Myst Online: Uru Live – Around?

Long time readers know this is the first MMO I played and that eventually lead me to Second Life™. I still scan the Myst Online forum. I was somewhere in the hierarchy of management of the lasse faire Guild of Cartographers (GoC). A family member helped me set up MY first web site and it is still a shared hosting thing under his domain. And I may be the last member of that guild paying any attention to the D’ni world made by Cyan Worlds.

My 2010 Uru Live Avatar Meets My 2016 SL Avatar

My 2010 Uru Live Avatar Meets My 2016 SL Avatar

We have 600+ people from that world playing in Second Life. If you script, build, are into furniture or clothes making, building, or role playing you are likely to know some of those people. Look for the group D’ni Refugees. Some percentage of us became movers and shakers in SL… not monumental shakers, maybe a 3 or 4 on the Richtor scale… Continue reading

MOULagain Re-Opens

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Myst Uru Bevin (neighborhood)

Those that have played the Myst games made by Cyan Worlds, Inc. (First Myst game cira 1993) will be glad to know that Myst Online Uru Live has reopened and is free to play.

The official opening was about two weeks ago. The first week was tough. The servers overloaded as thousands rushed to download the game. Both download and game servers were overloaded. Those problems have been handled and things are much smoother now.

There is a donation button on the Myst Online Play page. Donations were generous enough that Cyan Worlds could upgrade the servers. That has helped with game play being smoother. Download mirrors have been set up so one can take advantage of their high speed connections for downloading.

Download at: Myst Online Uru Live Again Continue reading

Busy

Devokan Hot Spot Myst-Uru Style

Devokan Hot Spot

I’ve been busy with RL, moving, unpacking, getting what little work there is done, getting cable to my new home for a good Internet connection, writing proposals for the company I freelance for…

I have new articles planned for here. One that is most in my mind is about Devokan (SL Map). It recently made the SL Hot Spots (these scroll off so I can’t link). Fans from Myst Online, a closed MMO, are building and playing in Devokan (link requires SL account). There is a story to Devokan. One can read the story on the Guild of Maintainers site in Developments in Devokan (the guild is a fan group from Myst Online).

I have a story about the SL RPG Land of NoR and the RPG’s spinning off from it. I just have to figure out how write about the drama if that saga without it being boring.

I also have a review of Babylon 5 RPG in SL. I need to up date it and get it posted.

I just need more hours in the day… 🙂

Myst-Uru Guilds IC and OOC Part-IV

AhraPahts13

Ahra Pahts Fan Content

This part of the series is about ways people have tried to make changes to Uru and/or the guilds. I have seen people take two paths to making changes. Both of these efforts center on an aspect of training people in world. I’m not sure the goals of the two are comparable but how they have gone about it shows comparable methods.

A European teacher wants to use Uru in a RL classroom as a teaching aid. She builds ages* for the coming open source version of Uru, no small feat. So, she is knowledgeable and involved with the guilds and contributing toward the open source effort. But the basic game engine does not really support what she needs. Someone will have to introduce new features into the game engine.

Continue reading

Myst-Uru Guilds IC and OOC Part-I

KI Image Photo #8

In Game Image Guild of Cartographers Public Hall

Update (2/2010): MOUL (Myst Online Uru Live) closed in 2008. It reopened in February 2010 as a free to play MMORPG named MOULagain. To play visit: Download MOULagain

Original Article: In recent posts on the MOUL forum the idea of ‘improving the guilds’ came up, again. In the forum there are great ideas and plans and not a few sour grapes from those having tried such changes in the past. But the basic understanding of Myst-Uru world guilds seems to be missing. To understand one viewpoint, mine, for why some of these efforts at change fail, read on.

Cyan’s creation of the guilds is spoken of often in the forums, as is their encouragement of the guilds. I think these statements often create confusion around the IC guilds (In Character or in Uru; In Cavern – both are a role playing concept) spoken of by IC characters and Cyan. Cyan has written about their plans for in-game guilds, which adds to the confusion. Plus, there are the historic guilds of the old D’ni culture adding more confusion. So, at least three types of guilds.

Continue reading

The Guilds of Myst-Uru Part II

The Myst Uru MMO world is one of a small group of games that have been taken over and run by the fans. Most MMO’s have the games creator in control of the game. Fans often unite again the management. But what happens when the management is the fans? Who then really controls the game? Which fan is it?

Eder Gira - Myst Uru Replication

Eder Gira - Myst Uru Replication

Many in the Myst Uru world think the guilds are about controlling the fan community. I have never believed that. I’ve never thought it was possible. But, many do. I think the fans are more in control and vote with their participation. Whatever they support and participate in is what appears to be running the show, keyword being appears.

So, where are the fans? What are they doing and who is in charge? A comment was made to me the other day, “I hear you are in charge of the ECR&D* now?” My answer was, about as in charge as anyone can be of anything Uru related. I know the participants of ECR&D can move on at any time. There is no real control.

Continue reading

Myst-Uru Search

Uru-Search

Myst-Uru GoC Search Tool

Got Myst-Uru search problems? May be things like finding information about topics regarding Myst-Uru history, the status of Myst-Uru open source, how to install and run the older games on new computers and on and on… It can be a challenge in the Myst-Uru world with most information on the Cyan (Myst creator) and fan forums. There are a ton of them. If you don’t know which forum is about which aspect of Myst-Uru, you are in for a long search.

Fans have realized this and stepped up and put in the labor to build lists of the Myst-Uru Important Links in the community. Others made lists of Myst Uru fan sites. Others lists of Uru fan blogs. The idea was to make it easier to find information in the forums. Lists of important links in a forum is an atypical solution so many fans do not realize it is there. If you have a specific need there is still a lot to read to find what you want.

There is Google, Yea! Google, I love you! If you run a search via Google you may just find too much information. Even worse you may find loads of hits from a forum and having already looked at it know what you want is not there. So, you are digging through pages of results or trying to narrow the search.

Or you may know that a piece of information is on a specific site. Then one tries to use the forum search and finds out how weak it is. Need to find information on the Uru Library Manager? Most fans refer to it as ULM, three letters. Most forum searches will not search on three letters.

There are some search tools out there. There is Uru Search by Kestr’l. If you search on ULM using it then one gets three pages of Myst Online posts. You would never suspect that the Uru – Guild of Writers (GoW) and the Uru – Guild of Maintainers – ULM (GoMa) have far more information on ULM. One would also likely not notice from the forum writing that GoW is depreciating ULM in favor of Drizzle/UAM. All the three letter acronyms make using forum search frustrating. The predominance of the MOUL forums in Google results make it less than ideal.

The alternative is the Uru Guild of Cartographers Search Tool. It was built to allow one to search the large community sites. There are several buttons for searching specific forums. Try it out and see how you like it. It does those 3 letter acronyms really well.

http://cates-associates.net/uru/search-uru.asp