Guild of Writers

Hi folks,
A survey is being run to try to better understand the disposition of the present Uru community toward fan content and fan Ages. There is also some additional information gathered from Age creators, so we'd really appreciate it if you could spend the time to complete it. The survey is short, so it should not take long to complete! Additionally, the survey does not collect any identifiable information, such as email addresses or real names, so please only complete the survey once! The survey will help understand how we need to prioritize development of: the Uru client, Uru localization, Korman, and the 3ds max plugin.

To take the survey click here.

Seeing as there are a lot of data junkies in the community and the survey contains no identifying information, the results are public as well. If you would like to view the results, click here.

Thanks in advance!

Great idea. Survey filled!

Couple really interesting pieces of info in there:

37% "have never played any other online game"

Love that one. Shows how unique this community is.

Which shard(s) do you play URU on?

Some idiot replied: "Shame on me, I don'treally play online". That would be me. >_>

What do you think is most important in a good URU fan Age?

"Places to socialize" comes last, by a big margin. Is it because the City and the other Cyan Ages are enough for this? Or some other reason?

Which of these tools have you used

Blender 2.49 comes a head of 2.79. What the heck? (not by a big margin, but still) This one baffles me.

Which of these tools do you use most

I'm surprised to see Max is still used quite a bit.

What, if anything, would improve your experience in using Korman to create ages?
A more accurate representation of Uru's camera, textures, and lighting from inside Blender.

Yes, this one please. I know it would be a lot of work. But that would save *so* much time.

I'm working on a much better set of visualizations for this data than the crummy little charts made by Google Forms. I've open sourced my code to produce the visualizations, of course, so if anyone wants t play around before the actual final graphs are available... Heh.

Aloys wrote:

What, if anything, would improve your experience in using Korman to create ages?
A more accurate representation of Uru's camera, textures, and lighting from inside Blender.

Yes, this one please. I know it would be a lot of work. But that would save *so* much time.

Unfortunately, the "lot of work" part of that task will probably be required for Blender 2.80 support. I'm not even sure if Blender supports everything needed for that to happen yet.

As I look at custom Ages one recurring problem I see with most of them it the lack of good lighting. And I think part of that comes for the tools, and the time consuming workflow where you have to bake your lightmap test in Uru / make some fixes / rinse repeat. When being able to preview directly in Blender's viewport would be a huge time saver. But yeah, lots of work to get there. And again Blender 2.80 is a concern too.

Aloys wrote:

Which of these tools have you used

Blender 2.49 comes a head of 2.79. What the heck? (not by a big margin, but still) This one baffles me.

Me too.

Aloys wrote:As I look at custom Ages one recurring problem I see with most of them it the lack of good lighting. And I think part of that comes for the tools.

I agree. If people would get away from 2.49 and start using Korman, they'd get a great deal of better lighting automatically for free. Ask Doobes, he knows!

"Have you used" is not the same as "Are you using".
I suspect some respondents are no longer creating content.
When they were, they used Blender 2.49.

Agreed, I think that data is expansive and really interesting.

Aloys wrote:Some idiot replied: "Shame on me, I don'treally play online". That would be me. >_>

Heh, I replied MOULa, DI and Gehn, but overall I don't play online either (I barely start the offline game anymore).

Aloys wrote:"Places to socialize" comes last, by a big margin. Is it because the City and the other Cyan Ages are enough for this? Or some other reason?

Dunno, but it's a bit sad. I am under the impression that multiplayer exploration isn't really the norm. Maybe it's due to the single-player nature of the game, coupled with the lack of people playing on fan shards (or spread too thin over all the Ages available).
I wonder if Uru could do with some better socialization features. Like, some bulletin board where people can propose exploring age X on day Y, and people can subscribe and get an idea of how many people will be there...

Chacal wrote:"Have you used" is not the same as "Are you using".
I suspect some respondents are no longer creating content.
When they were, they used Blender 2.49.

This, and also some people work for years on their Age, and don't want to risk migrating their Blender file from PyPRP to Korman.
I also suspect Myst fans are on average a bit more reluctant towards change.


As for visual quality... The ideal solution for iteration speed would be to somehow connect Plasma itself as a renderer to Blender (maybe through some plResManager hackery), and rely on dynamic lighting whenever possible instead of constantly baking everything. Needless to say this is a lot harder to do than it seems.

I voted “socializing” for the favourite aspect of Uru, but ranked it last for the fan ages. In fact Uru is more or less the only online game where I care about socialising.
The rationale is that I have around twenty avatars across all (save one) available shards, so there’s little left for exploring and solving puzzles for me. And I moderate the AGM
Between Ae’gura, the hoods and the pubs, I think Cyan’s ages have enough venues for socialising, so in fan-made ages that’s the last aspect I’m interested in.

I meant to propose explore-an-age events for a while, but never did, mainly because I can’t think of a way of doing that without the pirate shard devotees trying to steal the show.

Also, I’m not the one who voted “all of them, at some point” for the macOS wrapper question It would apply, but I picked PlayOnMac as my current favourite.

I voted “socializing” for the favourite aspect of Uru, but ranked it last for the fan ages. (...) there’s little left for exploring and solving puzzles for me.

It's always the same problem: we simply lack content. Back when Cyan was supposed to release new areas every month Uru was all about exploring, these days not so much.

IC Roleplay would be great; but to a certain extent this is also tied to content. It's hard to be IC when there's nothing new to talk about.. Which is why I find it so important that fan Ages stay very close to the Uru canon. Else why bother with Uru at all? We could create maps for any random game.

re: Blender 2.49
I suspect some respondents are no longer creating content.
When they were, they used Blender 2.49.

That make sense, that's a bit sad though, but that makes sense.

Chacal wrote:"Have you used" is not the same as "Are you using".
I suspect some respondents are no longer creating content.
When they were, they used Blender 2.49.

True. Just a limitation of trying to make the survey not ask a million variations.

Sirius wrote:I wonder if Uru could do with some better socialization features. Like, some bulletin board where people can propose exploring age X on day Y, and people can subscribe and get an idea of how many people will be there...

Or even just a usable chat. The KI needs a complete overhaul. It was designed before a lot of UI was standardized.

Sirius wrote:This, and also some people work for years on their Age, and don't want to risk migrating their Blender file from PyPRP to Korman.
I also suspect Myst fans are on average a bit more reluctant towards change.

I suspect many of them are, although so far this survey suggests less of them are resistant to change than previously assumed... at least in some ways. In others, confirmed.

Sirius wrote:As for visual quality... The ideal solution for iteration speed would be to somehow connect Plasma itself as a renderer to Blender (maybe through some plResManager hackery), and rely on dynamic lighting whenever possible instead of constantly baking everything. Needless to say this is a lot harder to do than it seems.

Definitely harder.

Korovev wrote:The rationale is that I have around twenty avatars across all (save one) available shards, so there’s little left for exploring and solving puzzles for me.

I don't do it much these days, either, except in very targeted archaeological investigations, but even so that's the reason I'm here for Uru and it always has been. They got my vote even if it's not my primary activity these days.

Aloys wrote:

I voted “socializing” for the favourite aspect of Uru, but ranked it last for the fan ages. (...) there’s little left for exploring and solving puzzles for me.

It's always the same problem: we simply lack content. Back when Cyan was supposed to release new areas every month Uru was all about exploring, these days not so much.

IC Roleplay would be great; but to a certain extent this is also tied to content. It's hard to be IC when there's nothing new to talk about.. Which is why I find it so important that fan Ages stay very close to the Uru canon. Else why bother with Uru at all? We could create maps for any random game.

I agree 100%.