Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Cyan Worlds the creators of Myst and Myst Online:Uru Live and the more recent Obuction are starting a new Kickstarter for a game named Firmament. Details here.
I expect this to be another VR game as Obduction is. So, playable on a PC with an NVIDIA 10xx series or better and VR optional.
Update: 2014/02/04 – Added a video, below the fold, showing a portion of Ercana, a part of Uru Live, that was moved to Cry Engine 3. This is no where near a finished product. It was just a quick move to extract it from Plasma to Blender to 3DS and finally to Cry3. It is a very rough video, but it shows the possibilities.
By now you know I am a Myst-Uru fan and somewhat active in that community. I have Myst-Uru sites included in my Feedly reader and Facebook follows. This popped up in a Cyan Worlds post on Facebook: Unreal Riven. It is an article about the development of a new rendition of Riven, one of the series of games that makes up the Myst games.
I found the article interesting because I have thought the use of the Plasma engine to build fan content was a dead end for years. Now I find out Cyan has been working with a group that long ago abandoned Plasma for the same reasons I have espoused for 5 or 6 years.
Cyan Worlds, the creators of the Myst games, announced that they are porting Riven to the iPad. The blog Touch Arcade picked up on an interview with Rand Miller, Cyan’s CEO, over at Modojo and wrote: ‘Riven: The Sequel To Myst’ for iPad Is Still Coming. You may know that Riven for the iPhone was released in December 2010 (US$4.95). We may see iRiven (for the iPad) this month.
Fans of Cyan Worlds will be happy to hear Rand say the realMyst iStore sales have passed breakeven. Meaning they are making a little money on top of paying the realMyst development costs.
iRiven is in progress. Rand says they recompressed the images to improve quality, improved animations, movies, and sound. The user interface has been touched up for the iPad. Now iRiven will run on all models of the iPad and even the iPad mini.
There is not going to be a fully explorable Riven (realRiven) any time soon. Rand says it is too large a project. But, he goes on to say that the work done porting to mobile devices will be used to update the Mac and PC versions… now there is something to think about.
This is just an interesting bit of trivia for my Myst friends. The trivia is the headline and is repeated in the last line of this post. The rest in between is making it make sense for Myst-Uru fans. Many in the Myst-Uru fan realm are not 3D modelers and they are not part of the SL community. So, many of what those of us in Second Life consider basic information needs to be explained.
To set the stage, Myst fans need to know what’s up in English not SL jargon. Second Life (SL), is a virtual world in which about 660 Uru fans have joined the in-world group D’ni Refugees (SLURL). I’ve long pushed it as a place to start learning 3D modeling. I think a large portion of those fans in SL have learned some aspect of 3D modeling. Whatever the case, modeling in SL has been done with primitive shapes (usually called prims). The primitive shapes are changed by parametric deformations. There’s a geeky term, I’ll explain it.
Updated: 2/9/2010
Those that have played Myst and its online cousin Uru Live are rejoicing to day (2/8). 🙂 The Myst Online web site posted that they opened a new Uru Live server and made the game download available for free. MystOnline.com 🙂
Today, February 8, the servers are totally hammered and have been for hours. The Uru fan forums are exploding with speculation and impatience to get in. However Cyan warned that they are using a small registration server and it would be slow. It is. 🙁
The Second Life group D’ni Refugees has been chatting about it all day.
Most of the Myst related builds in Second Life are related to Uru Live. A new exception is Varda Darkwatch’s new build dedicated to
Myst’s Riven in Lasting Love. While debatable whether Riven is the best game in the series many think it is.
Varda has imitated parts of Riven in his quarter of the sim. When visiting try not to disturb the other residents. This Riven is a unique SL build with only similarities to the real games. As Varda says, ‘…a place inspired by the Myst PC games.’ Still any Myst series player will recognize the places on this island. The thing swimming in the lake under the pods is a Wahrk. They are said to be mam-eaters… So, swimming is NOT advised.
Take a walk through the area. There is a path of sorts and it is more interesting to walk it than fly over. This build is new, just recently transferred here from a smaller parcel. This is still a work in progress. Several items in the previous build have not been added. I suspect they will be placed as time permits.
Varda was talking about making the pods living spaces, in which case he might rent or lease them to Myst fans.
More images of Riven: Nalates Myst Riven Flickr