Uru
Myst Online: Uru Live Again on a Mac!
One of the most popular posts on my site is How to run Uru:CC on a Mac. You may have also heard that Uru Live is back, under the new name “Myst Online: Uru Live Again”. Unfortunately, this version of Uru is PC-only by default.
However, it’s very easy to set it up to run on a Mac! Here’s how to do it:
- Download and install MacPorts.
- Download and install Xcode. This will take a very long time to download, unfortunately. It’s also an optional install on the CD that came with your Mac. If you don’t mind having a slightly out-of-date version (which shouldn’t matter for this), you can insert that CD and find the Xcode installer on there instead of downloading it.
- Reboot. (Might not be necessary, but I’d always recommend it)
- Go to Applications>Utilities in Finder, and launch Terminal.app.
- Type in the following:
sudo port install mystonline-cider - It will ask for your password, type in the same password you use to log in to your computer.
- When it’s all done downloading/installing, you can find Uru in /Applications/MacPorts/Myst Online (Cider).app
And that’s all it takes! Keep in mind that this is the “bare-bones” installer, so it’s going to download all of the meat of the game (the ages, sound effects, everything) the first time you start it up. That means it will most likely take a very long time to get past the loading section. It will eventually get there, though, so don’t worry that it’s crashed.
I don’t take any credit for discovering this method, I got it from “rainbow” on the Myst Online forums.
See you in the cavern!
It Breathes “URU” Again!
Today, Cyan Worlds announced the return of Uru Live, now called Myst Online: Uru Live Again. It’s like MO:UL was, except that it’s being run by Cyan, and it’s now donationware (meaning totally free, but donations are encouraged).
You can set up an account and download the installer from the official site. The servers are being beaten into a pulp at the moment, but you should get in eventually.
MO:ULA is currently Windows-only, but initial tests seem to point to it being completely compatible with Crossover on Mac OS, as Uru:CC was. More on that in a later post.
Update: Yes indeed, the game runs smoothly in Crossover. Besides the obvious network lag present in all versions of the game, I didn’t encounter any sort of slow-down while playing last night. The one problem is that the audio doesn’t appear to work all the time, ambient noises end up as small buzzing noises and such.
Setup couldn’t be simpler though. Open the installer file with Crossover Games, and let it do its thing. Even the PhysX install goes smoothly.
Update: I’m hosting a mirror of the installer files on my server here to help Cyan out a bit.
- Basic Downloader (not recommended)
- Full Installer (Much larger, much more likely to work)
Mysterium 2009
I just got home from Mysterium 2009, the annual gathering of Myst fan(atics). It was held in Spokane, Washington this year (as it is every few years). Spokane is the hometown of Cyan Worlds, the company that made Myst.
The convention was really great, although the last day was somewhat ruined by a flu outbreak in the hotel. It was fun to meet all of the other fans of Myst, and to know that I wasn’t even close to being the geekiest person there (ha).
On the second day we all piled into a few cars and visited the Cyan offices. We got to meet all the Cyan bigwigs, past and present, and they threw a party for us. I had Rand Miller sign my collectibles, including the copy of From Myst to Riven that I bought at their store, and the Myst concept art that Robyn Miller sent me a few years ago. We were given a tour of their awesome workspace, which I filmed, but due to some accident, I no longer have that footage.
After the party, a few members of the Uru community (Blade, Brian Fioca, Douglas Sharper, and Eleri) held a panel about storytelling in Uru, which was pretty cool as they all were (or are) celebrities in our community at one point or another. After that, the real show started with a Q&A session with Rand Miller. He answered all of our questions, covering topics from Something Else, to MO:RE, to the Book of Marrim, to many other things. It was quite entertaining, and also educational!
For those who weren’t present at Mysterium, or those who would simply like a refresher on the convention, check out the video footage I captured over the course of the weekend. The file is about 580mb, so be careful if you have a slow connection (took me about 20 minutes to download on a standard-speed connection). Also, please don’t directly link to the video file, link to this post instead. There is also a torrent of the video file available, for those who would rather use a P2P connection.
If you’re more into photos, check out this thread on MystOnline.com, this Flickr pool, and this thread on UruObsession.com.
In other news, THIS IS THE 500TH POST! Yes, you read that correctly. I have now posted 500 things to this website. Pretty ridiculous. Here’s to 500 posts, and hoping for another strong 500 in the future!
Happy New Year!
So, there goes 2008! We saw the closure of Myst Online: Uru Live, the election of the first black president, and many other important events, sad and happy.
Now we face a new year, 2009. Open Source Uru is on the horizon, and who knows what else? Happy new year, everyone!
Uru To Go Open-Source!
Cyan Worlds announced today that they are going to make Uru an open-source project. They plan to release the source code for the client, servers, and creation tools to the Myst community, and allow it to grow and develop as it will in the hands of the public.
