May Contain Nuts

(Besides “OMFG Buy a Server Farm!!!”)

I’m sure these will probably end up having to wait for the open-sourcing to actually happen, but I’d like to toss them out for consideration now just the same. Just a couple of “quick” tweaks to the game that would make doing certain things so much easier. (and by “quick”, I mean relatively speaking… I know neither of these things would exactly be simple to do)

1) Add a preference setting to the KI to allow or disallow people to find your KI# via search, and build a KI# repository on the MO:UL website where players can search for others by avatar name and get their KI number (more advanced integration of avatar/account data into the website like being able to add a found KI# as a friend from the web would be awesome as well, but baby steps, folks…). No more lengthy forum threads to search through, and no more incomplete/inaccurate/competing fan-built KI listings. An in-game solution would be even better, but again, baby steps.

2) Put some sort of bot character or device into the game in a relatively public space which can serve as a Marker Missions Exchange. Players can send their missions to this bot/device, from whence they can be downloaded by others (something low-tech but comparatively easy to implement, like a “/requestmission <mission name>” chat command, would work until things are open-sourced and we can get a real GUI for this process).

Yeah, I’m at it again. Be afraid. Be very afraid . Also please note that for as much as I go on about this, I really would like to see Cyan do Something Completely Different, rather than staying chained to the boat anchor that is Uru Live.

There are several things that have recently motivated me to further reflect on how to build a better Uru, though two really stand out for me. The first is the fact that I’ve been poking around in Second Life for a while now, and have gotten a feel for how the game’s user-editability works in a broad sense. The second is that the platform I’ve been targeting all of my thinking toward, Unity, is now free for the basic version of the development IDE, which eliminates the barrier-to-entry concerns I had for player-created content on that platform.

To focus briefly on Unity’s strengths, it’s a rock-solid 3rd party engine with its own extensive QA testing department, meaning that support and maintenance of the engine itself are no longer concerns, which makes the cost overhead of development considerably smaller (programmers are not cheap). It has full support for DirectX and OpenGL pixel shaders including bloom, blur, and a whole host of others. It will run natively on Windows, as well as Intel and PowerPC-based Macs, which means no more Crossover or Cider strangeness in the Mac port, and increased accessibility to the product for players with older Mac systems (I’m willing to take any users I can get at this point). It supports live asset streaming from server to client, which means that assets can be retained on the remote server and only downloaded when the client needs them. Considering the bandwidth requirements of most MMOs anyway, these downloads should be fairly speedy, and should even be able to be handled asynchronously, so the remaining content can load while you’re exploring the initial spawn point. It natively opens 3DS MAX files (on Windows), layered Photoshop PSDs, and will import FBX files exported from MAX and Blender, in addition to a whole host of additional mesh, image, video, and audio file support. This pretty much covers all of the most popular tools currently being used to build player-created content for the Plasma engine, with the added benefit of having a documented development API and IDE with full support for every possible feature out-of-the-box.

All of these factors combine to position Unity as a truly capable technology that can easily supplant Plasma in practically every way. I give major props and kudos to Cyan for developing their own graphics engine and server technology in-house to do things in realtime that were unimaginable when they started Uru’s development over 10 years ago, but truth be told, it’s decidedly buggy and lag-ridden in ways that I don’t think open-sourcing the project will ever adequately solve (or at least, ever solve in a reasonable timeframe). Plasma has had a good run, but I think it’s time to move on to something better.

On top of all this, I’ve been reflecting for a while on how to bring some of Second Life’s openness into Uru without destroying the core of what Uru is, or just turning it into a Myst-themed Second Life clone. When players can go pretty much anywhere they please, and do basically whatever they want, as well as build almost anything they can imagine, with a minimal outlay of real-world cash on their part, Uru’s restrictive and largely fixed, scenic environments seem much more sterile and uninviting by comparison. This puts a further degree of importance on the developer-driven storyline, as player-developed concepts are limited to what can be done with only KI notes and unmodified in-game photos as props, and it’s somewhat surprisingly difficult to get people to use their imagination to invent unseen, behind-the-curtain locales for player operations when the rest of the game is so fully visualized. Thus, when the developer’s storyline isn’t going anywhere, or isn’t moving at a pace that can keep up with players’ demands for new material, the game suffers greatly.

After spending a really long time reflecting on what I think makes Uru a great concept, as well as working hard to incorporate some of the most demanded aspects of gameplay throughout Uru’s troubled existence, I think I’ve arrived at a model that can be used to build a better, more potentially successful Uru Live by creating a more player-friendly world built on stronger underlying technologies. Here’s what I’ve got.

User-placeable objects. The game wouldn’t have an object editor like Second Life’s, which is really super complex, but players would have the ability to place arbitrary objects around the game. Certain limitations would be imposed to retain a certain degree of “realism”, so objects like papers could only be placed on designated surfaces like the ground or on cork boards, rather than allowing them to float in mid-air. Players could use this system to drop short notes, full-on notebooks, images, and even arbitrary objects from a global object library into the game. Notes, notebooks, and images would follow a Second Life-style modify/copy/transfer permissions structure, so players would be able to configure whether others can edit, send, send copies, pick up, or pick up copies of the object in question. Arbitrary objects from the library or from a player’s personal collection would have only copy/transfer permissions since there would be no way to edit them in-game.

