After the Fall

alahmnat:

Next week, I’m going to start a series of posts to lay out my thoughts on creating a new Myst MMO. Each one will cover some specific part of Uru that this new game needs to correct, emulate, or jettison, or some missing element that needs to be included. I want to keep this here and not on somewhere like the Open Uru forum, because I don’t think that’s really the right venue. I don’t just want to improve Uru, I want to make something completely new, without the baggage of Uru to drag it down. I’ll be ending each post in this series with a question mark, so that Tumblr will allow feedback beyond liking and reblogging. I invite constructive comments and feedback.

I’ve been musing privately (and sometimes in public) for a long time about what went wrong with Uru in every one of its many incarnations. I’ve also been working in secret on a project to build a new Myst MMO for a few years, mostly in fits and starts of planning, with little in the way of actual accomplishments. I want to get some of this planning work out there and maybe find a few more folks interested in working on it with me.

Without getting into my first post too much, I do think that an MMO set in the Myst universe can work, and even work well. I just don’t think that Uru is that MMO, and I feel that trying to build something out of its remains is just papering over the cracks of a fundamentally flawed game. I hope you’ll join me next week when I start laying out my case for this new MMO. See you Monday!

((OOC: This is relevant to this blog's raison d'être.))

Hello Tumblr!

I thought I’d try to be like all of the popular kids these days and get myself one of these Tumbr thingies. It’s a little easier to keep track of than my Blogger account. I also wanted to take advantage of Tumblr’s “ask” feature, so if you have a question about D'ni or what I’m doing down there, feel free to shoot me a line. I’ll try to keep on top of what I’m sure will be an absolute deluge of inquiries ;).

Thankfully I’ve also found a tool to import all of my Blogger posts, so I don’t have to try and forward people there for old updates.

But I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my Tumblr exploits. So, what exactly have I been up to? Well, I’ve been on the surface for a while, so restoration efforts haven’t gotten very far since my last update. What little I’ve been doing since my last Blogger post can be found on my Twitter account, which you can find linked somewhere on this page (I’m still tinkering with themes, so sorry if things are kind of all akimbo at the moment). For a quick recap, I did some maintenance work in the Nexus to give it a bit of a spit-shine, and I’ve also been doing some clean-up in the Cleft. The place has been getting a bit dust-blown, so I’m trying to make it a little more presentable.

I wish Zandi would stop by. His Airstream is still parked out front, but I haven’t seen him around in years. Can’t really say that I blame him… his grand dreams of D'ni restored didn’t exactly pan out like he’d hoped, and I can definitely empathize with getting disheartened about the whole thing. Every attempt so far has just resulted in more problems, and more failures. Maybe some day, but today is not that day.

Bah. It’s too easy to get caught up in reflections and what-ifs. We can’t rewrite the past, only shape the future. D'ni isn’t going anywhere, and every day it remains inhabited – even if only sparsely – is a day that the Cavern continues to breathe.

I have more clean-up to do in the Cleft, and so much more to do after that. Maker willing, all this work will start to pay off soon. Good night, and I’ll try to update more often (again).

Quick neighborhood update before I go on: I’ve finally gotten the light garden to stay lit after I leave. There seems to have been some sort of power-saving behavior that was poling for KI signals and shutting down the power when nobody was here. I’ve disabled that feature, so I can now leave the lights on indefinitely.

I’ve spent the past week cranking away at Negilahn. It’s going a bit faster than the neighborhood went, but there’s still work to do.

Notably, I’ve fixed the power issue that was causing the pod to never do anything. Something got into the wires that hook the solar panels to the battery reserve, so the battery was just never charging, and had long ago been depleted. With the battery hooked back up to the solar panels, things seem to be working again to some extent. The battery itself may need replacing entirely, because it charges and drains way too quickly, indicating it’s gone past its useable charge cycle. Either that, or I need to fiddle with some wiring to optimize power input and output a bit more. Right now I’m using some spare copper cable that I found in the DRC’s field station in the City a couple of years ago. I may need a different gauge or something to get the resistance dialed in, at least on the throughput from the battery to the pod. I should probably work on changing the charge speed too, though, since fast-charging the battery may not be terribly good for it.

I’ve gone ahead and scraped off the coating on the windows that polarizes them when the pod is off. It wasn’t in a very good state of repair in the first place, and turning the power on didn’t seem to do much to change the polarization, so I’ve just gotten rid of it all.

I also need to fix the ladders. They’re super rickety, and while I have no problem getting down to the bottom floor by slipping carefully over the edge and hopping down, climbing up them is another story. I may save that for later, but I don’t want to forget about it, so I’ve made a note here to remind myself.

One last note and then I need to get some sleep. I’ve replaced the Nexus Book in the neighborhood with a link to this instance of Negilahn and put a link to the neighborhood in Negilahn, just to save myself some travel time. It took quite a bit of prying to get the Books out of the Nexus book machine, and I banged my knuckles pretty bad at one point, but I finally managed it. Good thing I brought a fresh first aid kit though. Ow. It’s a temporary thing (which makes the pain worse, somehow…), but for now, it speeds things up when I need to get around.

