Video Games
Shapeways, Part II
Well, I got another shipment today (well, it arrived on Friday, I haven’t been home in a while). Ripping open the Shapeways box, I discovered the beautiful second half of my Riven Dagger Order: the steel and gold-plated daggers.
They’re gorgeous. The level of detail is amazing, even the tiny little loop I put on the top (for necklace-wearing!) is preserved.
My goal for the gold-plated dagger is to get some form of tiny gold chain, and wear it as a pendant. The steel one is just an awesome thing to add to my collection.
Unfortunately, the edges are a little more wobbly-looking than I would like, but I did violate the recommended minimum thickness to make them, so I was expecting it. It’s not really enough to even see unless you inspect very closely. The other problem is the bumpiness, which is very prominent, giving the daggers a rough texture. They feel like they had cheesecloth pressed into them when they were still ‘wet’. I know this isn’t at all how the process of printing them works, but it’s what goes on in my head.
That being said, I am extremely happy with these. The rough texture makes them feel a lot more authentic, actually, considering that the Moiety were the ones making these, and I’m guessing they didn’t have the technology to really smooth out their metal. Again, I’m not putting them up for sale, but if you’re interested in acquiring one of your own send me a message.
Also yes, I appreciate the irony of a Moiety dagger made out of gold, Gehn’s material of choice.
Shapeways, Part I
I recently discovered an absolutely awesome website, www.shapeways.com. Upload a 3d model, give them some money, and they will send you a printed out, real-life version of your object. The best part is that you can print in a number of materials, including plastic, sandstone, steel, gold-plated steel, and even glass. You can then open a shop and sell your models for a markup, and actually make money.
There’s some pretty impressive stuff on the site. Check out the impressive models (some mathematical, some just interesting) by Bathsheba Sculpture, some awesome D&D dice sets, and a thriving puzzle-building community. The opportunities afforded by a service like Shapeways are virtually limitless. Custom figurines for board games, inexpensive prototyping, you name it. It’s true democratization of the manufacturing industry, and it’s only going to get better over time (as the costs of production drop, as they always do).
Finding out about this service, I immediately did what any respectable Myst-head would do, and launched Blender. After about 3 hours of work (and a somewhat frustrating cycle of uploading, being told there were problems with the model, fixing the problems, and re-uploading), I got a respectable-looking model of my prize, and had managed to get the price down to under $15. I placed my order.
Now, about 2 weeks later, I finally received part 1 of my shipment! Take a look:
As you maybe can tell from looking at the photos, the resolution at which the models are printed is extremely high. You can see places where faces differed in height by a fraction of a millimeter, and the the outside of the ring is clearly segmented into faces. Additionally, the model has a very rough texture, and feels somewhat fragile at the tip of the blade (where a bit actually broke off in shipment, as I expected to happen).
The dagger isn’t going to be put up for public sale, due to copyright issues, but if you’re interested in acquiring one for yourself, send me an e-mail and I’ll see what I can do.
That being said, I am so happy with this model. It came out really, really, well, and I anticipate many bills from Shapeways in my future.
More to follow!
Pictures For Sad Children Game
Inspired by this comic, I decided to make a simple little Flash game. Check it out:
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!
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.
Oh, the Irony…
Yes, I am writing a third post about LittleBigPlanet. Yes, I promise I’ll keep it short. No, it’s not good news. I just unlocked a mini-game level in the game (no, I’m not quite finished yet, but I’m almost there) called “Spline Rider”. When I saw the title, I died a little on the inside, but when I loaded it up and found myself on a toboggan riding down an environment constructed completely of straight lines, I got angry.
Of course, the level is fun. It’s tricky to get the sled to balance right so you don’t flip over. However, this level is an exact replica of the extremely popular flash game, Line Rider (so popular, in fact, that it has been bastardized into a soulless console game). The hypocrisy is unbelievable, that Sony and MediaMolecule will remove fan-made levels that infringe on copyrights, while there is an official level obviously meant to emulate another commercial game.
On the plus side, I checked the published levels again, and I realized that the Mirror’s Edge and Tetris levels have not been removed (yet), so please, go play them while you still can. I sincerely hope that the Tetris level is not removed, because it is pure genius, and really fun.
On Second Thought…
So yesterday I posted about the latest addition to my list of all-time favorite games, LittleBigPlanet. After posting that post, I began to brainstorm the game’s possible flaws, and I came up with a few things.
