Rand's visit and news for Age Creators

[Chacal]

Sweet chat, but... again, Cyan will decide about all these things all by itself, without asking us for help or advice.
We've been discussing all of this at length already. We have the ressources and the knowledge.

Chloe, once we have our own servers, we can dispense with FCAL's, approvals and a "Writer's Nexus".
Those would be used for a Cyan server only.

[GPNMilano]

Chloe, once we have our own servers, we can dispense with FCAL's, approvals and a "Writer's Nexus".
Those would be used for a Cyan server only.

I'm going to put this as plainly as I possibly can. The above statement eliminates my goals and dreams for my ages. I write D'ni ages, not explorer created ones. I'm building ages that were written by the D'ni, and areas of the cavern. Simple as that. I want those areas and those places to be recognized as derivative canon. Not created by Cyan, but officially recognized as part of the history of D'ni. Your above statement negates any chance of that ever happening for my creations. Their way allows the room for my dream to become reality. And in this instance I choose my dream over no chance at all. When people visit my areas, no matter what shard they're on, I want them to know that they're visiting a place that the creators of the Myst franchise recognize as part of the history of D'ni. if I have to play ball with Cyan to make that dream a reality, than hand me my helmet and get out of my way.

[kaelisebonrai]

Then let it be optional, Chloe.

I couldn't care less what Cyan thinks of my ages, I merely make them for my enjoyment, and the enjoyment of those who visit them. =)

I have no high dreams of them being part of any canon... Though they may become part of Fanon, should the fans wish it so. And fanon is to be honest, the upper limit of what we should be aiming for. Making high quality ages, that people wish to include in the fan's personal "this is part of uru" list type thing.

I have no wish to cause you to lose your dream, however, I just don't want to be bound by your dream, when I don't seek that same level of "approval".


I'm just a lowly modder, its all I want, to mod, in peace, without being bothered. If people want it on shards, go ahead, hell, my only released Age is primarily designed for such a purpose... I don't want to have to conform to some game developer's opinion on how my creativity should be expressed.

[GPNMilano]

Then let it be optional, Chloe.

I couldn't care less what Cyan thinks of my ages, I merely make them for my enjoyment, and the enjoyment of those who visit them. =)

I have no high dreams of them being part of any canon... Though they may become part of Fanon, should the fans wish it so. And fanon is to be honest, the upper limit of what we should be aiming for. Making high quality ages, that people wish to include in the fan's personal "this is part of uru" list type thing.

I have no wish to cause you to lose your dream, however, I just don't want to be bound by your dream, when I don't seek that same level of "approval".


I'm just a lowly modder, its all I want, to mod, in peace, without being bothered. If people want it on shards, go ahead, hell, my only released Age is primarily designed for such a purpose... I don't want to have to conform to some game developer's opinion on how my creativity should be expressed.

I do want it to be optional. I'm just stating what I want for my stuff. To each his own. I personally am going to do what I need to do to get my ages to where I want them to be. At the same time, if other shards wish to use them and include them in their fanon, I have no problem with that and will most certainly let them do so. But for me, I'd like my creativity to be recognized by those who inspired that creativity in the first place. And that's Cyan. They created a sandbox for me to play in and I wish to add to that sandbox and have that addition be recognized by those who built the sand box, not the others that play in it. I respect every writer out there, every modder out there, and every age that exists, be it made by fan or Cyan i download and enjoy.

My personal dreams are my own, and that being such I will do what i need to do to make that dream a reality. I make fan ages for everyone, with the hope that it will be recognized by those who inspired me to create them in the first place. I want recognition from that inspiration AND from those that were inspired to write as well.

[kaelisebonrai]

Aye, here-here.

I agree with you, on this. Different strokes for different folks. I have no issue with others seeking that kind of approval, it is quite sensible to do so, in fact.

I personally love the age(s) you've released, especially the hood office. And on top of that, I look forward to your hood. So, definitely don't see my posts as "change what you're doing" my posts definitely lean towards "keep on doin' what you're doing, you're doing it well."

I think we agree, essentially, we're just in different branches of the same tree, as it were.

Live and let live. =) And, aye, To each his own. =)

[Trylon]

Anything that converts to MOUL needs to have an intricate knowledge of PhysX's binary compiled collision mesh format.
When converting from PhysX that data can be ignored, but generating it is an issue.

libPlasma already has tools to convert (reasonably well) between any Plasma 2.x formats... but the PhysX data is a point of failure.

Oh, and here I thought we had all the info

Wait a sec, I registered for some physx sdk on the nvidia site a few weeks ago, wouldn't that be of help?

EDIT: Yes, from the looks of it I probably could cook somthing up from the (binary) NVidia PhysX SDK to handle the MOUL Physics. It might give some problems with the GNU license of PyPRP (which it why I really prefer LGPL), but a little trick (external executable) could handle that.
Ofcourse it would be more ideal todetermine the storage format for collision data used by PhysX, but that would require a lot more time and experimenting and might be less reliable.

[JWPlatt]

I still think we need a Guild of Book Makers (engine coding) and Guild of Ink Makers (support tools) if this ever gets open sourced. I suppose neither of these items were mentioned in terms of fan created stuff.

Working on it.

http://openuru.org

[Jamey]

I still think we need a Guild of Book Makers (engine coding) and Guild of Ink Makers (support tools) if this ever gets open sourced. I suppose neither of these items were mentioned in terms of fan created stuff.

I HIGHLY support this!

[Aloys]

As much as I understand Cyan's stance on all this, I find Rand's informations about custom Ages in MOUL to be a little concerning, or rather to be a little off-topic.

It's great that MOUL is starting again, but regarding Age creation & publication they are telling us things that we do not want to hear, and they are heading in a direction where most of us can't follow them..
We all want the same thing: custom Ages in Uru, but there are many ways to get there.. Rand wants Uru to expand with custom Ages, there's no question about that, he loves his game and he wants it to succeed. But to do that he needs the Age creation community help and he doesn't seem to be heading in the right direction. These Ages won’t write themselves.

RAWA and Chogon certainly did (and still do) their best to listen to us and reply when they could and forward our questions & concerns to Rand, but the future he is hinting at right now is very different from what this particular community needs..

MOUL is just getting started again though, so we should at least give it some time and see if Cyan communicates anything on the OSMOUL front.

[diafero]

I still think we need a Guild of Book Makers (engine coding) and Guild of Ink Makers (support tools) if this ever gets open sourced. I suppose neither of these items were mentioned in terms of fan created stuff.

We already have that right in these forums - look at the "tools" section of the GoW. IMHO it just makes sense to have the people who build the tools, and those who use it, in the same place - makes it easier for the first to help the latter in their project,and to learn the needs of their users.

IMHO the best way to go to get a MOUL toolchain would be PyPRP2 - after all, I am told pyPRP has to be re-written anyway for the new Blender, and that new PyPRP version moves all the actual exporting code into libPlasma, which already exists and is working fine. PyPRP2 is "only" a compatibility wrapper putting the Blender data into Plasma classes (this also makes it more similar to how Cyan's plugin works: Create all the various objects in memory and then just dump them to disc).