow, here is a mirror.
Martin Studio Slashdot Policy
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Cyan, prepare to be /dotted!
http://www.cyanworlds.com/goodies/Uru3.mov
I found *no* mention of the platform so I *assume* it's M$ only??
I tried the get the *original* myst to run under winex from transgaming and it's a no-go..
Any hope of ever seeing a Linux port of any of these games? I really liked Myst, way back when.
I even have an original copy of "Drowned God" somewhere that I would like to play once again someday. I hate to think of installing M$ just to play a game or two and I can't stand the thought of connecting an M$ loaded machine to my broadband (virus pipe)..
Yeah, but you need a gentle soul to be able to d/l it first and then create a BT seed for it. Publishers tend to not know about BitTorrent yet, so they typically don't use it.
Give this a shot:
http://69.56.172.70/trailer2.mpg.torrent
I looked at Gametab a few minutes ago and nothing. I search the comments for a working bit torrent link, but nothing. So, one last ditch to check Gametab and what do you know? Here is the link to the torrent:
http://www.gametab.com/files/torrents.php?fuse=70
Here is the response as seen in the forum on their site:
Reference
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Obviously there's some spoilers.
I haven't played Exile and didn't finish Riven, but I beat Myst multiple times and have read all three novels.
Chronologically, the story begins in the second book, Myst: the Book of Ti'ana. Anne, Atrus's grandmother (the father of the two brothers stuck in the books) finds her way into the underground empire of D'Ni, where human-like people can link to worlds using books. It's considered an art form, they're in their prime, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. Long story short, a jealous friend and psychopath destroy the entire empire with a plague, but Anne's family survives by going into a private book world where the jealous friend has a change of heart and decides not to send a body with the plague to them. They return, Anne's husband dies, she takes her son (Ghen, I believe) back to the surface.
Cut to the FIRST book, Myst: The Book of Atrus. Ghen had a son with another human woman, then headed back to D'Ni to try to restore the empire, or at least to rediscover the art of world-linking, or making as he believed. He leaves Atrus, his son, with Anne until he reaches a certain age where he steals him and takes him to D'Ni, where they work on making worlds. Ghen's tend to be unstable, he uses them as playthings to experiment with, and thinking he 'creates' them instead of linking to them, he has the people of these worlds worship him like a God. Atrus falls in love with a human woman from Riven, Ghen's greatest world. Atrus rescues her and locks Ghen in the world of his creation, destroying the way out and using the final book to get back to Myst, the world he created, while falling into an abyss.
The book he used is the one you find at the beginning of the first game. You go into the book to find that Atrus and Catherine (his wife) have had two sons. Atrus set the red book and the blue book to trap his sons in as they were corrupt and had thought like Ghen did, but after he had set the trap, before it was sprung, Atrus was trapped in D'Ni and Catherine in Riven by said sons. You rescue Atrus, and he asks you to save his wife.
Cut to Riven. I'm assuming you save his wife and make it back to Myst.
In the third book, Myst: The Book of D'Ni, Myst and D'Ni (another section of it, not the collapsed room Atrus was in) are both re-inhabited by people from the book worlds. While going through some libraries, they come across a linker book to another civilization (the name fails me), and go to explore it. It's another group of book-writers, but one which uses the book peoples as slaves and playthings. You get your typical, albeit well written, story of outsiders attempting to free the slaves, slaves uprising, etc, etc, etc.
As for Exile, your guess is as good as mine, although I do believe it happens between Riven and the Book of D'Ni. Cheers to anyone who can toss in/tweak what I've put.
The books should all be rather inexpensive now, and they're all easy but satisfying reads. I suggest checking them out.
Cyan sold over 1 Million before the PC version saw the light of day. Besides when Myst first came out on the Mac, PC graphics and CPUs were not powereful enough to run it. I'm sure this was even pre-Pentium days back when the 386 was the dominant seller and the 486 was just out. They were forced to wait a couple of years before it could work decently on a PC.....
Well, there is a non-disclosure agreement. I can't say anything about it other than I am very disappointed. It's glitchy and not at all Myst-like.
