What is Cyan up to?

[johnsojc]

So, is it that Cyan tends to focus more on the artistic aspects of their games to the detriment of gameplay? Too bad... no fan ages for MOULa unless they are pretty enough, I guess.

[Tweek]

Too bad... no fan ages for MOULa unless they are pretty enough, I guess.

That's how I feel it should be anyway, unpopular as my opinion is sure to be.

[johnsojc]

"Wow! What a beautiful Age! What can I do here?

>"You can walk around and admire the clever texturing of the walls and floor... notice the reflective sheen of the stonework.

"Yes, but what is the story line? Are there any puzzles to solve or goals to accomplish?

>"No but observe the detailing in the scrollwork on the columns"

"Seriously? There must be something to do here!"

> "Well, there's a nexus station over there you can use."

"No thanks. I think I can use the X down in the corner."

[Christopher]

Too bad... no fan ages for MOULa unless they are pretty enough, I guess.

That's how I feel it should be anyway, unpopular as my opinion is sure to be.

You are not alone! I feel the same way. If I enter some(!) fan ages I simply can't explore it, cause the age looks aweful. Other ages only have an aweful sound -> Mute button ftw.

Christopher

[johnsojc]

Actually I do agree with Tweek and Christopher. Ages should be held to the high standard from the artistic pov. My only problem is that, without live content to drive events or some storyline or puzzle to figure out, the Age is just a pretty museum piece worthy only for a visit to see the sights, take a few photos and go off somewhere to find something else to do.

[Calena]

Too bad... no fan ages for MOULa unless they are pretty enough, I guess.

That's how I feel it should be anyway, unpopular as my opinion is sure to be.

You are not alone! I feel the same way. If I enter some(!) fan ages I simply can't explore it, cause the age looks aweful. Other ages only have an aweful sound -> Mute button ftw.

Christopher

Before I ever downloaded and took a look at a single fan created age, an explorer gave me his description of all of them - "don't waste your time; either they look good but there's nothing to do; or there's something to do but they look like cartoons."

Per my grandson, Cyan's ages are "creepy" and he wants no part of them, with the exception of playing with the critters in the pod ages. My son says the graphics are so poor and so outdated that it isn't worth entering the game. He's had it on his PC for over 2 years and so far he's seen his Relto (which he refers to as "that weird tiki hut" place) and the Nexus.

Me personally, I've played MOULa exactly once. I've spent all my time exploring the fan ages, because I love finding what I call "creative treasures" in them. There are fan ages I've explored multiple times, yet I have little to no interest in Cyan's work.

What does or does not constitute excellent "art" is an entirely subjective decision, completely reliant on individual preference. What does matter is what the shard admins will accept on their shard. Hoikas and group run and finance the Gehn shard and they have the right to decide what and how they will include fan created content to their shard. The same goes for Cyan. If an age writer's goal is to build to publish, then they have no choice but to build to please the shard admins or skip CWE/MOULa completely and build for Deep Island.

The other fact of life is that there simply aren't many age builders that are willing to spend hundreds and thousands of hours of their personal free time building to please a couple of dozen nameless, faceless people on the internet. What motivates me to build is to please myself and I do that by putting a smile on the faces of my son and grandson. Because of that, I have no interest in building for CWE/MOULa. I'm not averse to publishing on Deep Island, but it isn't my goal.

Right now, I'm aware of one person building an age for Gehn and working to please those admins and one person building an age for MOULa and working to please Cyan and the entire community. God bless both of them and I wish them the best of luck. What the community really needs is more age builders interested in building for CWE/MOULa. Discussing quality issues is a waste of time IMHO when no one is building anything!

[Christopher]

Right now, I'm aware of one person building an age for Gehn and working to please those admins and one person building an age for MOULa and working to please Cyan and the entire community. God bless both of them and I wish them the best of luck. What the community really needs is more age builders interested in building for CWE/MOULa. Discussing quality issues is a waste of time IMHO when no one is building anything!

And what I've seen from this two persons looks pretty good (At least good enough for me). I personally think the music in Sevkor sounds like some old N64 game music, but that's another point. I like visual quality of Sevkor.

Christopher

[Tweek]

Actually I do agree with Tweek and Christopher. Ages should be held to the high standard from the artistic pov. My only problem is that, without live content to drive events or some storyline or puzzle to figure out, the Age is just a pretty museum piece worthy only for a visit to see the sights, take a few photos and go off somewhere to find something else to do.

