Myst in Uru

General debates and discussion about the Guild of Writers and Age creation

Myst in Uru

Postby doctorwho788 » Thu Sep 15, 2016 1:06 pm

Hi! I love Myst and have played all of the games. A while back I found out that it was possible to convert the Myst 5 ages to Uru and play them.
After getting some help online, I finally managed to do it. (I've gotta say, even though the puzzles don't work, it's awesome!)

Now, after recently having completed RealMyst, I was wondering if it's possible to play the original Myst game in any form (can't imagine it being possible in 2d point and click though :cry: ) in some kind of co-op mode? Can the ages be converted into Uru like the Myst 5 ones could? I didn't see an option for realmyst in drizzle, but I've heard they're both made in the same engine... If it is not possible to play Myst in Uru, is there at least some kind of mod that would allow you to play Myst Multiplayer? Doesn't matter if it's for Myst, RealMyst or RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, anything would be nice! :D

Thanks in advance!

-Albert
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Re: Myst in Uru

Postby Deledrius » Fri Sep 16, 2016 2:36 pm

doctorwho788 wrote:Hi! I love Myst and have played all of the games. A while back I found out that it was possible to convert the Myst 5 ages to Uru and play them.
After getting some help online, I finally managed to do it. (I've gotta say, even though the puzzles don't work, it's awesome!)

Now, after recently having completed RealMyst, I was wondering if it's possible to play the original Myst game in any form (can't imagine it being possible in 2d point and click though :cry: ) in some kind of co-op mode? Can the ages be converted into Uru like the Myst 5 ones could? I didn't see an option for realmyst in drizzle, but I've heard they're both made in the same engine... If it is not possible to play Myst in Uru, is there at least some kind of mod that would allow you to play Myst Multiplayer? Doesn't matter if it's for Myst, RealMyst or RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, anything would be nice! :D

Short answer: Kinda, but not really.
Longer answer: The original Myst was made with a modified Hypercard, IIRC, and as you note was entirely pre-rendered to 2D. RealMyst:ME was made using Unity, and while the models could probably be extracted making it work in Uru would require a lot of manual work. RealMyst was made with Plasma 1, an earlier version of the engine used to make Uru (Plasma 2). They share a lot of similarities, but the differences are profound. Converting the game's assets to work in Uru would still take a lot of manual work. Myst V and Uru used only slightly different versions of Plasma 2 which made conversion an imperfect but relatively simple process.

I'd love to see this done someday. Whatever method is chosen (converting or re-creating) will require a lot of time and effort.
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Re: Myst in Uru

Postby doctorwho788 » Fri Sep 16, 2016 4:00 pm

Thanks for letting me know!
Btw, would you happen to know where I may find the RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition assets? I looked through the directory without finding anything useful. (Except for a few files with an unidentified format called things such as "level1", "level2", etc...)
I attempted to import the files into Unity, but as expected, they could not be used. Any ideas?
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Re: Myst in Uru

Postby Sirius » Sat Sep 17, 2016 2:42 am

I can provide some extra infos about MV, RM and RMME.

As Deledrius said, MV uses an engine very similar to Uru's, so converting Ages to Uru is a relatively simple process using Drizzle. It's been quite bugged for a long time, but recently I made adjustments to Drizzle so that Ages are handled better and are playable almost perfectly (that's Drizzle32). The modified version of these Ages is not on any Shard AFAIK.

As for realMyst. RM uses the same engine as Uru and MV, but the version is so old that it's almost another engine. Drizzle has a tab somewhere to extract some models from RM, but you will find it's not really useful for anything currently.
The reason for this is the guy behind Drizzle (Dustin) managed to get Drizzle to read and fully understand RM Ages, and was working on an automatic conversion from RM to Uru - just like what we have for MV. However, he left the community a while ago due to personal grudges and his bad temper (long story short). He did make the Drizzle source code available, but didn't include most of his work on RM.
While I was fixing the MV conversion in Drizzle32, I did try to also fix the RM conversion, but found out that the code available isn't very useful, because it's unable to read most of the RM data. Converting existing data from one game engine to Uru isn't very difficult - but reverse-engineering the realMyst executable to know what to read is insanely hard. So we're kind of stuck on this end.

(the most you can get out of Drizzle can be seen here, here and here. It's not realMyst, it's realMess)


Now, about RMME... As you know, RMME was made with Unity. And once exported, Unity games are compiled and tighly packed in order to make reverse-engineering crazy hard.
Assets are stored in the sharedassetsX.assets, but you'll find out that there are very few tool to open these files, and most of the time they don't output anything useful.
Unity's scripting engine might be it's weakest point for extracting data (since all script are stored into a convenient DLL), but so far I've failed to modify it with existing tools.


And to finish... Rebuilding these Ages. That might be a safer bet, since it would avoid most copyright issues, allowing to distribute it freely and put it on any Shard you might want. Plus, you'd be able to upgrade the visuals if needed.
But of course, it's still a tremendous amount of efforts. Also, you'll have a bad time getting the correct dimensions because most realMyst Ages are structurally impossible.
As for whether it's worth it... Well, that depends on how much you are willing to put in it.

Show Spoiler


To be honest, I grow tired of the idleness of Uru nowadays.
Currently I'm more excited about VR and how it will change gameplay than rebuilding Ages I already know by heart.
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Re: Myst in Uru

Postby Deledrius » Sat Sep 17, 2016 7:29 pm

Sirius wrote:
Show Spoiler

That's really cool. I don't think I ever realized how the upper building actually looked up there, or else I've just forgotten.

Sirius wrote:To be honest, I grow tired of the idleness of Uru nowadays.
Currently I'm more excited about VR and how it will change gameplay than rebuilding Ages I already know by heart.

Same here; although I still have a strong desire to rebuild some things, it's always tempered by knowing how much work it is, and how little point doing it in Uru there is at this late date.
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Re: Myst in Uru

Postby Sirius » Sun Sep 18, 2016 1:49 am

Deledrius wrote:That's really cool. I don't think I ever realized how the upper building actually looked up there, or else I've just forgotten.
Good catch. Well, there may be a few minor differences here and there, depending on what I think looks cool. But most of the time it's completely identical to the original.
(fun fact: I realized only recently that Rime is actually an rocky island and not another iceberg, contrarily to what I've been building so far. Oh well...)

Deledrius wrote:Same here; although I still have a strong desire to rebuild some things, it's always tempered by knowing how much work it is, and how little point doing it in Uru there is at this late date.
My hope is that soon Cyan will have more time to go back to progressively fix issues in MOUL, and then maybe add fan content to the server... That alone might be enough to have people discover or return to Uru... :P
All the login/account creation bugs currently plaguing MOULa make me very sad...
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