May Contain Nuts

“Why hasn’t Cyan released the Plasma source code by now?”

Because, as RAWA explained, it’s a long, painful process. As RAWA somewhat implied, there are very few people at Cyan who even know anything about the engine code anymore. Most – if not all – of the Headspin team they bought the engine from have since left the company or been laid off. The number of “Don’t use this, we don’t know what it does” comments in the ResEng documentation I was given when I started there speaks volumes about how much work needs to go into the engine to get it ready for release.

Further, open-sourcing the engine as it stands now faces a number of additional issues. First, I’m under the impression that Cyan wants to separate the engine code from any game content that might be tied up in it, in order to retain legal rights to their D’ni universe intellectual property and released content. Given how often purpose-built engines have game content references hard-coded into them for the sake of convenience, this may be more likely than it seems. Second, I’m fairly certain that Cyan intends to continue using Plasma after they open-source it, so it must be done in a way that doesn’t prevent Cyan from using the engine commercially in the future. Third, there’s a number of proprietary components in the Plasma engine that are the property of third parties (PhysX is a good example), which Cyan can’t release the code for. However, stripping the references to that code out of the engine would make it essentially useless.

A good parallel to draw, I think, is to Relic’s decision about 5 years ago to open-source the engine they used to create the original Homeworld title in 1999. As with Plasma, everyone at the time was mind-boggled at the fact that a AAA game engine for a best-selling title was just going to be given away by its creators. However, to this day there still isn’t an openly available version of the engine that can be used for anything besides running an extremely buggy and feature-deprived build of Homeworld, because so much of the engine got crippled when Relic ripped out stuff like the Bink decoder used for the animatic cutscenes (which weren’t released along with the engine, so until the hard-coded references to them were removed from the engine, the game would just crash because of the missing assets), and there’s a pile of assembly code that just doesn’t work very well on modern hardware, including a lot of homebrewed custom OpenGL assembly code (dubbed “RelicGL”) that was written to get bare-metal access to the anemic or even non-existent graphics hardware available in 1999. Check out the Homesource forums for a taste of what fresh Hells Relic’s engine hath wrought.

So, if Relic’s approach can shed any light on this subject (and I think it can), throwing the code out now now now isn’t going to accomplish Cyan’s goals any faster than releasing the code at a later date, and is in all likelihood actually going to slow things down even further. I know there’s a lot of code monkey geniuses in the Myst community, but Plasma is a 15-year-old monster of an application, and more eyeballs on the problem doesn’t always mean faster results.

Which leads me to…

“Why won’t Cyan let trusted community members help get the code ready for release?”

As RAWA’s noted, and as many others have mentioned, there are a whole swarm of thorny legal issues involved with granting non-employees access to a proprietary code base full of more licensed proprietary third-party software, on top of the very probable situation that Cyan doesn’t have a system in place for allowing outside access to their Plasma code repository, it’s probably in a rather outdated source control system (perhaps even Visual Source Safe *shudder*), and compiling it may also require licenses for software that volunteers would need to be given (just as an example, anyone who’s tried to recompile a C++ VS6 or VS.NET project in VS08 should know it’s not likely to go smooth). Getting all of this set up, settling the hazy legal issues surrounding unpaid labor in the US, and drafting and issuing contracts and access permissions that are locked-down to only the relevant material is probably more trouble than it’s worth, honestly. Again, remember, this is a spare-time effort that Cyan can’t afford to expend valuable resources on when they’re needed elsewhere for other projects.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Cyan is holding onto the code to try and hammer out some additional security issues, which they don’t want out in the open for discovery when they’re also running the only (legal *ahem*) active shard of the game on the planet. Given the (admittedly long-ago) history of outsider abuse of the Myst community (such as hacking the Riven Lyst), I would understand it if Cyan wasn’t willing to expose the Uru community to another outage resulting from someone exploiting the code’s most evident weaknesses. Considering the Vault always struck me as being held together with duct tape and bailing twine, I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot that can go wrong very easily, and again, right or not, Cyan may just want to avoid that situation if at all possible by keeping the code internal for now (and please spare me the “security through obscurity” arguments, because they never seem to convince anyone in either direction).