First of all, in the level creator, the first time you try to use a new category of objects (materials, switches, eyes, vehicles, etc.), you are forced to watch a tutorial on how to use it. This would be tolerable if the tutorials were skippable, but they aren’t. At least, not all of them are. The tutorials are really unnecessary, and seem extremely out-of-place in such an intuitive and easy-to-understand game. Forcing users to complete tutorials before allowing them to proceed is one of the biggest problems in modern games, which usually include a ridiculously long tutorial level (usually unskippable, as well) at the beginning of the game, which you are forced to play through every time you play the game. For example, the first half-hour in Kingdom Hearts 2 (Twilight Town) is basically a glorified tutorial level, and the opening level of Knights of the Old Republc 2 was just as bad.
Secondly, and this is not a flaw as much as a trivial gripe, the clothes are not as customizable as I would like. Basically, colors. Some clothes allow you to modify their color, but there is only one color setting for your entire avatar, meaning every customizable article of clothing, and all menus, must be the same color. Certainly not a showstopper, but a complaint nonetheless.
Neither of these complaints were enough to merit posting about, in my opinion. However, then I read about MediaMolecule (the company that created LBP) and Sony “moderating” fan-made levels.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I can understand the need for some level of censorship on their part, they obviously are going to have to delete anything obscene, and anything illegal. But the amount of level-deleting (and it is just that, permanent deletion of so-called “moderated” levels) that has been happening in the past few days is ridiculous. MediaMolecule is removing levels that could infringe on copyrights, so levels that reference other video games, music, people, movies, etc. are all being removed, irrevocably. This is really bad, a lot of my favorite levels (the Mirror’s Edge levels, as well as Tetris, Galaga, etc) are all being removed. They were really the best levels online, being so ingeniously re-created from the tools offered in the game. I must say, I’m very disappointed in MediaMolecule for being such cowards.
LittleBigPlanet
It’s pretty rare for me to really like a video game, or at least it’s rare for me to like it enough to actually want to play the game all the time. I usually only discover such an addictive game about once a year. The last time that it happened was with Rock Band back in the spring, Kingdom Hearts a few years that, and way back when, the Myst series.
However, last friday (Halloween), one of my friends lent me LittleBigPlanet for the week, and I’ve been been spending most of my free time since then playing the amazing thing (I actually gave my friend back his copy on thursday, and went out yesterday to purchase my own). The game is beautiful, creative, addictive, unique, intuitive, and above all else, fun. Of course, I’ve known about LittleBigPlanet for more than a year. The trailers and gameplay videos for it during the summer of 2007 were big factors in my purchasing of a Playstation 3 in the first place, so one could say I actually spend $500 to play this game (or, if you consider the fact that I bought my HDTV to go with the PS3 around the same time, one could actually say that I spent over $1000 to play it).
In LittleBigPlanet, you play as Sackboy (above), a character made out of cloth (hence his name), and run around LittleBigPlanet (a physical manifestation of all of the dreams and imaginative energies of the people of Earth), exploring and collecting items. Items include stickers (which can be stuck anywhere in the game, even on other characters), decorations (which are like 3-dimensional stickers, and can also be stuck on anything in the game), and costumes, among other things. The costumes are a very fun part of the game, because you can really customize your Sackboy a lot using them (see below).
Besides the story mode (the main levels of the game, tied together into some sort of loose, disjointed story), there’s also the “MyMoon” area, where you can create your own levels. As you play through the official levels of LittleBigPlanet, you collect the objects from the official levels as items, allowing you to (in theory) re-create the official levels entirely, or build your own worlds. When you’ve created a level that you like, you can publish it, so other people can download and play in it themselves. You can also download and play levels that other people have made, some of which are really amazing.
Perhaps one of the best features of this already amazing game is the multiplayer gameplay. Up to 4 people can play at the same time, working cooperatively to finish the levels together. In my opinion, this is the best form of multiplayer gameplay (that is, 4 people in the same room working together, while the second best is online cooperative, then real-life competitive, and online competitive being the worst form of multiplayer), because it really feels like a group effort, and you’re playing with people you really know, and having fun together. LittleBigPlanet is a very social game, it’s actually impossible to complete it 100% on your own, there are a lot of two-player puzzles to get secret items and such.
LittleBigPlanet is definitely my favorite PS3 game thus far. I would strongly recommend it to anybody and everybody.
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!
Search
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Aug | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||