Guild of Writers

I know this is going to sound really crazy but please hear me out on this:

Right now, as it stands, we are not allowed to discuss hacking of Uru: CC on the Myst Online forums. And talk of Drizzle is also a no-no.

Discussion of Uru: CC hacking is a no-no for mysterious reasons. (I'm under the assumption that it's not a malicious intention on Cyan's part but simply because of a property rights issue of some kind. While discussion of MOUL hacking is not because Cyan wholly owns the rights to MOUL, Uru: CC is still a grey area of some kind that we're not aware of as mere observers.)

Discussion of Drizzle is fairly evident why that is not allowed. Drizzle literally hacks every version of the plasma engine, not just MOUL. It converts all versions (With the exception of RealMyst, currently) to Uru: CC. This includes, Myst V, MQ etc.

My suggestion is this. In order to create a temporary test environment for MOUL created content with the 3dsMax plugin (The only currently available tool, not in development, able to create content for MOUL.) We offer a soultion to Cyan, we develop a branch of drizzle that ONLY converts MOUL content to Uru: CC. Meaning this branch of Drizzle (Maybe we'll call it DrizzleLite) would be a stripped down version that ONLY hacks MOUL files and strips out all Myst V/MQ/Crowthisle etc stuff.

This, if accepted by Cyan, would allow a testing environment for MOULa files created with the 3dsMax plugin, and discussion of how to fully create an age, including testing it, on the MOUL forums. Since DrizzleLite would only hack MOUL stuff it would no longer fall under a violation of the forum polices of MOUL.

You're using a reverse engineering program to convert MOUL ages to Uru:CC. It's simply against Cyan rules (and Cyan cannot be seen to encourage the hacking of their non-free stuff, as this would cause problems for them when they go to publishers etc).

Even this "DrizzleLite" would be against the CC rules since it requires knowledge about the CC binary format. So as long as that rule stands, there's just no point. In addition, I don't plan to support this no-CC-hacking-rule in any way, including adapting our tools to comply with them - but that's just my personal reason.

It would be great to find some compromise that would allow discussion of testing MOULa ages in URU:CC. But in addition to the reverse engineering of URU:CC that N. Sigismund and diafero mentioned, there's also the required modification of URU:CC files to allow new ages to be inserted, be it UAM, ULM, Offline KI or what have you.

I had requested clarification on the URU:CC hacking ban a while ago, but hadn't received a reply. Unless someone is able to get an answer, the ban will continue to remain a mystery.

This is a nice idea, and if Dustin agrees it would be worth trying. But personally I don't see why it would succeed.
This is an endless tug of war; and as always it will be up to Cyan. There has been countless requests in that direction, including people from the inside, and the situation has evolved one inch for almost 5 years. I don't see why it would change now.
Again, it doesn't hurt to try.

I have a question. How hard would it be to create a MOUL clone shard? As I see it, MOUL is free for use, so creating a clone of it may not be quite legal, but as long as no one is making money and it is strictly for testing, I don't think Cyan would complain.

Personally I wouldn't care if they did complain, we're not going to get anywhere if we continue waiting on them, we've made way more progress over the years just going ahead and doing it ourselves.

It couldn't hurt to propose such a plan (and RAWA has at least made the motions indicating interest in working with the fans) however I'm leaning towards Tweek's view. At the moment, for whatever reason, Cyan is frozen. If they will not move, the fans almost certainly will (though with less enthusiasm than if they got a positive reaction from Cyan).

I would argue that the GoW has more active members than MOUL does. I certainly see more people on the forums here, on average, than I do on the MOULa forums (or indeed in MOULa itself).

I wish you good luck, but I would imagine this would just be screeched down as a hack by the intellectually immature.

BAD wrote:I have a question. How hard would it be to create a MOUL clone shard? As I see it, MOUL is free for use, so creating a clone of it may not be quite legal, but as long as no one is making money and it is strictly for testing, I don't think Cyan would complain.

That's why I was asking Chogon for the server executables, which they could give us right now.
I could get us running in a couple of hours on dedicated, physical servers in a data center with 100Mbps bandwidth.

GPNMilano wrote:I know this is going to sound really crazy but please hear me out on this:

Right now, as it stands, we are not allowed to discuss hacking of Uru: CC on the Myst Online forums. And talk of Drizzle is also a no-no.

Discussion of Uru: CC hacking is a no-no for mysterious reasons. (I'm under the assumption that it's not a malicious intention on Cyan's part but simply because of a property rights issue of some kind. While discussion of MOUL hacking is not because Cyan wholly owns the rights to MOUL, Uru: CC is still a grey area of some kind that we're not aware of as mere observers.)

Discussion of Drizzle is fairly evident why that is not allowed. Drizzle literally hacks every version of the plasma engine, not just MOUL. It converts all versions (With the exception of RealMyst, currently) to Uru: CC. This includes, Myst V, MQ etc.

My suggestion is this. In order to create a temporary test environment for MOUL created content with the 3dsMax plugin (The only currently available tool, not in development, able to create content for MOUL.) We offer a soultion to Cyan, we develop a branch of drizzle that ONLY converts MOUL content to Uru: CC. Meaning this branch of Drizzle (Maybe we'll call it DrizzleLite) would be a stripped down version that ONLY hacks MOUL files and strips out all Myst V/MQ/Crowthisle etc stuff.

This, if accepted by Cyan, would allow a testing environment for MOULa files created with the 3dsMax plugin, and discussion of how to fully create an age, including testing it, on the MOUL forums. Since DrizzleLite would only hack MOUL stuff it would no longer fall under a violation of the forum polices of MOUL.

Question: Why? Its still hacking U:CC, and thus still violates forum policies. It hacks U:CC by its very nature of /adding/ to U:CC.

Also, what benefit is there to discussing things on the MO:UL forums? I personally do not see any benefit.