And now, for my own petty comment: I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Uru hacking community’s tendency to do whatever they want with or without Cyan’s permission is putting Cyan off from being willing to accept their assistance. I applaud Paradox for actually working with Mark on the Pidgin KI plugin, and that sort of approach – independent development of tools and extensions with Cyan’s permission since it’s their property – if repeated elsewhere, could go a long way towards improving the apparent lack of interest on Cyan’s part towards the hacker community, and community involvement in general (assuming the aforementioned hurdles aren’t going to get in the way).

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’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 .

To whom it may concern,

Clearly you feel that there is something seriously wrong with the way the MOUL forum is being run, otherwise you would not persist in your sarcasm-laden, poorly-veiled commentary on the moderators who run it and the posters who frequent it.  I could swear I remember stating as a matter of public record some time ago that I would be willing to discuss perceived mistreatment of members and mismanagement of the forum by the MOUL moderators privately.  Unfortunately, nobody involved in the explosion that triggered that statement has since taken me up on the offer, nor has anyone involved in the forum thread I linked to above.  Is this simply poor memory on your part, or do you feel that it is better to try and publicly stir up bad vibes and goad people into taking actions you can later use as justification for your divissive behavior?

I have been entirely honest in my offer to extend a hand in honest, open communication regarding perceived mishandling of situations on the forums by the moderators, and my offer still stands.  Vacant, public accusations of wrongdoing will get you no farther in resolving anything; I’ve learned that lesson myself.  If you have a problem with the way the forum is being run by the moderators, take it up with me directly – that’s why I made the offer I did.  If you have a problem with the behavior of a forum poster, take it up with them directly; don’t over-generalize and accuse the entire forum population of being Cyan yes-men when it’s plainly clear that that is not the case.

I look forward to working with you to resolve whatever problems you see as existing on the MOUL forums in a direct, professional, and speedy manner.

- Alahmnat
MOUL Forum Moderator

I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning…

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying to stick around anymore when all anyone ever seems to do is argue.

As I mentioned in my last Uru-related entry, I wanted to save the user-created content commentary for a separate post because this is going to be a thorny subject and I suspect I’m going to be on the wrong side of the debate here.  I’ve thus far been expressly avoiding major additions of user-created content like Ages and such because I honestly don’t think that they’re essential to the long-term survival of Uru.  Please to be not pummeling me until I have a chance to explain myself!

I am absolutely not saying that I think fan-created content is bad, nor am I saying that Cyan is wrong for wanting to give players the means to create their own stuff to share with others.  What I am saying is that I don’t think Uru is the right vehicle for that content.  Uru is (or at least was, I’m not entirely sure anymore) a Cyan project that builds on and continues the extension of official Myst canon.  As much as I like the guys at GoW, integrating fan Ages directly into official canon is a hazy proposition to me.  It just feels… off.  Of course, one could always just turn Uru into this content platform, and leave Cyan with the option of creating a Myst MMO with a brand new title .  I just get kinda squirmy when it comes to the “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!”-style scenario that could arise from putting fan content directly into a game built on canon (I’m a purist, you may now commence pummeling).

Where I think fan-created Ages (and indeed, whole fan-created games) would be better suited is a spin-off service that still runs on Plasma, has an officially released toolkit for developers to build their stuff with, and enables users to embrace or ignore as much or as little of the available material as they like, without it getting in the way of Uru’s story or content.  Like Steam, but just for Myst stuff.  With such a service available, content wouldn’t just be limited to what could be produced within the confines of Uru.  In effect, it becomes an official, kosher distribution point for virtual fan fiction, with the obvious disclaimer attached that none of what you’re seeing should be considered canon unless it’s officially adopted by Cyan.  You also get the added benefit of not getting freaked out about someone’s new Age mucking up the Uru Live Vault, and not having to figure out the managerial headache of how people would download and access player content without just piling it all into the initial download (which would be messy and ginormous).  Ultimately, I think trying to cram user-created content into a game that was never designed to support it would cause more problems than it would solve, and that the better way to do it would be to keep the two separate.  This way, Cyan doesn’t have to potentially re-architecture portions of Uru’s download manager, fans can still build and release content that runs on the same engine on whatever schedule they like, and players can access and enjoy both.

