Guild of Writers

IC: I was recently informed that a relation of mine had passed beyond his 12th allotted regeneration, and thus has now departed this dimension for more, er, metaphysical climes, most likely what I call X-space. Think of X-space as a corridor, and all the universes being behind doors in that corridor. This is the true realm of TARDIS travel.

At any rate, it appears I've inherited a library of sorts on Gallifrey. While straightening up one day, I happened upon a rather odd-looking and old book that was bound shut with leather straps that had a lock. I wondered who would do such a thing with a book. I couldn't find a key to open this book, so out came the sonic screwdriver. Everyone should have a sonic screwdriver . I opened the lock with it and then opened the book. I found what was clearly D'ni writing, or something resembling it, as I could not make it out (ooc: not that I understand D'ni anyway), so perhaps this book predated the D'ni, and could in fact be from Terahnee, or even Garternay. All very interesting. Which suggests that at some time in the distant past, the Ronay may have had some contact with the Time Lords. Where else would we have gotten such a book? What little sense I could make of the writing indicated an Age called Ah'Rorah (for my purposes, I'll just call it Aurora), and there was a linking page, but it seemed to be inactive. In my travels through time, I recall that Gehn had to power his books, so perhaps this was such a case. So I brought the book to the TARDIS, placed it on a platform I had wired into the TARDIS control panel and engaged the power. The linking panel came to life and showed a strangely beautiful world resembling an Earth-like planet with Saturn-esque rings, having two moons. One was a dead-looking, burned out world resembling Mars, and the other was clearly an ice world. But what did that really say about the planet? Was it safe? Was it hospitable to life? This is the image I was greeted with:



Against my better judgment, as I am also a Maintainer, but my curious nature as a Time Lord scientist overruled, I linked through. Upon arriving, I stepped off of the link-in point took a few strides and then turned around to see this:



It appears that aquamarine, or a substance like it, is abundant on Aurora, and is thus used often in construction, as you can see in the distant city, as well as the strange booth into which I linked. I discovered this to be true as I made my way around the immediate surroundings and noticed rocky outcroppings laden with veins of the gem. The usage of such a material by the inhabitants, and the mastery with which they displayed its usage -- tall towers, sharply carved curved panels, all made of it -- indicated to me that this was a planet inhabited by an advanced race. But I saw no one in my travels here. I have not found a way to cross to the city as yet, which led me to another observation: this is predominantly a water planet.

Not too far away, I found another booth with a pedestal. Knowing full well to bring a linking book back to Gallifrey with me, I installed the book on the pedestal and linked back to plan my next excursions in this strange new world.



OOC: Ok, obviously, these pics are early concept art for this Age, implying there's an enormous amount of work to be done here. The real deal may or may not entirely resemble what you see here, and certainly, the city is very rudimentary; it's just there for effect at this point. Firstly, I have yet to play around in Blender (these are done in Bryce). One thing I've learned from doing things in Bryce is that certain materials pose challenges for graphics processors, i.e., anything transparent requires serious number-crunching, and thus takes forever to render, especially if it is also reflective and curved. But that's Bryce. I don't know what Blender can do about that. And if there are challenges there, there could resultantly be issues for the in-game application. So some materials may need to be revisited. This was just me laying this thing out there for reactions, nothing really more, but I do still plan on creating this age. I really have to thank Ti'chelle for having inspired me to do this after she saw the picture of the planet in SL and suggested I write an Age based on that world.

So, that's it at the moment. And if anyone is intrigued at the idea of joining this project, by all means, drop me a PM.

~Doc

Ah, such clarity, loomchild. :9 Interesting visuals!

Blender will handle your transparencies and reflections just as well as Bryce, with the same penalties, but Plasma (the piece of wizardry Uru runs on) will not. For realtime graphics you will have to use some tricks, with precalculated reflection maps in place of actual optic simulations, for example - I hope you will enjoy familiarising yourself with the framework. :)

( Mind you - there seem to be some neat realtime raytracing projects making significant progress - I noticed one developed for use with IBM blade server racks now runs on small clusters of Playstation3 consoles, which use the same "Cell" processors, so game graphics may well do an evolutionary jump in the not very distant future... :7 )

I figured Plasma would be a problem. Fortunately, there's a Plan B for this Age architecturally, but I don't have much together yet for that, even though technically, it was the original Plan A. It's just when I saw the aquamarine thing while playing in Bryce, I thought that would be really cool. I'll get to work on Plan B and maybe revisit this in the future for a different project once game graphics can do it.

Thanks.

Well, here it is....

http://www.mystonline.com/forums/viewto ... sc&start=0

So ends the Age of Aurora. The storyline presented here violates the copyrighted materials rule and possibly the "new" information about the D'ni rule. Oh well. But at least I have a better idea now as to what we can and can't do.

Your back story jumps all over copyrighted material all right. You can't even Mention D'ni or anything from any of the games. Plus Dr. Who has it's own copyright .Not only that, but the Tardis translates anything within this universe's space time, so you contradicted the laws set up in that system. Other than that, nothing in the actual age violates the TOS. You can make the age, you just can't use your back story or include a journal with it in the age. You found a book somewhere, it works, don't know why, is perfectly acceptable.

If your sun doesn't move you can bake your transparency color from your gems into your ground texture in blender. You could also create a top down render in Bryce and use that as your ground texture. I don't see why you can't physically build this.

I actually have a very good replacement for all that. It's a story I was writing when people started to talk about the possibility of a Myst movie. Some guy inherits a bookstore from his uncle who passed away (yes, very similar to what's above, but this predated what's above, so now you know where it came from). While he's there with his wife cleaning it out, he finds the Myst book. The two both link to Myst, and, well....they encounter Atrus in the imager who tells them about the puzzles they must solve to unlock the one page they'll need to reach him in K'veer. The storyline goes on to Atrus' pleading for help to rescue Catherine from Riven (I always felt that Riven was the most compelling of the games storywise). But this is just the storyline I was using as the basis for a possible movie. None of that will be in the backstory for Aurora. The difference is that it's the Aurora book that gets found in the bookstore. Thus, I remove all the Dr. Who references and the references to the D'ni, as the central figure would have no prior knowledge.