Personally, I think this is a great development. The Myst community is very eager to get back into Uru, and in Cyan’s current state, the prospects of an official revival (especially one on the scale of Myst Online) are looking somewhat grim. By releasing the code for the project, the community itself can build and maintain the world of Uru, without having to rely on Cyan’s fluctuating state to keep Uru surviving. Also, it will provide me with the opportunity to run a real Uru server once again, and maybe even get it to a state of popularity…That would be nice, not to mention the way way way more interesting hacks that can come out of Uru once the hacking community gets its collective hands on the source code…
But on the other hand, this is also sad news. Uru has been a big project for Cyan Worlds for a very long time (production started right after Riven, basically), and now that they’re giving out the code to the public, it’s sort of like they’re letting go of the last piece of their effort, finally acknowledging that perhaps the world is still not ready for Uru Live. It’s a sad thing to think about, made only worse by the realization that there could possibly be no more Cyan-made content for Uru, ever.
Uru: Complete Chronicles on a Mac!
About a month ago, I decided (most likely thanks to Jevasi, DanTheMystFan, and all the other great people I was talking to at Mysterium this year) to get back into the world of Writing (the process of creating a custom Age for Uru), after a year-long hiatus. I returned to find the community in good health, happily churning out very high-quality ages one after another. The tool used for Writing, pyPRP (which is actually just a plugin for Blender) had improved and advanced tenfold since I last used it, now supporting animated textures, custom cameras, and something called ‘AlcScript’, which allows for simple actions to be scripted, making it easier to Write dynamic ages (my only finished age, Galamay, has no interactivity whatsoever, because when I Wrote it years ago, you had to actually write code to do that stuff…). The Guild of Writers Wiki, with its big list of tutorials, was endlessly helpful as I re-learned the little I remembered, and quickly advanced to new levels of ability.
The only problem with this Age Writing is the fact that I use a Mac, and Uru is built for Windows. The classic problem. My first solution was Dropbox, an easy file-syncing program that automatically copies files to every computer you’ve registered, every time the files are modified. This worked well enough, but I still had to wait on my network to move the files, and then move them to the Uru directory on my PC once they were synced. It worked, but it was definitely flawed.
So I began to think about another option. What if I could run Uru on my Mac? That would solve my problems, because then I could Write and test on the same machine. But how would I do it? My first thought was Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, which both run Windows on top of OS X, meaning that the game would definitely run exactly as it would on a PC. However, a virtual machine would only cause more problems, such as the time it takes to load a virtual machine, or the lag that would be produced by running 2 operating systems. I thought about the latter problem for about two seconds before the answer hit me:
Wine. A self-referencing acronym standing for Wine Is Not an Emulator, Wine allows users of non-Windows operating systems to run .exe files meant specifically for Windows. The great thing is that it does this without having to run the entire Windows OS, just the specific parts that it needs to make the program work. This means that there’s no added lag, and programs really do run as if they were native to your own OS (in my case, Mac OS X, but it is available for Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, and any platform you can build it on really, since it’s an open-source project).
The first thing I tried was DarWINE, a Wine project dedicated to getting Wine to work on OS X. Using the installer on the Uru Disk, I got through all of the initial installation before it gave me a strange error (Cannot find string ERROR_CANNOTLOAD), and crashed.
Next, I tried CrossOver Games, a commercial version of Wine dedicated to making Windows games work on Mac OS X and Linux. This behaved exactly as DarWINE did when I gave it the CD with the installer.
Frustrated, I thought more about my past experiences with Uru. I have found in the past that you don’t actually have to install Uru: all the installer does is unpack the data from the CDs to the hard drive. If you can get the files from another source (such as a past installation), you can simply run it without any other modifications. Perhaps the installer makes some registry changes, but they aren’t necessary for the game to run. Following this line of thought, I copied the files from my Uru install to my Mac, and tried opening UruExplorer.exe with CrossOver Games.
Presto! Flawless Uru, running directly on my Mac. Everything that worked on my PC works on my Mac, and given the fact that my PC doesn’t have speakers, the Mac can actually run Uru better than my PC!
Here’s how to do it:
- Install URU:Complete Chronicles on a PC.
- Install Drizzle, and get the No-Disc patch, flymode, OfflineKI, whatever add-ons you want. Drizzle is natively Mac-compatible, so you can always modify these settings later on.
- Make sure all of that stuff works on your PC.
- Copy all the files in your Uru directory (C:/Program Files/Ubisoft/Cyan Worlds/Myst Uru: Complete Chronicles by default) to somewhere on your Mac.
- Get CrossOver Games if you don’t already have it. The link is a trial, the full version costs $39.95 unfortunately…
Based on various reports, it seems like Crossover Games 8.0.0 works the best for Uru, newer versions can have some odd issues. You can download the trial for that here. - Create a WinXP bottle in Crossover (“Manage Bottles” from the Configure menu).
- Programs > Run Command…
- Hit browse and locate UruExplorer.exe on your hard drive
- Save the command, to make it easier to launch again later
- Hit Run, and Uru will launch. You can ignore the error message that might pop up, Uru will launch a moment later.
