Guild of Writers

So with Real Myst Masterpiece Edition now out I was wondering if anyone had taken a look at it or looked into the prospect of modding it?

I won't be able to afford Yet Another Copy of Myst for some time, so I haven't taken a look. I'm not especially interested in poking at it either.

I was going to have a go at it tomorrow. I need to download Unity first though.

I'm not very interested either. The first thing that needs to happen is they absolutely have to come off that price. The screenshots are unimpressive for the $17 they're asking for.

I've played it quickly today, the result is disappointing. Unity does good render of the sky and water, but is sloooow. Man, Skyrim's absolutely bugged engine is faster to display a whole landscape than Unity is to display half an isle with low-poly meshes

I only had a quick look at the Myst isle and Stoneship. There are some interesting visual effects, but it doesn't really feel good imho. Sometimes things look fake, such as very bright interiors, or the tower (from the outside, it looks as small as it used to in original realMyst. From the inside... well, try looking through the window, it looks horribly fake).

Stoneship, on the other hand, is really well done. You can see the rain flow on every objects, which is kinda cool. The lightning is much more impressive than in original realMyst.

Another problem, is that it seems they never use reverb effects anywhere, which could look great in caves, though.

But the thing that saddens me most is that they didn't even bother making more detailed meshes, or rework textures correctly. Which means there are seams in the models, and the textures are... how to say... flat.


So, I'd say it's worth seeing, but just expect a simple port from Plasma to Unity with a few cool features. And don't expect to run it smoothly unless you have a good PC.


Right now, if someone could mod it, I'd say the first two things to do would be remake all meshes in HD and tweak the lighting to feel a bit more realistic in some places.

Sirius wrote:And don't expect to run it smoothly unless you have a good PC.

As someone who has a couple excellent gaming rigs I can say that the problems that you list are pretty much the same. I've run it on my desktop and gaming laptop, the laptop seems to run it slightly smoother than the desktop but not by much (It seems to be better optimized for NVidia GPU's). It tends to randomly microstutter on both computers, and while I can say that the sky and water look great, even the textures on my R9 290 and GTX 560m still have that flatness that you mentioned.

If anyone is waiting to buy this I would recommend either buying it during a sale, or waiting for a patch. I find it unplayable in it's current form. I've heard people say that if you turn down the graphics it'll improve performance, however if I wanted to run RealMyst on lower graphics I would just play the original.

I get the complaints that people are having running it. And some of the graphical issues (I share those complaints.) But, to be fair, buying it now is the best price you will ever get. Steam has the 30 percent off if you buy the original. So for those who don't have realMyst yet, (Which, in this community is a bit odd cause most have us have owned or bought multiple versions of Cyan games throughout the years) you are getting a free copy of the original realmyst plus realMyst ME for the same price as RMME.

Sirius wrote:I've played it quickly today, the result is disappointing.

Thank you for the extended assessment, Sirius.

GPNMilano wrote:So for those who don't have realMyst yet, (Which, in this community is a bit odd cause most have us have owned or bought multiple versions of Cyan games throughout the years)

I bought mine through GoG, long before they were available on Steam, so no discount for me (at least until Cyan gets it onto their GoG listing). Anyway, that's rubbish about this being the best price; Steam has catalog-wide seasonal sales and it's hard to justify this price while it sounds like it still needs a post-release patch or two. Either way, I'm waiting, because I can't afford to be non-frugal with my funds. I'll buy it when the price goes down or the quality goes up.

But, to be fair, buying it now is the best price you will ever get.

We'll see when the summer sale/holiday sales roll around.

Ok, so a few tips about graphic settings for the game if it isn't smooth enough
- first, you want to disable the motion blur effect. It's already quite strong, but running with low FPS will make it really strong, and it will degrade video quality as soon as you move.
- I tried lowering the various settings, but the best way to get a good FPS rate on my pc is to lower the game resolution.
- you might want to disable the focus effect. It doesn't have a high FPS hit, but isn't working fine IMHO. Normally, this effect should blur close objects when you look at a distance, and blur the landscape when you look at close objects. In RMME, it always blurs close objects, no matter whether you're looking at them or not.
- you might want to lower the sunshafts quality. It could give you a few extra fps, and still looks awesome enough (personally, I think sunshafts look irrealistic - as in most games. But since it's so awesome, I still like it). By the way, sunshafts in Unity look quite bad when the light source is displayed on the edge of your screen
- lower or disable the SSAO quality. SSAO is quite demanding, and it's likely you won't even notice the difference. Personally, I think it looks almost as good on low-quality as on high quality.
- and disable AA, which is another very demanding option, and which doesn't improve much the quality IMO.


Also, Unity is totally buggy when it comes to changing the screen resolution. For instance, changing the resolution to 1600x900 on my PC made the game windowed and running at ~540 pixels. Forcing it fullscreen again set my desktop resolution to 540, and kept the game windowed.
It seems it is caused by VSync, so before changing the resolution, make sure to disable it.

Tomala wrote:(It seems to be better optimized for NVidia GPU's)

I have an NVidia GeForce GTX 760m, and even though it's playable it's not really fluid...



EDIT
BTW, I looked a bit in editing existing game files. I know nothing about Unity, but it seems most resources are stored in ".assets" files. These files can be decompiled with a tool called Unity Assets Explorer, but it gives ".43" files. Then there is a ".unity3d" file, which I believe stores objects position, logic, etc.

To modify meshes, textures and materials, the easiest way would be if Unity could read non-packed files, the same way as TES engine does. This way we could avoid having to repack everything, and redistribute too much modified Cyan stuff. But I'm not sure whether that's possible...