To further protect certain areas of the game, regions may be configured by the developer to disallow the dropping of objects onto them (the ability for a surface to receive dropped objects would be an explicit opt-in flag in the back-end). Player-owned areas of the game, such as rooms in the D’ni City, may have their structures configured by the owner to determine where things can be dropped by non-owners.

Asynchronous, lazy loading of content. Perhaps one of Plasma’s largest bottlenecks next to physics objects is the way in which it loads content. Everything seems to be loaded synchronously, so in large areas with lots of players, it takes a considerable amount of time before the game gets to a state even barely approaching useable. By decoupling content loading from the main rendering thread and making it asynchronous, players can begin to explore an area before all of the content has finished loading. This is especially prudent for objects like avatars and player-dropped content, but could theoretically be extended to cover the environment itself as well.

More user control of the game’s visual quality. This is a simple thing, but it would make a world of difference to many players. Give them the ability to reduce the visual complexity of the game by reducing the number of avatars their system renders at a time (X nearest, polled intermittently), and by reducing the draw distance for objects such as avatars and player-dropped content. Besides the general improvements to frame rate that would come from migrating to the Unity engine and cleaning up older, more inefficiently-assembled areas of the game, giving players control over the draw distance would likely have a marked impact on performance on lower-end machines, where even a one hundred polygon low-LOD avatar object would add strain to the rendering system. This is a point where we would have to concede “absolute realism” for overall quality and playability, but I think it’s an important and valid trade-off.

The ability to upload content into the game. This one’s going to stir a few pots, I suspect, but frankly speaking, there is no way to make Uru what players want it to be without making this possible. Having Cyan be the gatekeeper on every item that goes into the game is impractical, and there’s already precedent for user-created material being directly added into the game in the form of KI notes, which can be freely shared, edited, and posted publicly. Provided there is a method for reporting and removing offensive content, I think an honor code-driven system would work fine in Uru for the vast majority of cases. Players should be able to upload their own images into the game for use as images to share, and for use on clothing as extra texture options, without needing to go through Cyan for approval first.

I’m unsure of how (or even whether) a Second Life-like system where uploading content costs a marginal amount of real-world cash would work given Cyan’s traditional eschewing of micro-transactions for extra material, but when it comes to the storage space needed for uploaded text and images, there should probably be some way to defray those costs. The rest of the gaming industry, and Second Life in particular, has illustrated that micro-transactions are a viable method for minor gate-keeping and expanding a player’s available content for a minimal up-front cost, and I think if properly structured, such a system would work for Uru, but it would have to be very carefully managed, and should be considered separately from the notion of a player-driven economy within the game where players can sell items to one another, rather than just paying to upload their own content for themselves.

Uploading actual models and textures into the game would be a somewhat different ball of wax, I think, because of the way in which Unity compiles its game assets and given the fact that we wouldn’t be providing an in-game editor for creating one’s own objects. Objects would need to be built in a modeling environment, imported into Unity, and then submitted to the developer (in this case, Cyan) for addition to the global library/libraries in batches, or to an individual player’s account for their personal use. These additions could be done independent of major content drops because of support for on-demand content streaming built into Unity.

Create an API on top of which players can build. Player-created content is obviously going to be a big draw for Uru, if only because it’s been teased at for so long and is already happening under the table in Plasma. Creating a recognized development framework for players to build their own content and integrate it into the game is an absolute must from day 1. The framework should support adding objects, whole regions (Ages etc.), and extensions to the user interface (like new KI functionality) into the game. Depending on the type of material being developed, the developer may need to act as a gate-keeper of sorts, if only to serve as the conduit through which player content is included into the game’s published assets.

Because not every player will have the ability to build their own content for any number of reasons, it’s reasonable to assume that other players may band together to create development shops which would build objects for other players. Existing Guilds such as the Writers and Maintainers may be very well-suited to this task, and there may be some way to create a development shard that is more frequently updated (or possibly can be built on-demand) so that player-developers can test their content before giving it the green light for inclusion into the release builds. Addition of content would not be explicitly subject to Guild involvement, however; if a player wanted to build something and submit it on their own, they would be free to do so.

Certain areas of the game that were originally created by the developer could even have their own additional APIs for creating player-made rule structures, enabling things like more enforceable gameplay rules for player-invented games in Jalak. Provided the technology supported it, players should be able to upload these area-specific override scripts directly to the game for immediate integration, with the obvious ability to report broken, offensive, or griefing scripts.

Give players somewhere to showcase their work. Hand in hand with allowing players to create things like their own Ages is developing a way to let others access them. There should be developer-created spaces in the game for featuring player-created content such as Ages or artwork, and players should also be able to place their own content in player-controlled areas as well. For instance, if a player owned a room or building in the City, they could place a Linking Book to an Age they had created in that room or building, which would then be access-controlled based on who was allowed to enter that space in the City.

This framework for privatized content placement could even be expanded to a more fragmented shard system, where players could lease or operate their own server, and for a stated cost per month could operate player-created content on that machine with their own rules and code of conduct. Such privatized content would require certain disclosures to be put in place for players who may stumble onto it (my first and admittedly clunky thought is to present the player with a dialog box when they click such a linking panel, containing the destination’s rules as they differ from the main area of play, requiring the player to explicitly authorize the link before continuing to the new server).