I think that such a service would blow the doors off of a potentially massive Myst extended universe, much the same way that Star Wars has grown exponentially beyond the confines of the original films through licensed books and software.  The Myst universe has the potential to be incredibly huge and rich, and I think a lot of people in this community recognize that fact, otherwise there likely wouldn’t be such a huge push for player-created Ages in Uru.  And while I have to give props to the work the people at Alcugs have done to get their stuff into the offline version of Uru, having a sanctioned release channel that doesn’t skirt legalities, and doesn’t have vague questions about what you can and can’t put in your Ages like the current Uru:CC distribution system does, is going to get a whole lot more people on board.

On a larger scope, I’d love to see more commercially available Myst universe material.  I mean seriously, the Myst universe is simply too large and varied to not be expanded upon by fans and, in my opinion, other creative professionals.  There’s 10,000 years of Atrus-free history to work with here; don’t tell me that not one interesting thing happened in that time that wouldn’t be worthy of a book, movie, TV show, video game, etc.  Think of it: CSI: J’Taeri!  The Mahnxooreeahn Candidate!  Call of Duty 5: The Pento Wars!  Burnout: Ae’Gura!  Sim City: D’ni! (two great tastes that taste great together!)

On a more serious note, I really hope that projects like the Myst Movie thing actually get off the ground and make a dent in the public consciousness.  The Star Wars expanded universe has scads and scads of books, comics, action figures, and reference materials, not all of which are anywhere close to being canonical anymore, and the scope of a potential Myst expanded universe could easily rival such a construct.  I know Cyan’s had some bad dealings with shady, less than agreeable types in the past (*cough*SciFi*cough*DarkHorse Comics*cough*), but I think that with the right people on board to start an extended universe, it could really take off.  And while I imagine that Cyan could probably come up with a lisencing arangement that would prevent the creation of … uncomfortable products (“Section V, article 25: no ‘Atrus and Catherine consumate their relationship’ scenes”?) in order to maintain the franchise’s reputation, as long as there was an understanding that what you were reading or watching was part of that extended universe and not Cyan-sanctioned canon, I don’t have a problem with getting more stories about D’ni out of this franchise.

This is probably the eighth time I’ve re-written this entry, so hopefully it hasn’t gotten too long in the tooth through the numerous re-writes. I’ve been trying to work out an effective format for addressing the three remaining lessons I’ve learned from MOUL’s year-long run, and doing so without turning out a novel-length post is a considerable challenge. These three lessons all center around involving players in the game without forcing them to become addicted to it, and cover story, repeatable content, and content formatting. So let’s dive in (again, and for the first time).

As I mentioned in a recent post on the MOUL forums, Cyan has faced an uphill battle against time, money, and manpower constraints when developing Uru since UbiSoft decided to muck up the game’s formula 8 months before release, and these battles were only further exacerbated by the brief timeframe that GameTap gave a somewhat understaffed Cyan for re-launching the title into public beta at the end of 2006. These constraints have resulted in additional changes to Uru’s original game plan (episodes, live-only story) which, while more subtle than UbiSoft’s single-player campaign mandate, had a similar impact on Uru’s ability to succeed at its own game. I firmly believe that Uru is a concept that can succeed, both artistically and commercially, but all of the pieces to Uru’s development puzzle have to be in place for it to work well at all. You can call me a blind optimist if you like, but I still don’t think Uru as it should be has been given a chance to work… so far we’ve only managed to prove that “Uru Live Lite” isn’t a good business proposal. Twice.

That said, Cyan’s more limited resources require some smart game design decisions that would probably take the game to places other than it was originally intended to go. Still, when given the option of an under-executed original vision and a well-executed alternative, I’d have to go with the alternative option. Here are a few ways that I think Cyan could create a successful “alternative” Uru; one that has all of the pieces in place, but executes them smartly on a tiny budget.

Content is obviously a huge issue for Uru. It is, after all, a content-driven MMO rather than a grind-driven or competition-driven MMO. However, Cyan simply cannot provide Uru with enough content to keep the rabid puzzle-solvers sated, especially with their limited staff. As a result, focusing on single-use Ages with solve-once puzzles is not the most optimal use of resources, because for most players, once they’re done solving those puzzles, there’s little motivation to return to those Ages again, and then they quickly get bored and leave. An alternative Uru needs to focus more on repeatable gameplay and smart re-use of existing content to keep players interested and keep production costs at a minimum.

