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Games Entertainment

Myst - In Realtime? 158

Posted by timothy from the wie-sagt-man-auf-englisch-"myst"? dept.
ewhac writes: "Blue's News is reporting that Cyan is working on a realtime version of Myst, and has some advance screenshots to prove it." (more)

"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."
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Myst - In Realtime? More

Myst - In Realtime?

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  • Are you kidding me? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Myst and Riven both sold an astonishing number of copies, but don't let that fool you. Most of their numbers come from PC-packaging deals. Most Myst owners didn't buy the game; it just came with their computer when they bought it.

    This is just what the gaming world doesn't need. Myst and Riven are generally considered shitty as far as the gaming community is concerned. They exist solely as eye candy, with little gameplay value.

    The Cyan crew needs to quit trying to ride the wave of the original Myst's success and get on to something a little more creative.

  • True real time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This month's Wired magazine has an article on the future of amusement parks in which they mention that one park is considering/has considered a Myst island adventure. The island would have some sort of puzzles that guests would have to solve.

  • quicktime movie (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you can find a quicktime movie [apple.com] of the upcoming myst 3 on apple's quicktime trailers site.

  • Oh, great (Score:1)

    by Yarn ( 75 )
    Mentioning Myst merely brings back memories of boredom for me. I'd definitely rather play Serious Sam.

    The game I'm really waiting for is Terminus, the demo of which is due to be released on Monday, according to Station Terminus [stationterminus.com]

    Of course there were the Myst parodies, Mylk and Pyst.
  • 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.
  • I hope its as good as elite. (my favourite game of all time)

  • Why? (Score:4)

    by Shaheen ( 313 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @03:15AM (#1000891) Homepage
    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...
  • Harry from Silent Hill never even had a rocket launcher, IIRC, he was barely accurate with the pistol Sybil gave him, and only with the laser-guided infinite ammo weapon was he really a good shot..

    Erm, sorry for the off-topic rant. Guess my point is, never give a reporter missing a daughter a big weapon like that. :)



    bash: ispell: command not found
  • Lost Eden didn't have free movement either. You could click in a few directions, and the camera just took you to a new destination.

    That sounds like what Myst was originally. They're changing it to make it realtime. Which one of us is confused?

    --

  • I have a big problem with all of these types of games... At the end of the day, they are all very linear. You have to do A before you can do B which in turn allows you to do C. What if I happen to think up a better way which allows me to jump straight to C and go back to A and B later? Tough! Why can't I do C first. God damn it! I wanna do C first!!

    That's one of the big things I liked about Myst. It had no artificial restrictions like "sorry, you can't open this door because you're not cool enough yet." Sure, there are places you can't go, but that's because of something realistic, like there's a bridge between here and there but the bridge is retracted and can only be extended from the other side of the bridge - so you have to find some other way to get to the other side first, and then extend the bridge to make things easier for you.

    In Myst, if you can get there somehow, everything's waiting for you. In many other games, if you can find a way to get to someplace you're supposed to be yet, a door will be locked for no apparent reason (if you get there the "correct" way it'll be open when you get to it), or there'll be a person you have to talk to and they'll refuse to talk to you. I hate that; it's stupid. In Myst, you can beat the game from start to finish in two minutes, if you happen to know the secret - which you normally figure out by discovering clues as you go, but if you don't want to do it the "correct" way, you don't have to.

    --

  • Definitely not, but Myst was a great example of the awesome power of HyperCard. If anyone cares, (shameles plug) I've got a game of my own developed entirely in HyperCard, though nowhere near as impressive as Myst. Cannons and Castles [phroggy.com] is a HyperCard port of the Apple II game with two castles and a hill; type in the angle and velocity of your shot and try to blow up your opponent's castle.

    If you have any really pressing questions about HyperCard, feel free to e-mail me.

    --

  • Somebody pointed out the stretched texture maps and fairly low resolution, but the main thing is this [cyan.com].

    --

  • They've licensed the rights to Mattel Interactive/Presto Studios, which will be making a sequel [myst3.com]. RealMYST is just a remake of the original.

    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.

    --

  • Cyan is working on a new game, code-named Mudpie, which will be online multiplayer.

    --

  • No, I'm sure they mean freedom of movement, just like Quake, et al. There will be places you can't go - like, say, you probably can't jump off a cliff, because being able to do that would seriously change the feel of the game.