In addition, there should be central upload repositories where players can upload content from their KI such as notes, images, and marker missions, for other players to download at their leisure. Again, content uploaded to these stations should have modify/copy/transfer controls built into it so players can control the distribution of their own content.

Don’t forget the story. If Uru did all of this, and nothing more, it would essentially be the Myst-themed Second Life clone I want to avoid turning it into. However, the strength of Cyan’s games has always been the one-two punch of high-quality content and storytelling. Without these, Uru is nothing special, but without the rest of this list, storytelling and content become such a tremendously exclusive focus of the player base that maintaining a sufficient development throughput quickly becomes unsustainable. Do all this, and provide a compelling central story with imaginative and gripping environments, and I think Uru’s chances of success improve greatly.

Of course, it sounds a lot easier than it actually is, or it’d be done by now .

I came to the conclusion last night that Uru doesn’t work as an MMO (shocking, I know). First of all, it’s not profitable (at least, not quickly enough to justify its continued commercial development). Secondly, its style of play isn’t very well suited to an MMO… I don’t think this is Uru’s failing, I just think adventure games in general make for pretty crummy MMOs. Not every genre works equally well when you tack “MMO” in front of it.

So I started thinking about how to make a game like Uru actually work. What I came up with is sort of a hybrid between a traditional single-player adventure game and the MMO world of Uru, with a splash of TV thrown in for extra flavor (I swear, it’ll make sense once I explain it!). Beware, those of you well-versed in Uru’s ancient history may find portions of the following explanation tiresome. Because this is a really long post, I’ve put the rest below the fold for the sake of those reading MystBlogs… (I’d also like to apologize if it doesn’t make much sense. This kept me up until almost 4:30 AM, so I’m a bit tired…)

(more…)

First, I would like to note that I’ve been very impressed by not only the positive response to Cyan’s recent release of Myst for iPhone, but also by the apparently high interest in the title. I suspect that there is a certain nostalgia factor involved in its popularity – especially amongst the Mac crowd, which has lately been unable to play the game on modern Mac hardware, or even in the latest OS X release on older hardware – but I don’t think nostalgia alone is enough to push a $5.99, 700MB application into the Top 10 Paid Apps list in multiple territories (and even the Top 5 in some).

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the game’s popularity is its price point. The App Store has gotten quite a lot of press about its “race to the bottom”-style pricing wars, where just because you can charge more than $0.99 doesn’t mean you necessarily should. In fact, of the Top 10 Paid Apps currently in the US App Store, only Myst is priced higher than $0.99, and the average price of the other Top 25 Paid Apps is only $1.70. At $5.99, Myst is practically a premium application by App Store standards, and is managing to out-sell heavyweights like EA (with Trivial Pursuit, Tetris, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour) and PopCap (with Bejeweled 2), who have their games priced between $2.99 (Bejeweled 2) and $9.99 (Tiger Woods PGA Tour, because someone has to pay the licensing royalties to both Tiger and the PGA Tour, I guess). Given the fact that more expensive apps generally seem to be a turn-off for many buyers, coupled with the fact that at 700MB, Myst is easily the largest app in the App Store several times over, I’m honestly impressed at how well the game is selling.

What doesn’t surprise me quite as much, honestly, are the reviews. Overall, the game has a 4.5 star rating, with 86% of its ratings giving it 5 stars. I’m not exactly surprised by this fact given how well-done the port is, and given that there’s probably more than a few repeat buyers giving it these glowing reviews (though the repeat buyer thing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s guaranteed a good review… the DS port seems to be getting a pretty cold shoulder from veteran fans for what I understand are perfectly valid reasons). What does surprise me a bit is that the game is still so popular and well-received even though it’s 16 years old now, is rather clearly dated in terms of its technology, and has a rather vocal crowd of hard-core gamers who love to rip on it (amusingly, there are notably few complaints about its slideshow nature in the App Store reviews, and most entertainingly, someone commented on the absurdly long length of the intro… whether they were referring to Cyan’s classic logo or the actual game intro I’m not sure, though I suspect it was leveled at the logo, which is a lot longer than most of the “throw it up and get it over with” logo splashes of game developers these days).

Ultimately, it’s a testament to Myst’s staying power that 16 years later it’s still such a popular game. I think it sets a new bar for quality games in the App Store, and could well re-establish the traditional adventure game genre on a new platform, though I hope developers have learned from earlier efforts to duplicate Myst’s formula with spectacular failure and avoid making a lot of downright disastrously bad adventure/puzzle games.

Personally, I picked Myst up over the weekend just after it was announced as available on the Lyst (perhaps the first time in several years that I’ve gotten breaking Myst news from the Lyst, which was itself a nice bit of nostalgia ), and played through it on Sunday and Monday. Overall, I’m very impressed with how well the game runs on my 1st-gen iPod Touch (the slowest Touch product in Apple’s lineup). It eats practically no battery (I think playing a long podcast is more battery-intensive, which is just weird, but also awesome), and with one exception that a reboot seems to have fixed, is rock-solid.

