Planning Uru

Charura · **Joined:** Wed Oct 14, 2009 4:14 pm **Posts:** 1761

@Nalates
I collected maps and put them on the GoC Tech Data site, see Uru Maps.

I appreciate all your work but no one sees this stuff.. is it secret>

JWPlatt · **Posted:** Tue May 17, 2011 2:46 am

Two quickie observations:

aloys wrote:

(We now have the 3ds Max plugin, and it is really great, but nobody has the 6000$ to buy a Max license).

I see this a lot. Yet there is student pricing. And it also seems most community developers currently are students. And many who say it's too expenseive somehow come up with a copy. Interesting, no?

aloys wrote:

Stucuk wrote:

The only viable way cyan can make money from URU is by selling additional content that they make.

I think everybody agrees on that.. Even small things would probably sell decently. That's probably not enough to raise a lot of money, but it would most likely be worth it for them. The question is: can they do it? Do they even want to or have they totally moved on?

I see them moving on to where the market is. Currently, that's mobile casual games. But MQO is a good example of something that interested Cyan and leveraged their MOUL assets. CWE, assuming it becomes more than just a small community project, could feed back into professional studio production and support services for Cyan and affordable content for MOULa. But it's up to us to get it there while Cyan works on other opportunities.

Stucuk · **Joined:** Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:41 am **Posts:** 216

Dachannien wrote:

If someone feels moved to do so, they can go ahead and implement an automatic journal API-of-sorts and corresponding KI functionality, so that age writers can take advantage of it and add scripted entries to a player's automatic journal. Then the community can judge for itself whether the automatic journal entries that the age writer devises are flawed in some way, e.g., too revealing of things not seen in the age, too leading, too out-of-character for the player's character, boring, etc.

Id do it if it wasn't programmed in C++. Visual Studio is a horribly complex compiler designed to annoy you(The fact that if it doesn't by default allocate enough memory to its self that it tells you that you need to give it a parameter specifying a higher memory value is stupid, decent compilers just request more memory themselves, etc) and its slow at compiling.

Shame there isn't alot of games written in Delphi, its a nice fast compiler where you can compile a whole game in 1-5 minutes rather than upto 2 hours with Visual Studio. After getting URU to compile and run fine i gave up after it took 3 minutes to re-compile when i just changed one single line(Which only affected 2 projects). In Delphi it would have just took about 3-10 seconds.

aloys wrote:

I think everybody agrees on that.. Even small things would probably sell decently. That's probably not enough to raise a lot of money, but it would most likely be worth it for them. The question is: can they do it? Do they even want to or have they totally moved on?

Id imagine that it would require the community to grow before Cyan commit any of there staff to work on URU content.

Marten · **Posted:** Tue May 17, 2011 6:43 am

aloys wrote:

Nalates wrote:

What would motivate you to log into the Cavern each day?

That is the 10 million dollars question we have yet to answer properly..
The answers we have seen so far all seem to lead down two paths:
1) Making such deeps changes that Uru would no longer be Uru.
2) More content, more gameplay. That's the original plan, and history hasn't been kind with that one.
Neither option seems totally satisfying..
What would make me log into the Cavern each day? Truth be told: probably nothing; because that's not how I enjoy that kind of game. But maybe twice a week..

Is a story content? Obviously it is something created, but it's different from ages, or clothing, or other changes that require software development and testing.

A Cyan-driven story, even without new age content, would pull me into the cavern daily if that story unfolded daily.

(I won't get into the reasons that community-driven story will no longer do this for me. A question was asked, and I've answered it.)

Charura wrote:

@Nalates
I collected maps and put them on the GoC Tech Data site, see Uru Maps.

I appreciate all your work but no one sees this stuff.. is it secret>

One of the continuing pitfalls of Myst Online is the difficulty in helping people find out about all the resources available. Out of cavern, here on the Myst Online website, the forums are large, have many topic areas, and it's easy for newcomers to miss things unless they are official Cyan announcements (and even those are sometimes missed). There's no list of related sites anymore (there used to be). .There's not even a clear pointer to the official in-cavern site, DRCsite or its forums (did you know DRCsite had forums?). And in cavern, we can't set up billboards, and anyone can overwrite or clear messages on the public imagers.

I've encouraged people to share just one site, to be a portal to all of the other Myst and Uru sites. rel.to.

rel.to/goc should get you to the Guild of Cartographers' site. Feel free to poke around rel.to itself and see what other resources there are meaningful to you. Leonardo at the Guild of Messengers rel.to/gome now maintains rel.to.

Robin · **Posted:** Tue May 17, 2011 6:56 am

JWPlatt wrote:

aloys wrote:

(We now have the 3ds Max plugin, and it is really great, but nobody has the 6000$ to buy a Max license).

I see this a lot. Yet there is student pricing. And it also seems most community developers currently are students. And many who say it's too expenseive somehow come up with a copy. Interesting, no? ...

You can do even better than "student pricing" if you qualify. Autodesk will give you a FREE three-year license for their products if you are a qualified student, veteran, or among the unemployed from certain industries. FAQ (I qualify two ways at the moment.)

Someone finally figured out that the 30-day "free trials" weren't long enough to actually learn how to use the products effectively, and even it you just need it for one class, school semesters typically run several months. They also have the tutorials and learning programs on-line, so you can figure them out at your own pace.