    --

  • 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.
  • Personally, I loved Myst, AND Riven. I only had two beefs with it myself..

    1) To damned addicting. I played it for days and days untill I finished the damned thing. I was hell bent on not cheating, and darned it, I never did.. (Ok, so perhaps I consulted a web site trying to decipher the numbering system..)

    2) Once I finished it, I quite literally *NEVER WANTED TO PLAY IT AGAIN*. It was done. completed..
  • 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..
  • 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.
    --
  • Some of us have an imagination.

    I use to play games made by Infocom they were called TEXT adventures.(Figure it out if ya want to.) If playing Myst is too much for ya go back to watching the WWF or Smackdown or whatever passes for entertainment these days. Cause ye kin git 60 FPS on that there TV!

    Damm young wipersnappers:)
  • Another tidbit is that they used NetImmerse, which runs under Linux... I'm off to ask them about a Linux version of that game.

  • Looks really nice (Score:3)

    by Sulka ( 4250 ) <sulkaNO@SPAMiki.fi> on Thursday June 15, 2000 @12:24AM (#1000907) Homepage Journal
    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
  • 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.

    --
  • 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.
  • Why bash Myst?

    You say it is one of the few games that makes you think about what to do next. That's true, and untrue.

    If you consider current games, yes, it's one of the few games to do that.

    If you consider past games as well, it's merely one of many. And IMHO, many past games integrated puzzles and plot better than Myst. That's why many people bash Myst... I mean, I enjoyed it, but besides the eye-candy, I've seen it done better.

  • All it needs... (Score:5)

    by Zach Baker ( 5303 ) <zach@zachbaker.com> on Thursday June 15, 2000 @12:39AM (#1000911) Homepage
    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..."

  • Um. What are you talking about? Myst came out when 486/100's were all the rage. Of course it needs more memory and hard drive space

    Prerelease specs are something like:
    Pentium 450
    64+MB ram
    3D Accelerator (duh)

  • Thats probably why they released it on DVD afterwords eh?

  • Anyone want a video of it? (Score:4)

    by myconid ( 5642 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @01:19AM (#1000915) Homepage
    http://www.cyan.com/arachnid/sneakpeek. html [cyan.com] 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 [cyan.com] An older screenshot of it.
  • Text adventures were fun because you interacted with people and monsters, not just wandered around a bunch of pretty, inanimate objects. The only draw Myst really had for me was to see all the nicely rendered graphics; the story never developed enough to suck me in.

    NTSC TVs have 60 interlaced FIELDS per second, so watching the IRS Smackdown would not be as exciting as playing GL Quake on a GeForce 4 RDR Turbo++ Alpha.

    And I played HHGTTG on a IIe goddamit! I know I still have that Don't Panic pin somewhere...

  • 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?

  • There are almost no games that couldn't be greatly improved by a chainsaw.

    Even Elite (Ramming speed!!!!)
  • The disc changing wasn't THAT much of a problem. It pretty much only occurred when you visited a new island. And it usually takes more than 10 seconds to go through everything on an island.
  • How exactly do static screenshots prove that the game is rendering in realtime? :)

    Just kidding, I think it rocks.
  • Myst III will not be done in real time. However, it will allow QuickTime-VR like rotation at any of the points you can stand, allowing you to see a complete panorama of scenary. Cyan says they can trust Presto to make this game good, so I'm definately going to be waiting in line to pick it up.
  • I remember the time it took me to do Myst, and the fact I gave up twice before actually completing it. Looking at this story I had images of an online version of Myst, where there are thousands of people walking dazedly around, and muttering: "What!? How...!? Oh, I get it!"

    Kinds like EverQuest on Valium.

    --


  • Well, the only experience I have with the company [presto.com] 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 [myst3.com] 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...
  • If the game is going to work, then the puzzles will have to be modified, otherwise the only selling factor will be "gee wiz it's in 3D", which is not sufficient to get the necessary sales. The new version interests me, though the quality will have to be maintained and there will need to be slight differences to make it feel worth re-exploring.