There are a couple of differences between the PC and iPhone versions which bear mentioning just for the sake of being nit-picky. First, the Linking Books are all still images, with the obvious exception of the initial fly-over of Myst Island (because that’s frankly impossible to remove); the animated fly-throughs from Myst Masterpiece Edition are the only moving overview you get of the Age. I suspect this was done for space-saving reasons, and ultimately it doesn’t detract from the experience. If anything, it’s made up for in spades by actually being able to “touch” a Linking Book for the first time. Suffice it to say, I geeked out over this more than was probably necessary.

Second, some of the sound effects seem to have been changed or removed, and the “loose” nature of some of the controls have been tightened rather substantially. This is most notable in Mechanical Age, where the Fortress Rotation Simulator doesn’t make a thrumming buzzy noise when “booting up”, the elevator rotator doesn’t have any inertia to it (making it impossible to over-shoot the elevator’s position, which was sometimes annoying but fairly realistic) and sounds a lot less substantial (I think the wrong click sfx was used there), and the fortress rotation puzzle also lacks its inertia. It may also be because of the touch-based interface, but the pressed state of many buttons seem to be missing; again, Mechanical Age is a good example, where the elevator buttons don’t dim when they’re pressed. Most jarring was the change made to the Generator Room’s sfx on Myst Island… gone is the reverberating series of “ka-chunk”s as the lights turned on, replaced now with a pretty bland pair of “click”s. Again, these don’t really detract from the experience, especially if you’ve never played the game before, but from the perspective of an old-timer, they were noticeable changes.

Finally, the wipe transitions seem to have all been replaced with fades. This is fine for moving from place to place within the game, but it does remove some of the pseudo-animated feel that the doors used to have in the original, where wipes were used in the place of video to “swing” doors open. The transition speed also seems to be used for the “animation” of large button presses, like the pump switches in Stoneship. I like having the transition speed set medium-high, which is fine for walking about, but it seems too slow for the pump switches.

One thing that is markedly improved over the Windows release, at least, is that the game performs just like it did on the Mac, even back in 1993. The Windows release was plagued by a couple of pretty glaring quality issues, most notably the fact that it couldn’t play two sounds at the same time. If you were standing by the Planetarium on Myst and turned the marker switch on, the windy ambient sound would cut out so that the switch sfx could play, and then the wind sfx would return. It also suffered from a problem with Quicktime’s behavior under Windows, where the cursor would flicker and display as black-and-white rather than color whenever it was placed over a video. These two problems persisted even into the Masterpiece Edition of the game, which has always bugged me given how well the rest of the game is presented.

Changing gears to actual presentation, I’m absolutely blown away by the visual quality of the images, even 16 years away from the game’s original release. To be sure, the construction seems a tad crude in places by modern standards (especially the massive color-only bitmaps used for ground texture), but the image fidelity itself is fabulous. With the iPhone’s 160ppi display and the original 24-bit rendered images, everything looks super bright and crisp… much better than trying to play it on a 24″ monitor set to 640×480. I would suggest setting your display brightness to at least 50% before playing, though, or the darks are a bit over-dark (display brightness has always been a concern in the Myst series, so this isn’t exactly a new development ).

The audio sounds great in most places, though some of it just suffers from poor source quality… the voice work is a bit fuzzy, I suspect largely because it was done by a couple of guys in their basement with what was very probably not top-of-the-line recording equipment 16 years ago. It’s probably as good as it’s going to get, and while it’s not crystal clear, it’s still pretty darn good (and it’s nice to have Atrus pronouncing “futile” correctly, even if the audio quality does suffer ).

If there’s one audio cue I do wish would be remastered from scratch, it’s the chime on the Selenitic clock tower. Gods bless Chris Brandkamp’s pitch-shifted Craftsman 7/8″ wrench, and kudos to him for his sound design ingenuity (between that and the toilet bubbles I still giggle every time I watch the Making Of video), but it just doesn’t have the bass of a real clocktower chime, and it gets lost under the louder and more trebble-heavy tick-tocking and grinding noises in the cue.

The auto-zoom is a nice feature, though it does rather clearly illustrate that the images being used in the game are only as large as the display itself. Most of the auto-zoomed content looks fuzzy because of the scaling… I’m pretty sure there isn’t much Cyan can do about this because the original images aren’t really big enough to make high-quality zooms, but I’ve caught myself waiting for an image to “resolve” the way Safari does when you zoom into a webpage, before realizing that the image is as clear as it’s going to get.

One thing that is a tad jarring is the fact that the game seems to flash to black rather frequently when transitioning from a still image to a video and back again. I don’t know if this is just a side effect of playing on a 1st-gen iPod Touch, or if it affects all platforms, but it is a little distracting and breaks the immersion a little. The loading throbber that appears for about a half-second before a larger video (like one of the brothers’ ramblings) plays is also a little distracting and seems largely unnecessary, but neither of these things are really deal-breakers.