Of course there are some annoying limitations, like not being able to use them for commercial purposes and the Autodesk labeling/watermarks, but for this group it may not be a problem. Look at it this way: The more people that know how to use your products, the more that will be using them professionally in situations where they WILL pay big bucks for the tools they know, or will encourage their employers to use them. It's a Marketing tool, and one of the more effective and least expensive ones.

Check it out at the Autodesk Education Community. They have over 30 of their products available for free download, and 3ds MAX is just one of them.

Just as a heads up though. Some of these are LARGE downloads, and once they have downloaded, installation can also take a very long time... Even with my high-speed cable connection, one package took a solid hour to download, and another hour to decompress and install. :roll:

Stucuk · **Joined:** Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:41 am **Posts:** 216

Since we have the source couldn't someone make a plugin for a truly free 3D Modelling Application(Which would have all of the features Cyan's one has)? That way anyone, no matter people are a student or not, they could contribute.

AdamJohnso · **Posted:** Tue May 17, 2011 4:22 pm

Stucuk wrote:

Since we have the source couldn't someone make a plugin for a truly free 3D Modelling Application(Which would have all of the features Cyan's one has)? That way anyone, no matter people are a student or not, they could contribute.

Wow, talk about being asleep at the wheel. PyPRP ring any bells?

Nalates · **Posted:** Tue May 17, 2011 10:22 pm

Is PyPRP being upgraded or is it still just for Blender 2.49b and an older Python?

Stucuk · **Joined:** Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:41 am **Posts:** 216

AdamJohnso wrote:

Wow, talk about being asleep at the wheel. PyPRP ring any bells?

I don't make ages, so my knowledge is limited in that area(Hence why it was a question rather than a statement). Though im willing to bet that any existing community tools won't have all the bells and whistles that Cyans 3ds max one has, which why i said "Which would have all of the features Cyan's one has".

AdamJohnso · **Posted:** Wed May 18, 2011 1:11 am

Nalates wrote:

Is PyPRP being upgraded or is it still just for Blender 2.49b and an older Python?

We are slowly making a new version for Blender 2.5x that will target all available versions of the Plasma Engine. The work goes slowly because the Blender Python API has been insanely volatile until just recently.

Stucuk wrote:

I don't make ages, so my knowledge is limited in that area(Hence why it was a question rather than a statement). Though im willing to bet that any existing community tools won't have all the bells and whistles that Cyans 3ds max one has, which why i said "Which would have all of the features Cyan's one has".

Well, maybe you should educate yourself on the topic and stop spreading misinformation and making assumptions--you know what they say about those things. In this case you are making one out of yourself.

Stucuk · **Joined:** Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:41 am **Posts:** 216

AdamJohnso wrote:

Well, maybe you should educate yourself on the topic and stop spreading misinformation and making assumptions--you know what they say about those things. In this case you are making one out of yourself.

How am i spreading misinformation by asking a question, i never stated there were no community plugins for blender. Instead of trying to make me look small because i asked a question you could have simply just said "We currently have a plugin for blender which is on par with Cyans 3ds one", would that have been so hard?

Note: Given that i don't own a copy of 3ds there is no way i could know if your plugin is on par with Cyans due to the fact i could never test Cyans(Hence why i asked a question).

EDIT: According to the GOW Wiki(Only thing i could find via google that wasn't a forum post from 2007-2009) PyPRP only supports the offline URU's directly. I have no clue if the format is the same as online URU or different as PyPRP's documentation doesn't say. Given that libhsplasma (which i forgot i had downloaded the source of in 2010) defines EOA as using a newer version to URU Live id imagine the formats of offline are different to online. So given that there is not complete information on PyPRP thats easily available how is one meant to know if your plugin is as good as Cyans?

AdamJohnso · **Posted:** Wed May 18, 2011 4:50 am

Stop being so self righteous, it really gets quite old. For some reason, it seems to be quite a common problem on this forum.

Anyway...

Quote:

im willing to bet that any existing community tools won't have all the bells and whistles that Cyans 3ds max one has.

That's what you said. This is misinformation. You should not say it unless you are certain that it is true. If you are unable to determine the truthfulness of your thoughts, then maybe you ought not to state them where impressionable minds might read them.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have better things to do than reading/answering angry posts.

Stucuk · **Joined:** Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:41 am **Posts:** 216

AdamJohnso wrote:

Stop being so self righteous, it really gets quite old.

Im sorry that my beliefs that people should post helpful posts rather than posts designed to make people look small offends you.

AdamJohnso wrote:

That's what you said. This is misinformation. You should not say it unless you are certain that it is true.

Its called an opinion. If i said something like "PyPRP does not have all the bells and whistles that Cyans does" then you would be correct but i didn't. Misinformation is where you say something as a fact which is actually false, not when you have an opinion. The fact i wrote "Im willing to bet" shows that im not 100% sure about what im saying.

If you believe a persons opinion is wrong you just need to tell them what the truth is as that then clears up the matter. So far i still have no clue if PyPRP even currently supports URU Live directly, as the documentation doesn't say and you have never stated if it does or doesn't.

Marten · **Posted:** Wed May 18, 2011 6:34 am

This is a useful thread and I'd hate to see it locked. - that's an opinion

I'm willing to bet that if the hostilities don't cease, it will be locked. - that's an opinion too, but it's also speculation, which makes it a bit different.

FYI.

Planning Uru

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