    BTW: Myst 3 is out, though it has been done by the guys who made the Journey Man Project ( Presto Studios ). There is a website: http://www.myst3.com/ [myst3.com]

  • While you are first person, these tend to be at the seat of a vehicle. First-person tends to refer to the idea of being able to walk around on your own to feet. I suppose you could call the others first-vehicle games.
  • It was amongst the first CD-ROM games, but it was the first that was worth buying. I can remember other games at the time that simply tried filling the CDs with a lot of junk, simply to say that it needed a CD.
  • My guess is that they are no longer writing this in HyperTalk, venerable language that it is. <g>

    Anyone know what they are coding in?
  • With realtime Myth we'll finally be able to escape the beaten path and make our way to the brothel book hidden behind the observatory. Anybody who's seen The Thirteenth Floor knows that Atrius is probably just another pervert who uses his abilities to create his personal deviant universe. He only locked up his kids 'cause they were going to rat him out to his wife.
  • Only if we can get an add-on patch to turn the rocket launcher into a chicken gun... (man, that was my favorite WAD in DOOM...)

    --
  • IIRC, there was Myst for Dos, then Myst for Windows, and then Riven. Now we have Real Time Myst. I guess Real Time Riven is next. How about we spend some time coming up with new ideas rather than rehashing the same old things over and over? Is Real Time Myst going to have the same puzzles? I hope not. If so, why buy it?

    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • Thanks for the update on the timeline.

    Myst and Riven were both great games. Not my bag, baby :), but my wife and daughter loved both of them. I bought Myst for my wife as soon as we had a CDROM drive, and I bought Riven the day it was released. We also have the Myst books.

    But you are so right. Let's see a sequel/prequel/something, but not the same thing again.
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • 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).
  • Myst in realtime will be something like the old game, Lost Eden by Cryo. Not a great game at all (Lost Eden), but it had some good ideas and some amazing graphics for that time. I don't know if it was rendered in realtime or just movies that were played... Because it is an old game, the graphics is also only VGA.

    Lost Eden didn't have free movement either. You could click in a few directions, and the camera just took you to a new destination.

  • Now we can be bored in REAL-TIME instead of this "move-and-wait" crap!

    I'm so excited!

  • The game will use the original "plot" of the Myst... as well as those 5 ages we remember so well... but there will be an additional age built specifically for the new engine. Also, many new puzzles to make use of the engine I'm sure.

    WorldMaker
  • Sheesh! Many of us adventure gamers have known about this since April 1st or so... when Cyan posted a fishy joke Press Release (go to their site and read it... it's quite... weird). Then some mysterious 'employee' leaked some photos and a quick abrubt ending movie file. Then at E3 the game was officially announced as "Myst Dimensions", and will be out in the fall! Then, come Spring "Myst 3: Exile" from Presto comes out! Myst 3 looks incredible and has a new villian. Of course, it will be pre-rendered, but check it out at Myst3.com anyway.

    WorldMaker
  • The sad thing is, the previous post got modded down for some reason.
  • Why in God's name is this modded down? This is the second "mis-modding" I've seen on this article.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if they keep a lot of the gameplay exactly the same, and seriously restrict your movement. Anybody remember the Seventh Guest? The graphics weren't rendered realtime, but they were full-motion. In fact, have they eve promised full range of motion? It might be that the graphics are merely rendered realtime.
  • I don't think the target audience for myst is the ones with good enough hardware for a realtime myst. Of course there are exceptions but in general I don't think the myst people are the ones who upgrade their computer to play games.

  • Ugh...Myst again??! (Score:3)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @03:35AM (#1000941)
    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?
  • The only problem I can see with this is that it wont stop Myst from sucking. I don't know why everyone liked Myst so much. It was so boring. And don't say I didn't give it a chance. I gave it more chances than it deserved. The puzzles were impossible, the plot was stupid, and the game was boring. Now the Manhole on the other hand, even though it was built on the Myst engine, that was a fun game!
  • From what I've heard, this was made mostly by SunSoft, and Myst III is being made by Presto. That gives Cyan plenty of time to work on Mudpie.

  • Re:All it needs... (Score:5)

    by Betcour ( 50623 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @12:54AM (#1000944)
    Not only that, but most problems in life could be solved by the proper use of a rocket launcher too...
  • For proof, just watch Falling Down again. An excellent movie, made even better with the liberal use of advanced weaponry!

  • Screenshots in real-time (Score:3)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @03:11AM (#1000946)
    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.
  • 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.

    Yeah, well Titanic made more money than any other movie, but it still sucked.

  • http://members.aol.com/mystsequel7/m3d/shots1.html
    is still working?
  • Of course, any mention of a rocket launcher deserves a Marathon tribute.