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss." - Douglas Adams
It DID allow you to copy all the files to your hard drive, just wasn't an install option (it was 1997, come on).
If I recall correctly, you can just move the files from the CDs to the Riven/data folder. You can also download Jehon the Scribe's Riven installer to do it for you. :)
SFT
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
ok, as a beta tester, i agreed to a restrictive NDA telling me not to discuss things i see in the game outside of the beta forums... so my apologies if this is lacking in details.
i'm seeing a lot of comments about killing the myst franchise by going online, the game possibly sucking, etc. let me say this: it is by far the most impressive online game i've seen yet. the graphics are great, the music is incredible, the puzzles and ages are wonderful, there haven't been any lock-ups or timeouts, everything is top-notch. don't worry about killing the idea that is myst.
a couple people have asked about what kind of computer the graphics were rendered on. i'm getting the same results using a 2.0GHz P4, 512MB RAM, and an nvidia geforce ti 4600.
overall, absolutely incredible.
Nice pudge. Here's a little background for you (at least, as much relevant background as I can remember... I hope it's accurate). Cyan bought a little graphics company named Headspin for their excellent Plasma3D engine, which is the basis for the engine being used in Uru (formerly codenamed Mudpie). The Plasma3D engine was written in DirectX, and when Cyan bought Headspin, they brought a lot of the Headspin programmers to Spokane, added on to the Cyan HQ, and had them continue working on the engine.
The graphics engine for Uru is absolutely fabulous. I agree that it's a shame that the game isn't available for the Mac (disclaimer, I now work for Apple, so please note that this is all my opinion and doesn't represent the views of my employer, shouldn't be considered a statement by Apple, etc, etc.) but I know that the founders of Cyan (now Cyan Worlds) have always been very commited to the Mac platform. However, one of the founders left for Project Green Tea, and the other was already staring down the most expensive game development project in history (I'm not sure if that still holds), and converting an entire engine between DirectX to OpenGL is an incredible additional engineering expense. Pesky money.
Additionally, they use 3D Studio (sigh, so many marketing changes to keep track of, now called "3ds max") for modelling (at least they did last I heard). 3ds has excellent game development workflow, from all I hear. But, again, Macs.
Somehow, I doubt you would fault them for using SGI workstations to develop Riven, especially if you knew about the constraints they were working under at the time (try rotating a 5 million polygon model on a Mac circa 1998). Bitching at them for their development constraints is about as productive as staring at a cieling.
If you want Uru on the Mac, send the publisher an e-mail, write them a letter, or call them. Promise to pay money for the game, or preorder it if they'll develop it. People in the Cyan fan community have known that Mudpie/Uru would be DirectX based since Cyan bought Headspin, which was a long, long time ago. They've had plenty of time to raise their concerns. But, it's never too late.
-AW (former Lysters [should] know who I am)
Follow a couple of links around on the UBI soft site, and you will find that the creators Cyan have a complete opensource section around the myst stuff. right here http://open.cyanworlds.com/
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Well, there is BitTorrent, perfectly legal for such stuff and FREE (nobody will come to their door and want $10k)...
IMHO there is no reason to complain... Also when big companies like that uses that stuff, it will open path for Java (embedded) and ActiveX bittorrent clients which works easily for average user.
I now download it using Shareaza (http://www.shreaza.com) and I am sure I don't even "touch" any of their hosts, bandwidth...
Why companies are so slow adopting excellent stuff which would save hundreds of thousands $$$ for them?
Funny, I thought YOU were the troll.
You said "Macs are not made with gaming in mind."
Apple has made a very clear effort to make machines suitable for gaming. It's clear in the marketing Apple does of games for Mac, and in the tech specs for the machines.
What do you want? 128MB DDR AGP 8X video cards? Got 'em. High-speed drives? Got 'em. Digital audio? Done. Audio out, USB and FW ports on the front of the computer? OK. Apple has often mentioned video gaming as part of the reason they make some of these features (some of them as options, like the 128MB video card).
What more do you want? John Carmack himself, on stage at Macworld saying, "Apple is making all the right moves on both the hardware and software sides to make the Macintosh a great platform for games."?
Ask and ye shall receive.