Repeatable gameplay would most easily come in the form of in-game mini-games. There are already several examples of this sort of content in both Prologue and MOUL, but they seem more like ways to test the water than really well-developed concepts for getting players to kill time in-game.

Small table-top games like Ahyoheek are nice distractions, and with functional leader boards could even fuel more regular play (especially with a game-wide board for players to vie for spots on), but it’s not something that will hold attention for hours on end, and most players will get tired of the D’ni version of Rock, Paper, Scissors before too long anyway. Still, it’s a nice start, and something to fall back on when you’re out of other things to do.

More exploration-based games like the user-created Marker Missions fill another niche, but can only be played solo (which is good for the loner types but not as useful for making actual games). The original Ubi beta for Uru in 2003 had 2 additional game types: Capture and Hold, which were played with teams in a single Age, and had a set time limit. In Capture, you ran around collecting markers for your team, and everybody playing could see all of the game’s uncollected markers. In Hold, the markers you collected didn’t disappear, meaning the other team could steal markers away from you. In both games, whichever team had the most markers at the end of the timer was the winner. They were fun and fast-paced games, and I still don’t quite understand why the time wasn’t devoted to making them work in the final release; they disappeared shortly after Ages Beyond Myst’s announcement at E3 2003, never to be seen again.

Finally, we segue cleanly into strictly competitive mini-games. Typically quick and constrained to a game surface like a wall, a life-sized game board, or a track, these games wouldn’t appeal to everyone in Uru’s crowd, but would hopefully provide something to entice new players into the fold, as well as give those interested something more exciting to do with their time in-game when not out puzzle solving. These games are also typically great for spectating, but Uru has traditionally made getting to these games tedious at the best of times, and downright frustrating at worst, which I think has soured their appeal for most people. Beyond making them easier to get players and observers into, areas like Jalak and Gahreesen’s Wall need to provide places for spectators to gather, a solid way to determine scoring and victory, and ideally a set of leader boards in a public place to showcase your accomplishments and give you something to work toward, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The Wall has more of these requirements than Jalak, but I think that if both were tweaked to include this complete feature set, they would both be fairly popular hang-outs for the more energetic segments of the Uru community. Releasing planned content like the Kahlo creature races would only add to the number of possible things to do in the game during story down-time.

Beyond mini-games, though, content has to be recyclable for story and general gameplay purposes too. For instance, consider Er’cana – quite possibly the only real forray into repeatable gameplay that Cyan has made. Er’cana’s puzzles are almost all complete throw-aways that have nothing to do with actually operating the machinery in the Age. It’s a big set of “get around this broken pathway” puzzles with power switches at convenient intervals. The only really sustainable puzzle is figuring out a good pellet recipe, and that was generally short-cutted around through the communal efforts in the forums. After that, the Age became largely useless, and the machinery didn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual pellet-making process, which was a curious shift from Cyan’s typical attention to such details. I think that the concept of Er’cana can be seriously expounded upon by at the very least factoring in machine operation and supply management in basic forms. My ideal super-complicated implementation would call for a ‘hood-instanced mega-Age with weather patterns to learn and track over months or even years, and dynamic vegetation growth and harvesting that responded to changes in the weather (i.e. a long drought would cause plants to wither and the ground to become cracked mud). Creating and testing such a system would obviously require considerably more resources up-front than the far simpler infinite supply system and basic puzzle mechanics of Er’cana, but I think the Age would last a LOT longer as a result, and complex puzzles like tracking weather patterns seems like something right up the alley of some of the more obsessive Uru fans. As a launch Age, it would give players something to spend at least a few months pouring over obsessively, without putting a multi-month delay on other content drops while the beast went through development and testing.

As a final point on content, adding new material to existing Ages was another promise of the original Uru which never came to pass in MOUL, a fact I find most unfortunate. I think that part of this was related to the 4-year-old setpieces that Cyan had built versus the new direction in which they were moving the story. To that end, I think there is a need for a set of content that can be repurposed for pretty much anything, and I think that the Path to the surface could provide the perfect opportunity for such a set piece. It’s largely modular, and could be broken into discreet sections by strategic cave-ins; it runs through any conceivable section of the D’ni Empire you need it to; when tied into the GZ coordinate system, you can drop all kinds of subtle clues to players leading them to new content in already-explored areas; KI access restrictions could be integrated into the doors to keep players out until they’d completed any pre-requisite story arcs… the list of potential uses goes on and on. Especially for smaller story-related material, these sorts of simple expansions to existing areas could have a huge impact on the depth of the game world and provide a cheaper alternative to building new Ages from scratch every time you needed a new story element unveiled.

