Guild of Writers

With GoMa's increased persistence on their view of how things should be, I started wondering what people were using to visit Fan Ages.

The recommended and supported way is the Offline-KI and Drizzle, but there are many other possibilities that some people are known to use. Don't worry, I won't be upset if you select something else ;)

Let me know if I should explain what the options all mean!

Edit: I suppose I should have had an option for the original UruAgeManager I made in 2005, but that might be confusing since the current versions are a part of Drizzle. If you use the original UruAgeManager, please select 'other' and make a post saying so!

ddb174 wrote:With GoMa's increased persistence on their view of how things should be, I started wondering what people were using to visit Fan Ages.

What increased persistence? This "persistence" has nothing to do with the part of playing fan ages. You make it seem like GoMa is boycotting everything except ULM. I suggest that people at least read the GoMa wiki about playing fan ages to learn more about GoMa's view. You will see UAM in Drizzle mentioned there as recommended tool.

Oh, and to visit fan ages I use my own custom mods. Does that count as manual or as other? I still need ULM and UAM to download them though because fan ages are rarely offered as standalone downloads.

Choice is good

My latest negative experience with ULM...
http://guildofmessengers.com/forum/topic/june-issue#comment-9852

Drizzle and Offline KI are my favorites by a long shot.

I know it's not you doing it D'Lanor, but there is an increased push especially on mystonline.com to point to the GoMa page, which doesn't allow mentioning the Offline-KI.

*Ignore this paragraph if you're not an expert*: Heh, I was actually thinking of you when I put down the 'Drizzle/manual' and 'just manual' options ;) I would put Drizzle/manual if you're using Drizzle to download, and your own code to link. By the way, the new UAM system was designed to allow people to just get the archives directly if they don't want to use Drizzle. (Just for advanced users like D'Lanor; regularly, people should use Drizzle.) Just download the archive, and extract in the main Uru folder! You can see all the archives by going to the mirror's folder: http://the-ancient-city.de/uru-ages/ (In addition to collecting Ages for UAM, Old Wolle provides this mirror!) Note that this list is just the uam.status.xml file, formatted according to the uam.status.xsl file.

I started out over a year ago using the ULM. It seemed a little cumbersome but not too bad. I had very few problems getting it to work. The two things I liked least about it were the slow download speeds and the lack of linking panels.

However, now I use Drizzle and the Offline Ki. It is infinitely easier to use and I like how it integrates the MOUL and Myst V elements into the game. I also use UruFun to play around with the .age and .sdl files in order to tweak things more to my liking.

But I do understand why the Guild of Maintainers shuns the use of the Offline Ki as well as why Cyan can not approve of any paths to fan created ages. (Am I the only one that thinks it's oddly hypocritical of Cyan to have Fan Created Ages forums but forbid any discussion on how to access them?) I hope that after the release of Open Source Myst Online that all of these intellectual property and legal issues can somehow be resolved in both the fan's and Cyan's favor.

Not every maintainer objects to the Offline KI... I think it's the most convenient and easy way to access fan ages and the ages from MOUL. Drizzle and the Offline KI have made Uru fun again. Furthermore, it's easy to use for everyone in the community, which may raise more awareness of user-created Ages in the community.

Since this is the GoW forum I would like to point out an advantage that ULM has for age writers: It gives us full release management control. Writers can upload their ages to their own hosting space and update the version information in ULM by themselves, whenever they want. It is a well designed concept, although in practice it still has a few kinks to work out (like the bug where available new versions do not show up).

ULM's main problem is in it's err, "creative" file management (every file separate instead of a nice clean simple zip file), and crappy spaghetti coding, which makes bug fixing a bit too hard..

I use manual + ULM by the way.

I hope you find that list of Age archives useful for manual installations Trylon! Would you like me to add some kind of sort-by-date thing so that it lists them by most recent on that webpage as well? That would probably help when just looking to see if there are any updates.

D'Lanor: I agree that in it would be neat to have immediate updates, but in practice, yeah, it was another skill the Writers had to learn, and typically they didn't understand about how to leave previous versions, so the result was missing old versions and broken downloads (because of missing/different files, etc.) In practice, it's much easier for Writers to just send the files to Old Wolle or me, via email, ftp, rapidshare, or whatever, and then we take care of the rest, including making sure one can actually link into the Age, and helping the Writer if they have forgot a file or whatever. And we don't censor the Ages(including for offensive or copyright reasons), so there's no worries there. And the whole process is really very quick, since we're used to it.