Since it’s been the subject of a fair amount of conversation in the various places the game is being talked about, I thought I’d also discuss the game’s size from my limited-knowledge perspective. A couple of people have noted that the game’s size is absurd considering that the original game fit onto a 650MB CD, and was able to be installed on hard drives that were smaller than the iPhone port itself is with plenty of space to spare. These people are forgetting that the original game only installed the executable for the game’s engine; the media used by the game was streamed off of the CD, not copied to the hard drive. They are also forgetting that the original game used 8-bit images with additional Quicktime compression layered on top of them, while the iPhone release uses the original 24-bit renders, which are probably either JPG (if they were shooting for space-saving) or 24-bit PNG (if they were shooting for losslessness), and probably don’t have additional compression applied to them because it’s ultimately not as important as it used to be to save every possible byte. I’ve also noticed someone in the Wired review complaining that the game was smaller on the PC despite having larger images. Ignoring the 8-bit vs. 24-bit difference, there is no conceivable way that the original images were twice as large as those used on the iPhone. The game ran at 640×480 (versus the iPhone’s resolution of 480×320), but the images were nowhere near as large as the screen. Assuming RAWA’s example images in his dissertation on dithering are the correct size, the original game’s images were 544×333, or about 20% larger than the iPhone resolution. I am uncertain whether the images used in the iPhone release are the same size as the originals, or if they are scaled/cropped to fit the iPhone’s screen (the aspect ratios are different, though only slightly, so some cropping has occurred), but it would very likely not go as far toward explaining the increase in the size of the game as some of the other factors discussed above and below.

The video content was also super-compressed (and often looked terrible overlaid on the dithered 8-bit images) and poor quality, while the iPhone release’s video content is virtually indistinguishable from the still images. I’m wondering if the videos weren’t just re-mastered to all play as full-screen video content rather than embedded on a still background to avoid the overlay issue entirely (this would explain the full-frame flashing I experience, as well as why the Linking Book animations were removed), which would make them substantially larger in file size, despite improvements in compression technologies in the intervening years. More than anything else, I think this would have had the largest impact on the game’s size (and would explain how it went from just over 500MB in an interview with Rand several weeks before the game’s release to over 700MB… such an increase seems unlikely to be caused by a boost of audio or still image content alone).

Finally, the audio and music is all 100% intact and very high quality. The musical cues were truncated in the Masterpiece Edition release (again, ironic that the Masterpiece Edition would suffer from so many technical failings), likely to help keep the game on a single CD. The iPhone release made no such compromises, and it’s likely that a number of megabytes of content are taken up just by using the complete cuts of the music.

Ultimately, this is a no-holds-barred, damn-the-torpedoes release of the original Myst, which I have to say is well overdue. It’s a fantastic port, even factoring in the minor issues I’ve mentioned, and it plays very well, even on my low-end hardware; it probably plays better than it did on our $2000 PC back in 1994. It’s also great that I can play the game without having to migrate to my aging laptop or reboot my iMac into Windows, and I can take it with me to keep me occupied outside the apartment.

Several folks have said that despite the ludicrous size requirements, they would love to see Riven make the jump to the iPhone as well. While I won’t argue that it would be great to have Riven on the iPhone (even if it meant it was the only thing on some people’s iPhone… I can easily see it topping 5 gigs in size), I think that it’s such a massive undertaking that Cyan would be better suited to put it off until later. If any of their existing back catalogue gets ported, I’d love to see Manhole, Cosmic Osmo, and Spelunx make the jump before Riven (if only so I can actually play them).

Interestingly, something RAWA once said about Spelunx has me thinking that it would make for a great game to port to the iPhone under OS 3.0. In discussing Spelunx for those who had never seen or heard of it, RAWA mentioned this:

The cave system is also modular, so it is possible that if new rooms are discovered in the future, they can be added to your cave.

Given Apple’s impending support for in-app purchases and Spelunx’s modular design, it seems like a natural fit for a kid-friendly, extensible, educational game for the App Store.

Beyond re-releasing their back catalogue, I think Cyan could conceivably get into the market of making smaller iPhone-only games, given the high percentage of each sale that goes back to the developer, the low cost to market, and the potentially high return on investment due to the massive install base.

To be pie-in-the-sky, since the super hard work of moving Myst to a Cocoa-based application has already been done (while noting that going from an iPhone to a Mac app isn’t just a toggle in XCode), I’d also love to see Myst re-released for Mac OS X, and I’d definitely love to see Riven re-released on the Mac as well (definitely more than I’d like to see it released on the iPhone), since neither will currently run on the platform that launched the series. Given that Riven is the only game in the catalogue still limited to 8-bit dithered images and highly-compressed, 16-bit, outdated-codec videos, a Masterpiece Edition re-release with 24-bit images and high-quality video would be very, very much appreciated, regardless of the platform it ends up on (though Apple will need to improve their installation process if Riven hits the App Store at several gigabytes in size).

Ultimately, though, it’d be nice to see Cyan break new ground rather than continually re-tread the past… the question, I guess, is whether they can get any money to do so. I hope they can.

Honestly, I forgot this was even still in existence until recently… and so have a lot of other folks, apparently… only 30% of the sites listed in the Guild of Archivists webring are even still active now (where “active” here means “doesn’t go to a squatter page”), and only a handful of those seem to be actively participating in the webring itself by putting up the links.

Effective next Friday, April 10, the webring will be shut down. If you’re one of the few sites still displaying the webring content, please remove it by then. Thank you.

I have a confession to make…

I’m not really all that excited about the prospect of OpenURU anymore. I’ll definitely still play, and check out what the GoW and others are able to do with the game if/when it’s finally released, but from the standpoint of being actively involved in its development, I’m just not feeling it anymore.