Oh I'm not saying artistic merit by itself is enough, not at all. Story and content is just as needed. Whilst I can apparently make my Ages look good, and I have a good understanding of lore. My Ages do lack interaction. Oh I have all these ideas but I currently lack the time and skill to implement said ideas.

But I do feel if you are adding your content to MOULA (and to Gehn) then it needs to look "as good" as everything else. If you own your own server, then of course you can make your own rules

I have very high standards for fan content that few can live up to. I include my own stuff in that too, I am constantly looking at what I've built and seeing it isn't good enough and tweaking things.


Calena - Well to be fair Uru is now over 10 years old. But I would love to see graphical improvements to the engine. Heck just redoing some of the textures at a higher res would go a long way.

Once upon a time we had a lot more Age builders, some of them good ones. But alas between Cyan's decisions and community bickering most of them have been driven away to other things.

The community is very apt at shooting the only doctor within miles then shooting themselves in the foot then expecting said dead doctor to apply a bandaid.

[janaba]

Awesome and interesting and very profound statements, Calena and also Tweek ... Of course, not very encouraging lol but so very realistic and true and thus freeing and enlightening, and only on an absolutely true and genuine basis and in truly and clearly seeing things as they really are, is it at all possible to effect and really change and contribute sth if that'd be at all desired and considered worth the efforts ...

And yeah for your wonderful grandson, Calena, he of course stands for the new generations, completely spoiled resp. absolutely positively used to the awesome, magnificent graphics quality provided by so many new computer games, be it MMO's, adventure games or even casual games etc ... There is sth happening in people who are being drawn to Uru/MOULa and the whole Myst/Riven/D'ni lore and feeling on a deeper level and there are many more personal and other reasons too for some to keep at it all, but that is certainly not an astounding visual delight and graphics quality, only when you look at it from a standpoint of when it was built resp. programmed decades ago ... Yeah, everything is developing and changing dynamically and at almost the speed of light ... What interesting times we're living in ...

[tachzusamm]

When I played MYST the first time, the overall graphics quality was astounding high for the year it came out. I was impressed in the first place, but while proceeding through the puzzles, I more and more forgot to have a look at visual quality. It was like exploring a world, because everything did fit together.
The same happened when I played RealMYST; this was during MOUL while we had a GameTap account. We explored with 3 players in synch while talking to each other via Skype. For example, one explorer said "okay, let's turn left now", and the others followed, each one on his own screen. We in fact turned RealMYST into a Multi-Player game. But again, I forgot to be impressed by visual quality after a while, because everything did fit together. Of course, the quality was better than MYST, but not THAT high that I would have shout "amazing". And still, the scenes, buildings and surroundings did fit to each other. It gave an impression of "beeing in the world".

Now, when I see screenshots of the current status of "RealMYST Masterpiece", I get an impression that it does not fit yet. In Myst Island for example, the space observatory looks of course better than before; I like the shading and the shadows. But the library for example looks somehow misplaced; their walls seem so flat and shadeless.
The same applies to Mechanical Age. I like how the bridge on the left looks, and the banister. Nice shading and shadows, and the beach looks okay for me. This is really an improvement. But why is the gear-wheel at the banister rusty (which is okay), whereas the gear-wheel on the beach is made of very few faces with ultra-sharp corners (as it has been ever)? This does not fit at all. And the house looks totally false there; textured, but flat walls, with an absolutely false looking shading.

In my humble opinion, just adding plants here and there, adding dynamics shadows to "some" objects just for the sake of to show you can, is not enough. It may be my personal preference, but I think it's not the absolute visual quality that makes a scene look impressive; it's more how everything fits together. And that's not the case yet. Let's hope this is really just a WIP currently.


Besides that, I guess (though I can't know) that Cyan does not really develop a completely new, revolutionary game engine. My assumption is that it's still based in many points on plasma. Brilliant visual quality we are used to nowadays from current games is mostly based on new game engines, like cry engine, unreal engine, or others. I don't know all of them. But those engines are not only capable of handling *much more* polygons than plasma can - plus most of them automatically can fade out objects which are too far away, and reload them automatically when needed - they additionally make it much easier to a designer to create the world. They mostly don't rely on something like a "Max plugin"; they come with their own editors, especially designed for game creation. Heck, do can nearly play the complete game WHILE working in the editor, and do your tweaking while you're in it (like: design - play - stop - tweak - continue - stop and add something again).

Don't get me wrong; I still appreciate what Cyan does, and I'm totally aware of how much work this must be to completely re-design every part of Myst - but I just hope they can and are willing to do better.