I was reading Korovev's AGM summary, and was really excited when reading this:
The third announcement was that Cyan released a set of images for textures used in Uru and Myst, available to be used in fan contributed content. The number of files was overwhelming, more than 8000. Rarified set up a browser on the OpenUru website where they can be viewed. It may not be up forever, but it will be kept up as long as possible.
Now, I have a few observations:
- This is absolutely awesome, thank you to everyone involved ! This needs to be said. Cyan's textures are really well made despite their low resolution, so this will enhance fan Ages quality a lot.
- Textures from one of the realMyst games (the original one I think ?) are included in the package, which adds a significant amount.
- Some textures cannot be found ingame - for instance, the Gira fossils, billboards from the old daytime version of Todelmer, etc. I expect some DiRT stuff to be there as well. This is interesting for people who enjoy digging up cut content.
- Textures are sometime higher-res or less compressed than their ingame equivalent. EDIT: this only happens for smaller textures. Apparently the textures browser contains no texture above 450x450 ? Is that normal ? Uru certainly has textures up to 1024x1024.
- Currently no license is mentioned anywhere. I guess it's the standard license/guideline Cyan gave us about fan content in general. Adding a link to it in the browser might be a good idea, just to make the legal aspect clear.
Now, I have a small question. Does anyone know the URL to the archive/repo where all the textures can be downloaded at once ? I would love to browse all the textures on my computer to see which ones are new. (I'm also kinda obsessed about collecting and archiving things )
Since some of those textures are higher-quality than the ones found ingame, I'm tempted to try putting them back in the game uncompressed or using less compression (modern computers can certainly handle it). This would also be a good opportunity to remove this optimization for higher-quality visuals... Worth a shot.
Anyway. Once again, this is awesome news !