by JahmanMyst » Sat Sep 19, 2020 2:11 pm
Okay, Like many others who posted. I've player through every Myst stand alone game. Including the initial Online (short lived) Uru Release into Chronicles Path of the Shell. Later into what I call the GameTap MOUL game. And then the MOUL, again online game.
My only talent and contribution was in creating an extensive Series of Quest Marker Games with a Story line theme of Journal Quests. I introduced it in 2008 as a real time Community Quest Series.
It had required several accounts and avatars running on 3 computers to host it all.
I finished building the entire Quest Series in 2012.
My creative motivation stemmed from the GameTap era of New Ages being introduce roughly every month or so. Usually it only took a few days for the new age puzzles to be solved and posted to the Forums.
This was when I realized the power of a community of explorers working together on Age puzzle solving. I had always wondered why the new ages were made so simple that the community of explorers could solve them all so quickly.
After making my Quests Series of Puzzles and Stories, I learned by the experience that Myst Uru by nature is a single explorer based game.
Most explorers will prefer to play the new Ages independently more often that with others.
Even though I had explained the Quest Marker puzzles were made for several explorers playing together to solve them, most ignored getting others to help them.
And because I had intentionally created my Quest Series of Puzzle markers very hard for any single explorer to do on their own, most explorers would simply quit than get help.
I had mistakenly thought explorers would find others to join them in playing a multiplayer Series of Quests.
The Story Quest Journals were the reward give after a Quest Puzzle game was solved.
Then two (2) game changing things happened for me and my Quest Series. MOUL,a had a Vault reset that wiped out explorers game progress.
Then came the change in the MOUL,a PhysX that changed dramatically how avatars behaved in game.
They went from sticking to where ever they jumped to, to falling forward as in real life with momentum.
This meant that jumping into the fun "out of normal play places" was made either impossible to do or extremely hard to do now.
Most all of my Quest Marker Game puzzles were made obsolete for this change. I was forced to remake them so single players could solve them by being able to get to the new markers.
Then the game Client changed the Marker Quests Code format from JSON to YAML. This doomed my Quest Series.
Because I hadn't the technical skills to covert the JSON Code to YAML Code back then. All of my Quest Series Games and Story Journals where 120 to a 150 markers or more long.
Remaking the Quests with new markers and text would be labor intensive beyond what I could do., given they took me years to build.
2020: I came back into MOUL,a when I saw the announcement of new fan created open source Age content coming.
So, I looked through the Myst Online Uru Live Forum and was able to cobble together a working Marker Editor.
I tracked down some posts about a PHP translator for JSON to YAML Code which led me to do an online search for a converter. And yes, I found a website converter for such.
It was my good fortune that because I had used the original Marker Editor Lyrositor had made, I still had most of my Quest Series of Games and Stories in my own PC Games folder.
Yep! You guessed it, all of the up loadable .txt files.
So, my adventure begins again with restoring my Quest Series of games and Story Journals.
