How to decide which Fan age is first on Moulagain

[RedSoxFan]

There are a lot of great Fan Ages to choose from and I like Sonavio because it has a story, puzzles and multi-player but selecting an age solely because it is popular may not be wise. What is the criteria to be first Fan age? Does it have to be multi-player? Does it have to be Myst like? Will the author be required to convert it to 3DS MAX? Will the Maintainers & Writers have to 'approve' it or will the authors submit it to Cyan? What about authors who can not check their ages in a multi-player environment will they be excluded?

[Jamey]

I must apologize in advanced if what I'm about to say may seem self-indulgent, because it completely not my intention.

I think The Writer's Niche would be a great age to have in Uru first. It is a fantastic places for Members of the Guild of Writers to meet. This place in D'ni has plenty of resources, including a Library, an Auditorium with a working stage curtain, 2 Classrooms, a meeting room with 4 tables, a room for linking books for high quality ages to be stored, and a room with a nice view of the city. I should also mention that The Writer's Niche is FCAL Approved by Cyan Worlds, which means they shouldn't have a problem with it.

I think it's a great resource for the Guild of Writers and for the Uru Community.

[D'nial]

Fens FTW. Or Ahra Pahts.

Yeah, Ahra Pahts would be a good first Live fan Age. It's a good representation of stuff that comes from all over the community.

Yikes, I'd better get cracking on my shell!

[RedSoxFan]

Now there you go, I love Ahra Pahts too, see how easy it is to flop about? We need a criteria to cut the selection to a short list.

[I.Brattin]

Here is the problem. We could hash and rehash what is to be included in MOULa first. But in the end it is likely going to be Cyan's decision what gets in first.

Well at least till we get the source and can start opening our own servers. Then we can decide, right now I expect there will be a submission of some kind, Cyan will likely review them and then make a decision on what gets put on their server.

[Aloys]

Ahra Pahts.
Yeah, Ahra Pahts would be a good first Live fan Age. It's a good representation of stuff that comes from all over the community.

Although I agree it would be marvelous to see that Age in MOUL with plenty of people walking the streets, if it has to be converted to 3DS Max I'm afraid that will be very difficult...
It is a very large Age, with thousands of objects, dozens of thousands of Alcscript lines.
But before that I think it would have to progress quite a bit to reach a greater level of quality. Textures needs to be updated, many content has to be added, wavesets have to be done (although Dox has done some great progress on this) sound has to be added etc. The Age is nice as it is, but it could much be better: numerous Ages have been published since the last version of AP that are of much better quality.
That being said if Cyan is interested in having it in MOUL it would certainly be an interesting case study for us: if we are able to import that massive Age in Max and successfully export it to MOUL, then I guess we can probably do it with any Age. :p

[Trylon]

I think it would be better to wait with Ahra Pahts until Pyprp supports moul.
Additionally, Ahra pahts would definitely need to be tested on a multiplayer server before widespread deployment.

Personally I think people should nominate an age (including their own), and we should take a vote. Then the two best could be offered as possible candidates to Cyan (They might want them both in there )

(And yes, I think that it would be well worth the effort to modify pyprp 1.5 to support MOUL, considering all the ages currently out there that would need a rebuild.)

Edit:
I would like very much to see an age with hub potential in the first few candidates. That might facilitate easier addition of other ages.

[CrimsonMatt]

Incidentally, Jamey, when I read the title for this page, the first Age to come to mind was the Writer's Niche.

Ahra Pahts would be good, except that there's only a few shells filled up. Once a lot starts to be built it will be the most awesome Age ever, but I dont think it would be a good first as it is... There's still a lot of bugs, aren't there? Like I just saw a post about numbers being mixed up.

I forget who wrote Fens, but I think he also wrote some sort of garden age, that had some random floating cubes. Fens and the gardeny age are good choices, I think.

I haven't played the fan ages in a while, so I forget most of them...

[D'nial]

Fens is Whilyam's creation. He also wrote Bimevi, which contained random floating pentagons. Lontahv wrote Tre'bivdil, which is an Age of cubes that float(?) in water.

I'd like Writer's Niche more if it didn't claim to be a restored D'ni site. "Machine meets the beautiful" and what have you.

[I.Brattin]

I would like very much to see an age with hub potential in the first few candidates. That might facilitate easier addition of other ages.

Unless Cyan has changed their stance, the Hub (or Library age) was reserved by them. I think thats why Rand said something about a Writer's Nexus.