Mostly it’s because I just don’t have any time to devote to the conversations and debates. I would be doing a disservice to other contributors by getting involved when I know I can’t keep up with the responsibilities that go along with pitching in I’ve pretty much voiced my concerns and ideas for what needs to be done to make Uru work well already, so I feel comfortable handing those ideas off to everyone else to do with as they please. However, for me Uru has finally hit the “death by a thousand paper cuts” stage. I’ve been through so many ups and downs with this game that I’m just tired of the roller coaster now, and I’d like very much to get off and ride something else.

The biggest draw in Uru (and Myst in general), for me, has been Cyan’s art and story. Since I’m not getting either anymore, my interest has frankly waned. I’m also less than optimistic about the prospects of OpenURU’s success without some serious (and I do mean serious) work to refine the game’s most basic elements of story and interface. Again, since the ability to affect change in either of these arenas seems unlikely to be granted to us by Cyan at this point, I’m just not interested in trying to put more band-aids on a game that’s already been cut up into itty bitty pieces and stitched back together again at least three times.

What I want is something new. Even if it’s just printed text on a page, I want to learn something new about D’ni. There’s 10,000 years worth of characters and tales in Cyan’s mythology, and I desperately want to see more of it come to light (I realize they’d have to invent it before it could be printed, but writing a story is still far cheaper and structurally simpler than building a whole game). And as much as I enjoy fanfic, I’d like instead to see something unique and interesting come from Cyan. I know that’s simply not going to happen – Cyan seems to have reverted to the halcyon car-net days of Myst’s development (poetically, the project those left “at” Cyan are working on is Myst for the iPhone) – but that’s what I want.

Failing that, I’ll still work with anyone interested in building a Cyan-sanctioned Extended Universe. DPWR’s resources are still available for use and expansion, and I have no intention of changing that fact. Unfortunately, development of the site is still nowhere near where I want it to be, partly because I lost time to work on it, and partly because I postponed development after it seemed like Invision Board 3 would be coming out at the beginning of this year, thus making even more work for me in the long run (that has yet to happen… now it’s looking more like June. Awesome). Still, there’s plenty of work that can and should be done in the Archive. It’s slow-paced, laid-back work that I enjoy doing when I have the time, and tonight I decided to do a bit of work, inspired by the frenzy of activity on the Battlestar Galactica Wiki after the series finale last week. Hopefully I’ll have time to keep up with what I’m doing before I forget what I was working on. Anyone else interested in pitching in is welcome to do so.

I’m also noodling with a few game concepts again (another reason my creative inclination toward Uru has waned), and hopefully I’ll have more done with them next month. One in particular is a fairly simple project that I keep over-complicating and putting off… if I can get it finished hopefully I can hawk it for a few bucks a pop and make a little bit of extra cash.

I touched on this a bit in my last post, but I wanted to take some time and go over a few (but certainly not all) of the possibilities for what we might end up being allowed to do with OpenURU, depending on how the Plasma and the Uru content are licensed.

First off, I think it’s at least somewhat likely that Cyan will release the Plasma code under a Creative Commons license, in which case the most likely candidates are Attribution, Attribution Share Alike, Attribution Non-Commercial, and Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (I’m not going to go into GPL, BSD, MIT, etc. because I have very little knowledge of their inner workings, and I don’t have a supremely large amount of time to devote to what is essentially a thought exercise).  The Share Alike licenses are, to my mind, the most likely of the most likely candidates, and the Non-Commercial versions seem like a reasonable certainty, but I’ve been wrong before. Any of these licenses would enable developers to take the Plasma engine, the Plasma server code, or both, and use them to build their own brand new, not-D’ni-related MMO. The only question is whether those new MMOs will be able to make a profit, as determined by whether the license is Non-Commercial or not.

None of this covers the actual content of the game, though; just the code that makes the game run. That, if it’s licensed at all, would almost certainly be licensed separately.

What I would prefer to see Cyan do is license the entire existing game’s contents under the Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, or something fundamentally similar. This would enable the community to fix long-standing problems with the game’s content – from fixing minor graphical issues, to overhauling the KI, to completely revising how the game begins for new players – without running afoul of Cyan’s intellectual property rights by ensuring that the content remains under the same license. Since this license would apply only to the material that Cyan created and any derivative works that were made from it (they’d be licensing the models, not the universe), I believe (but am not 100% absolutely certain) that user-created Ages would not be subject to the Share Alike clause – treating the content as divorced from the engine powering it is a cheap but effective way of attempting to ensure that. In any case, if the Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license ends up not quite fitting the bill, I’m sure something could be found that would require changes made under the license to Cyan’s own content to be redistributed under the same license without requiring new Ages added by the community to be similarly licensed.

It should be noted that under this sort of license, Cyan would be creating a platform for fan fiction, but not the creation of an Extended Universe of D’ni canon. Without a specifically-defined process by which content created by the community can be approved for inclusion into the Extended Universe canon, the story of D’ni will be static until Cyan (or a licensee) is able to add to it in the future.