    "If I had a rocket launcher, I'd make somebody pay..." -Bruce Cockburn

  • You forgot poker. You can make a poker game truly memorable with the simple additions of quite a bit of whiskey and a firearm.

    --
  • Yeah, but what's the fun of just walking into the side of the Hancock building when you can fly a Cessna into it at 200mph? If you just walk into the Hancock building, you wind up in the lobby, take the escalator up to the mezzanine and order a Coke. I can do that in real life, eh? Who's gonna buy simGoBuyACoke? simFlyIntoABuilding is much more exciting, and I still didn't have to shoot anybody.

    --
  • The screenshots look really amazing. Just look at the woods ... about ten bazillion objects there, plus the water mirroring everything ... I really can't imagine how they want to do that in real-time on existing hardware. I mean, this isn't just a few walls and stacked boxes like in quake, they have very complex objects, too (see the skeleton in the first picture).

    I guess, for playing this in real-time, you would need ... a Beowuld cluster? ;-) *ducksandruns*

  • That just proves that the public will buy anything that looks pretty. I doubt many of these dunderheads finished the game. I mean, really, it was something like 3 years old and then suddenly everyone started buying it again so the price was jacked up from bargain-bin $14.95 to $39.95. I actually think a lot of these copies sold were to said idiots who bought it for their Windows 3.1 systems. When they upgraded to 95 and it didn't run anymore, bought the 95 version instead of calling support to get the free patch.
  • so it is a remake of 'elite' that i used to play on the C64.
  • The screen shots are pretty obviously taken from a low-res textured environment. I'm guessing 640x480 or so (not sure what res a Mac uses). You can easily see the stretching of the textures inherent in this type of render. Look at the rocks by the lighthouse. The original didn't look like this. It's also pretty easy to tell these screen shots came from a Mac, mainly because of the general dimness or low gamma. Of course, the original was rendered frame by frame on a Mac...



    Dive Gear [divingdeals.com]
  • I think it's great that a 3D version of Myst is coming out, because as others have pointed out, it will be one of the only non-violent first-person 3D games out there. Now I'm not a prude or squeamish, but as a female I can say that I honestly hate FPS games and I can imagine how young girls would be scared of computers just because their brothers and friends use them to inflict the most horrible kinds of violence on others.

    When I was a kid I played Nintendo games like Super Mario Bros. and Zelda; the only things you killed were yucky monsters and you got to solve a lot of puzzles along the way. Gender-neutral games like Tetris or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego were also a great joy to play for me. But when Myst came out, I spent many awestruck evenings playing that beautiful game on my Macintosh Quadra 605 with external 2X CD-ROM, and it certainly inspired me to want to create gorgeous, interesting worlds of my own. However, when I went to a modemer party where my nerd guy friends were shooting the hell out of each other in Doom, I felt completely alienated.

    The Web was the killer app for me; I learned HTML on my own so that I could instantly communicate my art and poetry. Eventually I applied to Stanford so I could major in Computer Science. Admittedly, I'm not the best student, and sometimes I wonder how much more skilled I would be if someone had just shown me how to program BASIC or given me a computer before high school. Games like Myst really were my only exposure to computing, and I aspire to coding artful games myself someday. You say you want a game that isn't linear? Hire a chick to design one.

  • If I recall correctly when I read about the making of myst, there were other limiting factors besides processing power. Most notably cd-rom speed. I believe that they had to take the image quality down quite a bit to get it to run off the CD.

    If you were running the 3-D version, I'd expect that you would have to have a *heck* of a lot of memory and hard drive space available. That world was rather complex.

  • I dunno 'bout you, but I'd sort of like to see a more freeform realtime rerelease of the 7th Guest. It was a quite fun game when it came out, and certainly could benefit from modern 3d technology.

    But don't get me started on The 11th Hour.
  • Just because it's realtime doesn't nessicarily mean that all constraints are removed. If you think about the original, you really were hopping between discrete points. You could allow the user to click and move between discrete points, and none of the puzzles would change, but with the on-the-fly rendering, you could have a smooth transition of walking from point to point. Still same game, but it might be easier to find your way around if they got rid of the jumpiness. Also, if it's rendered on the fly, you can probably add more background animation of various sorts.

    All in all, just cosmetic changes. (I don't know what cyan is going to do though... ...it's an interesting thought to be able to go anywhere in Myst...)
  • You just need a video card with T&L acceleration!

