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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."

8 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Okay by Verteiron · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's damn impressive for realtime. Hell, it's pretty impressive even for a prerendering. I wonder what the specs were on the machine that generated it...

    On the other hand, RealMYST had a mind-bogglingly beautiful realtime engine, even by today's standards, so I'm glad to see that they're still making progress.

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  2. BT link? by jehreg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any BitTorrent available, or is it already to late for even that?

  3. Re:No Macs by Cliff · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SKUs are generally inventory numbers or stock keeping units. By asking users to watch their webpage for "additional SKUs", they are basically asking the users of other OSes (ala Macs) to hold their breath until they decide to release to something other than Windows.

    What I want to know is what is so different about this latest version of Myst where they couldn't have completed a Mac version to begin with. They had 2 versions of Myst under their belt, already, so it's not like they haven't had experience developing for the Mac.

    I can understand if they gave an explicit reason as to why a Mac version wasn't created, but saying "watch this space", is kind of a cop-out. Generally, and at least in this industry, when you say "watch this space", what it really means is "yeah, keep looking. We might do another version, but we want to keep the hype machine going at your expense"

    In all fairness, I'll have to take a look at the trailer and see what the new game looks like, but the preponderance of the "games only sell on Windows" attitude, I'm wondering if game studios are willing to live with the fact that they are making this a self-fulfilling prophesy and if any of them are ever interested in trying to get out from under Microsoft's shadow.

  4. Re:No Macs by BWJones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Let's screw the platform that made the Myst franchise what it is today!"

    Indeed, when Myst was originally created by Cyan back in 1992/1993, it was an all Macintosh operation. They used all of the video and audio built into Macs leveraging Quicktime (on Quadras I seem to remember) for the production and play of the game. All audio and video was a Macintosh operation. When it was ported to Windows, I had a friend complaining it simply did not look as good as it did on my IIci or my Quadra 840av. The really cool thing was, this was created using Hypercard and Hypertalk scripts! and is probably one of the all time greatest Hypercard programs.

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  5. Stupid question... by zapp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can anyone explain to me what the hell is going on in the world of Myst/Riven/etc?

    I played about... 75% of Myst, and then oh... I dunno, 50-75% of Riven... and lost interest in them both before I could finish them (usually stuck at some puzzle).

    What is the story, what is going on? Last I knew, people in books were talking to me :)

    I'm sure its quite complex, so if you know of any websites that explain it... just point me there :)

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  6. Re:Mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Who are you, and why are you donating all this bandwidth to slashdotted sites? Doesn't it cost you a lot of money?

  7. Re:the bulkiest game? by zakezuke · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Myst, the first version released before CD-rom drives were standard equipment, was a single CD. I can't remember the exact release date, but it was circa 1994 or so.

    I remember being somewhat annoyed at the fact that I couldn't borrow a CD-rom drive to copy it to my hard drive as I only had a 1/2 gig drive in the first place.

    Keep in mind the fact that this was a game designed to run *well* under a 68030 based mac or a 386pc without a math/co if i'm remembering correctly. If my memory is correct, this would mean NO jpeg compression what so ever. I believe they also had to resort to 8 bit graphics in order to actually get the bugger to fit on a single CD.

    I have NO clue about Riven though.

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  8. Re:No Macs by randyest · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You just made me think of this:

    Has (or why hasn't) Apple considered developing a DirectX-compatible graphics API, or OpenGL wrapper, or similar? Seems to me that even moderate compatibility with the most popular, most heavily-developed (and by many accounts pretty good these days) graphic subsystem (DirectX 8+) would go a long way toward helping revive the flailing mac gaming market, which would be a good thing.

    I, for one, would certainly love to be able to frag some of my mac-using buddies in Battlefield 1942 (though I'm afraid to consider the cost of a max that could run bf1942 at the resolution and detail settings I'm accustomed to (1280x1024x32bit, all options at max on an XP2400/1GB/GeFX5900U).

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