Since I’m all about increasing the breadth and depth of the D’ni universe, I would love to see Cyan maintain its stance on user-created canon expansions that RAWA outlined for MORE: a community-run panel would review submitted content, and approve it if it passed a set of well-defined criteria. I don’t know if the FCAL panel should necessarily retain its originally-intended composition though. What would be more flexible is a dual panel, with the GoW and GoMa in charge of overseeing the inclusion of content into OpenURU based on its stability, where such content could be added to any shard upon approval. The GoA would run a separate “canon review” panel, which would be entirely optional, but whose approval would enable the applicant’s content to be placed on an (the?) Exnteded Universe Shard, which would likely be managed by the Guilds.

(I should note that Guild approval is obviously not going to be a requirement for content inclusion depending on the shard, but I would hope that if something passes a GoW/GoMa test plan, it could be added anywhere with reasonable assurances as to its stability. Clearly, though, content is going to need to be tested before it’s added to a live shard… exactly how that happens will likely be up to the individual shard managers.)

This is, of course, all what I would prefer to have happen, because it’s incredibly flexible in what it allows, without requiring Cyan to give up creative control of their intellectual property – all derivative works would have to be properly attributed, with their content specifically (i.e. the stuff from MOUL) licensed under a Share Alike-format agreement. It sets up the possibility for both canon wonks and casual storytellers alike to have a place and a way to contribute without stepping on each other’s toes. It also makes it possible for other groups or companies to benefit not just from Cyan’s years of work on their engine, but also from the mountainous improvements that are bound to be rolled into the code by the open source community. The MMO space has never really had a AAA-quality engine be this accessible to so many people; it will be interested to see what happens in the future with Cyan taking the first step towards leveling the playing field for newcomers.

Of course, what could also happen is that Cyan retains exclusive ownership of the content from MOUL, which seems like a bit of a dick move, since it would severely hinder the ability of the community to fix some of the more eggregious problems with the game – not just technically, but gameplay-wise as well. It would require us to figure out a completely different way of integrating new user-created content too, rather than doing the “easy” thing of piling it into the Nexus, or the more visually interested thing of expanding the Library.

In such a situation, Cyan will still need to have a license in place for user-created content, because even if Cyan isn’t interested in letting players expand the D’ni universe anymore, user-created content within the D’ni universe still requires a license from Cyan because at the end of the day, you’re building off of their intellectual property and distributing it to other people (and it’s the “distributing it to other people” bit that causes problems, legally). Given the immense interest people have in adding content to Uru, I don’t think Cyan in its current state is going to be able to handle individual requests in a timely manner; a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license for the D’ni universe IP with a few additional restrictions (basically what’s on their Legal page) would probably be more than sufficient.

I, of course, have more thoughts on what I would like to see happen, gameplay-wise, in OpenURU, but for now, I kind of need to get back to work.  More later .

So, evidently Cyan is open-sourcing Myst Online. After re-reading the comments in the Spokesman Review a third time in preparation for writing this entry, I’ve picked up on a couple of things that I’m not sure others have really noticed… I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, my initial reactions.

I suspect that it’s currently one of my worst-kept secrets, but since the plan to release MORE essentially dissolved earlier this year, I’ve been working hard-core on ideas for how to build a new MMO set in D’ni (the chances of actually pulling it off without obscenely large piles of money were always very slim, but I considered it a good thought experiment at least). To say that this new announcement has drastically altered any and all of my thoughts about this little side-project of mine is something of an understatement. I may be one of the few people in the community to actually be a tad conflicted about this revelation, but then I had some pretty slick ideas for how to improve on what I saw as the game’s fundamental flaws. I’d like to discuss some of these ideas in the future in the interests of making OSMOUL a better game, so keep an eye out for that.

My very next thought was, “oh crap, what’s this going to do to the Archive?!” I initially missed the part in the Spokesman Review blog post where it says that Cyan still plans to operate the central Vault, and flipped out about the potential for a completely fragmented multi-shard insanity where no shard’s implementation of OSMOUL was the complete one, and the complete view of OSMOUL’s shards was a contradictory mess. Having now realized that Cyan intends to keep MOUL itself on one instance with multiple servers attached to it from around the world, much in the same way that MORE would have, I’m less freaked out by the prospect of OSMOUL than I was an hour ago. I have no doubt that other shards will inevitably appear, whether out of necessity or desire, but I think it’s safe to say that any official canon expansion or Extended Universe canon development will take place on the shard backed by Cyan’s Vault, while other shards will range anywhere from high-end fanfic to “just goofing around”, and honestly I have no problem with that. As it stands, Uru can most certainly not be all things to all players, and while I hope that the official shard develops quickly enough that newcomers of all persuasions can find something that interests them, I also understand that for any number of reasons, some fans might want a different type of experience with Uru as a game from that offered on the official shard.

With all of that said, I’m very much interested in finding out what Cyan wants to do about fan-created content on their shard. If the plan is to basically just run it like an open-source MORE, then I think the Guilds (myself included) ought to get back to the task of creating the FCAL Panel and hammering out a process for how content will move from a testing environment to the official shard. I hope to get the Archive back into a more active state as well, since the future of D’ni doesn’t look quite as bleak now as it did a couple of hours ago. On that note, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Invision Power Board 3, which powers DPWR’s backend, as it should enable the site to do pretty much everything I’ve been trying to hand-code in some form or fashion over the past several site revisions. More on DPWR later, though.