    Even with a non-T&L card, I'd be willing to bet a reasonably fast chip (750 MHz Intel or AMD) will handle the geometry just fine. I don't think RealMYST is the kind of game that will demand 60fps. I'd rather see it at 30fps on my Voodoo5 with full scene anti-aliasing.

    But then, RealMyst would also look stunning at 1600x1200 resolution on a GeForce2 GTS card... but who knows what hardware will be available when this game ships.
  • Good thing terminus isn't an FPS, eh?

    -------------
    The following sentence is true.
  • Sheesh, they announce one of their projects and you assume that it's all that's in the works.

    See here for info: http://www.cyan.com/info1.html [cyan.com]

    Basically, besides Myst Masterpiece for Mac and Myst3d, they're working on a project codenamed "Mudpie" which will be a massively multiplayer D'ni online roll playing game (aparently using a later version of the Myst3d Engine). And they've also licenced Presto Studios to make Myst III [myst3.com]

    -------------
    The following sentence is true.

  • A Couple cyan employees posted on a Riven mailing list info on how these shots were rendered:

    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... :) The one marked difference I've seen between the cards is
    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.
  • See you hit(nail, head).

    The whole way it was constructed was to let you
    think you were walking through a 3d world anyways.


    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
    --
  • No way man.

    The Barney one. Hands down. With the Beavis and Butthead one in a close second.

    Those were the days.

    :: Sigh ::

    Rami
    --
  • Here here!

    (Especially bridge. Yich!)

    Rami
    --
  • Why do gamers always totally bash Cyan and the Myst line of games?

    Here's my two cents; YMMV of course. If anyone reading this hasn't played the game and intends to, there are some huge spoilers in this comment.

    I had three problems with Myst:

    1. This one is my fault: I believed the hype. "The game that will become your world" was, for me, merely a collection of pretty pictures.
    2. The puzzles were almost insultingly easy. For example, the maze that some people seem to think was so damn confusing was easily and quickly traversed with the right-hand rule.
    3. "Whatever you do, don't put the last page into the green book!" Gee, you're both evil, I wonder what I should do?
    I finished Myst in something like ten hours, which seems to me to be an incredibly short time for a game that was supposed to be so devilishly complicated. It was no challenge at all.

    Just because it's the best-selling game of all time doesn't imply quality; Britney Spears and Kid Rock sell a lot of records, but it doesn't mean they're any good.

  • Opened the box, popped the disc in, and played. Were there even walkthroughs available when Myst first came out? I suppose there must have been; it had been out for a month or two when I bought it. But I did play it from the beginning, with no help.

    This isn't the kind of game I'm normally good at, which is why I was so surprised. Return To Zork, for example, completely confounded me. I think I bought the walkthrough book for that one the day after I bought the game.

  • A major gripe... (Score:5)

    by pleitner ( 95644 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @12:53AM (#1000969)
    I have a big problem with all of these types of games... At the end of the day, they are all very linear. You have to do A before you can do B which in turn allows you to do C. What if I happen to think up a better way which allows me to jump straight to C and go back to A and B later? Tough! Why can't I do C first. God damn it! I wanna do C first!!
    [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.

  • That's great!

    Now I can...read books and flip levers.
  • 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 :-)

  • Thank you (Score:5)

    by Vanders ( 110092 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @01:19AM (#1000978) Homepage
    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 ;)
  • I totally agree. Bowls is such a dull slow game otherwise.

  • One of the advantages of the 1st person 3d style game is that it is very easy to get into. Generally they don't have many intricate keyboard commands that require a dedicated emacs user to hit quickly (and in the right order). Newer games are becoming the exception though. Killing everything in sight just extends this easy use concept so that anyone that picks up one of these games can get into it almost immediately. That in itself gets past one of the hurdles that games companies have to face when trying to get people to buy the game, does the player really have to read a 50 page manual?

    I can think of a couple more non-violent 1st person 3d games, Normality used the doom 2 engine to provide a unique environment where you could walk around (looking up and down as well) pick up items using the mouse in a manner similar to existing 2d adventures. I remember there was also a kids style version of a game where you had to pick up trash and stop littering animals from messing up the place but I forget the name, anyone remember?

  • Re:Why? (Score:3)

    by kerrbear ( 163235 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @03:28AM (#1001007)
    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.