So I’ve been taking it easy this past week, going over everything in the neighborhood to make sure it’s ship-shape – or at least as ship-shape as I can make it right now – and yesterday I decided I needed a new restoration challenge. To be sure, the neighborhood was a big deal and took for blessed ever to clean up, but I learned a lot doing it and want to apply my skills to something else, ideally a little smaller this time around.

My instance of Negilahn has been a disaster area for a while now… not sure why, but its power doesn’t work, and the windows are all fogged over. I think I’m going to take this opportunity to work on getting those things fixed, and maybe go from there to something new that the DRC left behind. More as it happens :).

Good morning Ae'Gura!

Just got off the flight to Carlsbad – a terrifying experience I strongly advise you to avoid if at all possible – and am on my way back to the Cavern as I speak. I’ve got a few new toys in tow, most notably my iPad and shiny new iPhone, which I hope to use to improve my reporting capabilities. Maybe I’ll finally post a picture or two! Gasp!

See you in D'ni!

Told you it might be a while…

*ahem* Anyway. There’s so much working now it’s almost hard to remember what I need to record. The light garden is working, though it still seems to be turning off after a while… must be something I’ve missed, but darned if I can find it. I’ll come back to it later.

The Private Rooms are as functional as I think I’m going to get them… I finally managed to pry the doors open on the room facing the entry hallway, so you can at least get into one, but I think I permanently damaged the door getting it there, so it won’t be closing again anytime soon. So, your definition of “private” may need some adjusting ;).

The classroom is all polished up and looking fancy. Desks are still askew, but I’ll worry about organizing everything later. More on the classroom in a second though.

I’ve managed to work out how to get the imagers turned on and running. The left imager was accepting uploads just long enough for me to upload a photo I took of Eder Tsogahl a while ago, but now the upload functionality seems to be hosed. Sigh. The imager on the right is even less interactive. I managed to hack in a hello world message, but that’s about it. It’s not set up to accept pellet scores or anything, so there’s not much else I can really do with it at this point. At least it’s running…

Going back to the classroom, the imager in there is working as well. Well, “working”… it’s running, and again I managed to get an image onto it before that functionality went belly-up. I wonder if there’s some sort of flag in the code that’s preventing additional updates… I’ll have to dig into this more later. For now, like I said before, I’m just glad they’re running.

At this point, I think I’m going to take some time and go home for the holidays… I’ve already missed Thanksgiving, and I’d rather not miss Christmas too. I’ll be back after New Year’s with some more restoration updates. Until then, happy holidays, and stay safe!

This past couple of weeks has been super busy, and I’m writing this so late because if I don’t, I’ll forget about it again. Sorry for the lack of a regular update. I hope it’s been worth the wait, because there’s a lot of progress to report.

I’ve gotten into the Classroom and the Private Rooms. There’s still a little bit of clean-up to do in there, but mostly it’s just dark because the lights are being fussy. The Private Rooms are a bit frustrating, because for some reason the doors are all shut to the individual rooms. I’m working on prying one of them open, but it’s rough going, because these are not doors that were meant to be opened manually from the outside.

I’ve gotten the fountain working as well. The roughest part was carrying buckets of water up the stairs from the light garden to fill the stupid thing. Once I found the pump controls, though, things kicked on pretty quickly, which was rather impressive. I was honestly expecting it to take more time.

I’m still working on the light garden controls. The circuitry is a bit weird, and figuring out how it all connects is something of a challenge. Hopefully once I get this figured out, I’ll be able to take that knowledge and get some other stuff working, like the imagers. May be a few weeks though. Not sure I’ll really have much of anything to report on in the meantime, either, since this will be my project until it’s done. Until next time, I guess…

As noted in my last entry, I decided to tackle the auditorium now that the outside areas have been cleaned up. The clean-up process has been a bit quicker in there now that I’ve gotten some extra lights to work by. Things seem structurally sound, and I’ve just started getting the actual light fixtures working again rather than using loose firemarbles lanterns, and flashlights to light my way. It does get shockingly dark in here, I will say.

Assuming all goes well, I should have this area pretty much done by the time I post again.

So. Much. Cleaning.

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of the grime. Knowing where at least some of that stuff came from (the poison that Veovis released during the Fall of D'ni) I’ve been careful to wear gloves and a mask whenever I work on getting rid of it. It’s probably safe to work without them, but I’d rather not take the chance.

Now that the surfaces have been cleaned up in the outside areas, it’s starting to look a lot more familiar. I’ve also gotten the lighting working practically everywhere. There’s a few lamps that I haven’t gotten to, like the ones on the back stair by the waterfall, but most everything else is lit up again. Again, I say he outside areas, because I haven’t managed to get into the Classroom or Private Rooms yet, and I’ve been avoiding the auditorium for the time being. Now that I’ve got most of the outside cleaned up, though, I may have to turn my attention to that room before I try and get the doors working.