This leads us inevitably to the story. I think Uru suffered from the same fate that befell the new Star Wars trilogy: a good story poorly executed. However, while we only have Lucas’s inability to write his way out of a paper bag to blame for Episodes 1-3, Uru’s story failings have a myriad of causes that stem from a lack of time, money, and manpower.

Since I’m already adopting the viewpoint that a new Uru needs to be a complete reboot in terms of development anyway, with a lot of time being devoted to building large sustainable content chunks before release, I figure I might as well go whole-hog here. Uru’s storytelling technique is unique in the MMO genre because it abandons the notion of player-controlled, player-instanced story for that of a global tale being told in real time, concurrent with the progression of time outside the game. In Prologue, this was handled through regular, live, in-game events that moved the DRC plot along, with a parallel solo story arc involving Yeesha and the Bahro that could be explored at your leisure. MOUL abandoned this solo story arc concept for new development, focusing instead on the much cheaper-to-produce live events as the exclusive manner in which story was unveiled in the game. Unfortunately, this method didn’t work very well, and players more often than not became frustrated with their inability to watch the game’s story unfold first-hand, and instead resigned themselves to learning about the story through out-of-game means like the forums.

Hopefully, I don’t have to tell you that having players leave the game to learn about the story because it’s easier than trying to wring it out of the game itself is a bad thingâ„¢. Eventually, even the simpler methods of maintaining a permanent storytelling record in MOUL, like Sharper’s journal, stopped being updated entirely. Regardless of the fact that Sharper, as a fellow denizen of the Uru universe, probably stopped updating his journal once he found out it wasn’t exactly private anymore, some way to keep that information flowing was necessary, and it wasn’t maintained. Removing it cut off the only remaining source for catching up on events in-game without trying to find someone else who knew what was going on, and that was bad for the story’s delivery.

Beyond that, realtime events ended up cheapening some of the story, in my opinion, by turning them into second-hand recountings of really exciting stuff which, like vacation photos, are really only cool to the people who went with you. Story arc points like the unveiling of the Bahro civil war could have been handled much better, I think, through a player-controlled reveal much like the original Yeesha journey’s reveal of the Bahro’s very existence, rather than Sharper recounting That Time He Almost Died in Negilahn and That Time He Shot a Bahro in Noloben.

Not everything is suited to a real-time event in Uru, but not everything can be placed in the hands of player progress either. Wheely’s death and Watson’s return, for example, had to happen once and only once, as there was only one Wheely and only one Watson for these things to happen to. If someone joined in November and was able to witness Wheely’s death first-hand as if it was happening for the first time, it would certainly be more informative for that player, but it would also violate Uru’s premise that all of this is actually happening in the real world. Some things can even be a combination of real-time and player-time events (I like that term, I think I’ll keep it). For example, many many players were angry that they didn’t get to see Yeesha’s speech in the season finale, and so missed their only opportunity to see her again in person. As an alternative, let me propose the following: upon completing the Path of the Shell Ages, you arrive in a private instance of K’veer so as not to be disturbed. Yeesha appears before you in a triggered sequence that plays once for all players upon reaching this point. Yeesha reveals the salient points of her speech, but leaves out the “kthxbye” part. This gets used in her real-time appearance and speech in Exodus, which obviously only happens once. After her departure, the Yeesha in K’veer becomes a hologram for anyone else completing the Path of the Shell Ages, and an additional line or two detailing her departure could even be added for consistency and explanation. This way, everybody gets to see Yeesha regardless of when they complete PotS, and the real-time event where she departs to draw the Bahro away is preserved as an event for the history books. Provided MOUL’s sole animator hadn’t spent the entire development period animating all of those Bahro around Kerath’s Arch, Yeesha’s 2-minute speech could probably have been cranked out in a couple of days, plus maybe a little overtime (or minus a couple of dogfighting Bahro).

On one final note, I have thus far been very intentionally not mentioning user-created content beyond Marker and Jalak games because that’s a whole ‘nother bail of barbed wire that I’d rather be saving for another post that isn’t already several pages long .