    The real reason for the success of Myst was that it was a well developed world with a great deal of hidden history and background. This is always what distinguishes great art from mediocre art.

    Tolkien's trilogy was a success because it has a huge amount of background detail to it. The languages, culture, and history was developed by him before the work. Once this was accomplished he could draw upon it in the writing. One got the sense that the work itself was just the tip of the iceburg. Myst accomplished this also, both visually and as a story (not to the same degree of course...).

  • I played Myst, and found it to be moderately difficult in terms of puzzles (Though most of the puzzles didn't make the remotest bit of sense in terms of why they were there), moderately pretty (Horribly dithered 256 colour graphics are not pretty to me), and woefully lacking in plot.

    Of course, plot wasn't the point of the game - the puzzles were. It's more akin to Pandora's Box than Monkey Island. I guess that's what disappointed many adventure gamers.

    Now, no-one forces anyone to play it. But what really annoys me is that it spawned a number of clones, with the idea that empty worlds with no people in them are the way to make adventure games. These 'deadworld' games, as someone at Lucasarts (Tim Schafer?) once called them, practically killed the traditional dialogue and plot driven adventure game that many people love so much. This is doubly sad, because I'm sure these newbie Myst players would have enjoyed Monkey Island or Grim Fandango much more had they been exposed to them.

    In essence, the misclassification of Myst as an adventure game, had a horrible impact on 'real' adventure games (For want of a better name). Myst was a puzzle game, primarily, and had its imitators realised that, perhaps things would have been different.

    (True story: I showed my bosses kid Monkey Island 1, and he declared it crappy because it was old and low res. I didn't like to point out that the old sega emulator games he was playing were not much different)

  • Re:A major gripe... (Score:4)

    by Erataikasu ( 164339 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @01:00PM (#1001009) Homepage
    Clearly you missed the point of the game. In Myst you played a tetraplegic with a wand in your mouth and an electric wheelchair.

    This explains why there were so many places you couldn't go (Ground was too rough for your wheelchair), it explains why you couldn't pick anything up, it explains why the only things you could interact with are levers and buttons, and it explains why you can't talk (Your mouth is full).

    This game is a tremendous triumph for the differently abled, and I am saddened that so many people put it down.

  • Re:Thank you (Score:4)

    by Dazhel ( 171866 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @01:58AM (#1001012)
    Thief: The Dark Project from (the now defunct unfortunately) Looking Glass Studios stipulated on the expert difficulty that killing anything wasn't allowed. None of this "charge in and kill 20 monsters with a rocket launcher", you had to make an effort NOT to be seen to complete each mission. Quite a good game.
  • Close. Myst was never released for Dos (it required Quicktime), but there was a version for Mac, and a version of Windows. Then they rereleased it a year or two ago as the MasterPiece edition, with 32-bit graphics and better sound. (they had to dither everything to a custom 256 palette originally because of 2x CD-ROM load times).

    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 3 (Score:4)

    by darkith ( 183433 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @02:17AM (#1001021)
    Myst III [myst3.com] Now this, I'm really looking forward too...hope they can keep up with Cyan's vision.
  • There are many games in production here surrounding Cyan and the Myst series. Myst III, Exile is being made completely by a different company than Cyan (ie Cyan is not directly involved as far as I understand) Here is a clarification: Future Product Clarification [cyan.com]

    From this page we learn that Presto Studios is making Exile. Presto is owned by Mattel, which of course will mean that the game will make maps of our phsychological profiles, upload them to Mattel's HQ and subsequently help them in their plans for world domination by producing dolls and action figures incorporating mind control devices.

    Now Mudpie, there's a concept I can subscribe to. Hope I have sufficient broadband when it is released to play it. I will never log off...

  • Will this improve the game? (Score:3)

    by Jon Erikson ( 198204 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @12:32AM (#1001029)

    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
  • That are words! You are plainly right, but most 1st person shooter gamers don't care about the story. My brother loves those kind of games and after he finished Halflife I asked him how he liked the story? Guess, what he replied me: "What story?" (Okay, I admit the plot is not that great)
    So yes a good old "no-gun" adventure in 1st-person 3D really would bring some new wind in the genre. That new Myst could be a great precedent :-)

  • Ide be happy... (Score:5)

    by DavidOgg ( 200113 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @12:19AM (#1001035) Homepage
    To be able to run MS Word in realtime.

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