You can also just find UruExplorer.exe in Finder and double-click it, Uru should launch just the same.
More pictures:
If you love Uru, but are tired of exploring by yourself, you should install Myst Online: Uru Live Again on your Mac and come play online!
MO:RE
Yesterday, Cyan Worlds delivered a letter to the Guild of Messengers, to be released to the community-at-large. It reads:
Shorah,
We’ve got some good news. GameTap and Cyan Worlds have reached an agreement that would return the rights of Myst Online to Cyan Worlds! We’re very excited, but at the same time, there are some hurdles to overcome. Cyan Worlds is currently operating at a reduced capacity. We’re not in a position where we have plenty of resources and people to bring MO back fast and furiously. But we’ve got a plan, and we’d like to run it past you – our fans and supporters.
Basically, the letter says that we will see yet another incarnation of URU (this being the fourth Uru, following Uru Live, Uru:Ages Beyond Myst, Until Uru, and Myst Online: Uru Live, which closed just a few months ago), and that it won’t have any new Cyan-based content (at least, not at first). Instead, Myst Online: Restoration Experiment is to be much more community-supported, with a heavier emphasis on the Guild system that was established, but never really put to good use during the extent of MO:UL.
The initial thinking on the cost of this project is $25 for six months, a fee I will gladly pay for more Uru, especially if it is to have fan-run servers, like Until Uru did. I attempted to set up my own UU server back in the day, but I never got it accessible to the public before D’mala (Cyan’s official server) opened and everyone stopped caring about the fan-based servers. Understandably, I’d like another shot at running a server.
Here’s hoping that this is the Uru that finally makes it, and that the fourth time’s the charm.
Fan Ages and Drizzle
Fan ages – that is, custom-made, unofficial ages for Uru – have certainly progressed a long way. From my first age, Galamay:
To the Fan City of Ahra Pahts:
And now, Eh’ko and the Book of D’eux:
The two ages seen here, Eh’ko and The Remote Age Viewer, look absolutely stunning. They really are Cyan-quality work, and incredibly impressive.
Also, the Drizzle Project is a pretty impressive feat of fan work. Some hackers have managed to decrypt the MO:UL age files, and re-encrypt them using the old Uru encryption methods, meaning that we can put the ages that were once exclusively for MO:UL into URU:CC. I tried it out myself, and after one failure the first time, I got it working completely the second time around. It’s very fun to link to the ages and mess around with the settings just by tapping keys on the keyboard (such as swap the winter Delin for the summer one by pressing Q or W, or make animals appear in Negilahn), plus it includes the flymode patch, which means you can use flymode in these ages and see everything from any angle. It’s very fun, and I’d recommend it to anyone with Uru:CC and the MO:UL files.
Uru’s Final Day
Well, this is it. The final day of Myst Online: Uru Live. Tonight, at midnight (mountain time), Cyan Worlds and Gametap will pull the plugs on the game servers, shutting down the game for the foreseeable future. I plan to be online up until the very last moment, should anyone care to join me. Also planning on video recording the last 5 minutes or so, for the memories. You can expect that to be up sometime tomorrow.
Attempting to Make a Vista FrankenMachine
I’ve been called back into The Guild of Writers to do some work for the Kehlbet project, so I once again find myself in need of a Windows PC. I have plenty of old computers lying around in my house, so finding a victim base to upgrade to modern standards was not too difficult. The computer I chose is an old Dell 8200, my old “gaming” computer. Ha. I got it for $50 from my dad’s work, and being the first computer with a dedicated video processor (a GeForce 4 MX 4000), I used it for my graphics-heavy work (Uru).
Of course, this computer is not nearly good enough for Vista. After installing a DVD drive in it to even install the os, I was awarded a solid 1/5 in the Windows Experience Index benchmark thing. My lowest spec was, of course, that graphics card, being 4 generations old (and the base model of that generation). Of course, half a gig of memory wasn’t helping much, either, but the main thing was that GeForce 4.
So anyway, I paid a visit to Microcenter today and picked up the cheapest card my motherboard supports (the mobo doesn’t have any PCI-Express slots, and the AGP is only 4x I think, so I’m limited to PCI cards only), a GeForce FX 5200 with 128mb of memory. Certainly better than the card it was replacing, right? And it even says ‘Vista’ on the box, though it isn’t Vista Certified, it just says Vista on it. “Oh well,” I thought to myself. I bought the card for $47, and brought it home only to find that nVidia doesn’t support any cards earlier than the GeForce 6′s for Vista. I searched in vain, but nothing made Vista utilize the card. It certainly recognized it, but there was a driver issue and it disabled it, defaulting back to the GeForce 4.
I’m returning the FX 5200 tomorrow and picking up instead a GeForce 6200, which I’ve read is supported by Vista, and is indeed capable of decent performance under the hog of an OS. If I had a PCI-E slot, this would be so much simpler, because the newer PCI-E cards are actually cheaper than these old PCI ones, and they’re much more powerful, not to mention actually supported by nVidia still.
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