Having thought this whole thing over for some time now, I’m actually rather excited now at the prospect of what OSMOUL could do for Uru. With fans able to get their hands on the code, hopefully some long-overdue projects will finally get taken care of, like an overhaul of the KI, or fully debugging the stupid doors, or the client collapsing under the weight of handling physics objects in a highly populated area (or making the client more capable of loading and rendering massive Ages intelligently). Depending on how lax Cyan intends to be with what they let us create and add into the game, maybe I could even get to some of the places I’ve been oggling over since I first read the Book of Ti’ana over 10 years ago. A complete implementation of the Descent would be beyond awesome, and getting to more of K’veer or into the Guild Hall would be super cool. At the very least, getting some of the lingering graphical glitches in MOUL tidied up would be nice to see.

I think I’m beginning to understand how and why Blizzard continually manages to make more money than some third-world countries… they make one game and sell it to you three times.  Clearly taking the Square-Enix Final Fantasy approach to storytelling through games (whereby you answer an increasingly large number of questions about the primary story’s plot through additional titles, ideally on completely different consoles so that hardware manufacturers can get in on the consumer screw-fest), they’re releasing StarCraft 2 as 3 separate titles, each focusing on a different race.  I suspect that to get the whole story, you’re going to have to drop $150 on what should by rights probably be a $60-$70 experience.  And before I go any farther, I would just like to point out that this is a different sort of “sell one game three times” magic than what the likes of Tell Tale Games does with their products… you really only have to buy a season once to get the whole story, and a whole season is still cheaper than most stand-alone titles.  Blizzard, on the other hand, will probably charge full price for each installment of their epic title of ultimate destiny (dun da-da-dun!).

While I respect Blizzard on one level for being able to turn such massive profits off of the backs of crushed souls the world over World of Warcraft players and bucking the trend toward games being varying shades of brown and black, stuff like this (as well as the completely unnecessary and inexplicably popular portable soul-crushing experience World of Warcraft: The Gathering CCG) just strikes me as exploiting a fanbase already slavishly devoted to your every whim.

I’ve been mulling this over for more than a month now, since I brought it up to Blade as part of our conversations about the GoA after attending the GoMe meeting in August, and have finally reached a conclusion: I can no longer be the sole point of development and administration for DPWR.  The site has gotten large enough, and I’ve gotten busy enough, that I simply can’t handle the work load anymore.  Unfortunately, because of DPWR’s history, transitioning to shared ownership will not be an easy thing.  The code has never been under source control, and development hasn’t exactly been what one might call “professional” at any point in time.  DPWR is how (and why) I learned PHP, and a lot of what I do with the site generally consists of hacking and modifying existing files in Invision Power Board, with poorly-documented and poorly-commented results.

What I want to do is essentially start from scratch in some ways.  I want to start with a virgin installation of IPB and the various components that I use for DPWR (Links, Gallery, and Wiki), and then build the current feature set back into the site.  It’s a fair amount of replicated effort, I know, but I think it’s the only way to start off on the right foot.  To make things potentially easier, I’ve already subversioned the current files so that there’s a base point of comparison that can be built from and re-implemented whole-cloth where appropriate (and possible).  In addition to re-programming the PHP, I would also like to tackle modifying the site’s skin as well, since it’s got some rather obvious legibility issues and needs some love to pull it more in-line with the Guild of Archivists concept (Tweek being the awesome person that he is has provided me with his “Guild Pub” emblem for the GoA, which I’d like to run with).

Ultimately, my goal is to get everything updated and moved to the live site by the end of the year (just in time for IPB 3 to come out and start the process all over again ).  Since most of the stuff on the site doesn’t need much (if any) modification to work, and all of the really hard work of getting the Archive to support tags has already been done (it just needs to be re-implemented into the vanilla install), I think the thing that would take the longest would be the skin.

I’ve decided to do this now (rather than wait for IPB 3 to come out) for several reasons: 1) I want to make sure that the site is actually maintainable by a small group before IPB 3 comes out and the really hard work of porting the Archive component to the new version begins, 2) I want the site to be able to support all of the requirements that being the host for the GoA puts on it ASAP, and 3) I don’t have the time to do any of this by myself anymore.  I’ve got one pro bono web design project I’m working on right now, and will hopefully have a contract for another site by next month.  Coupled with the 3 months worth of other small-to-massive-sized projects I’ve accumulated over the summer without a Mac to call my own and the fact that I’m at work 9 hours a day, I just don’t have the ability to throw myself at DPWR the way I did when I was 15 without a care in the world .  (On a side note, it’s actually kind of scary that I’ve been managing this site since I was 15… it originally launched on Homestead on June 30, 2000)

So, if you’re a PHP developer interested in helping to get DPWR on its feet, please leave a comment with some way of getting in touch with you, or email me and let me know you’re interested.  I realize I’m asking a great deal with no real compensation (all I’ve got are my gratitude and appreciation [as well as my most profound apologies for the current sorry state of the code base]), so I don’t exactly expect a stampede of volunteers, but anyone willing to lend a hand would be very, very greatly appreciated.  I’ll discuss the details of how to get to the SVN source, as well as some other guidelines and requirements, privately with anyone who volunteers.  It’s not nasty, mean, paranoia-inducing “OMG SEEKRETS!” stuff, just stuff that I would rather discuss in confidence because it has to do with a non-open-source project .