Tag: Korman

  • News Roundup #18

    Cavern events

    A Developers and Storytellers Meeting was held on April 24: it covered the highlights of the latest patch, and discussed the intentions for the fan-directed IC storyline. A cleansed and a raw chatlog are available.

    Guild of Writers

    Korman 0.13 was released on April 24: it represents 83 commits with approximately 850 lines of code changed since Korman 0.12a. Per the announcement of Korman 0.12, Blender 2.79b is no longer supported; Korman will now only function with “Blender for Korman”. More details in the release notes.

    Mysterium

    The hotel this year is the Holiday Inn Denver East in the Central Park neighborhood, east of downtown Denver, CO. The discounted rate, including free parking, will be $121/night, and will be available until July 20. More details on the location here.

    Quabitat for Squeemanity will allow to adopt a pet quab or squee and get a free, customizable habitat. More info will come soon.

    The Committee is planning a Family Feud style game show for this year’s convention. To do that, they need survey responses, the more they get the better it will be. You can find the survey here.

    The Committee is also still taking submissions for this year’s Activity Book; the deadline has been extended to May 22, the same as the event submissions.

    Cyan

    The winners of Cyan’s 2nd annual Cake Contest are Molonara, mst_haroro, CalleyJSciWri, and fobofobiac. They got gift certificates for the Cyan Store, along with stained-glass motif posters, print and coaster sets created by Kelly Coston.

    Area Man Lives, a game under development by Numinous Games and published by Cyan Ventures, is rapidly approaching a release date. A cast promo was released on April 12; you may even spot a familiar face or two 😉

    A new Cyan Venture was announced: The Last Clockwinder, a sci-fi VR puzzler for Meta Quest 2 and Steam from indie studio Pontoco.

    Abner Coimbre, senior engineer for Firmament, left the position to focus on the systems programming conference Handmade Seattle.

  • The December 2021 update

    The December 2021 update

    On December 15, 2021 MOULa got a big update, with lots of interesting additions; a full list is available at the bottom of this post. Let’s go over some highlights and answer some questions that may have arised:

    A new Age

    The most anticipated addition is probably the Age of Tiam, designed by Ametist. As announced by a post on Cyan’s own Twitter channel, an opening ceremony will be held at the Chiso Preniv library on Monday December 20, 2021 at 13:00 KIT: there will be a short presentation and the new linking book will be made available.

    Tiam is an Age that was created for a family to relax and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine; there, you will be able to unlock and discover how this family spent their time there. To get there, the direction is going to the Nexus, then the Watcher’ Pub, then to Chiso Preniv using the book in an alcove.

    It will be a good idea to have the client fully updated before the ceremony; to do so, one way is to open the game’s folder and delete TOS.txt; this will enforce a re-check of all the game files.

    New clothing

    Next, if you visit your wardrobe you will find some new items have been added, including some that have been available in the offline game for years. Some of the additions are rewards for completing the Journeys, while others require visiting logically related places 😉

    A special note about the second backpack: it was enabled by accident, as it has a visual bug that was still being worked on; if you have it and lost the old one, you can re-acquire it where you first got it.

    Serene

    The snowfall is back, and an indigenous ‘person’ has appeared for the holiday season 🙂 Both are original to Andy Legate’s design: the snowfall (a type of particle system) could not be handled by the Guild of Writers’ Age building tool Korman until recently, and the ‘indigenous’ was hidden in the Age files.

    A bit of code makes the latter appear automatically in the PotS version, but on MOULa the code interferes with multiplay and can have the opposite effect of hiding it, so the code was disabled.

    A journal that actually gives some background about the Age has replaced the previous one, hidden somewhere close to the gazebo.

    Graphics and sound improvements

    The Kirel podium has been given a new recording. More may come in the future! A story book (not a Linking Book) has been added to Chiso Preniv, while the Heritage Document and Activity in the Cavern have been moved to another shelf, close together. Various improvements to textures were made in Baron City Office, Teledahn, K’veer, Chiso Preniv and more.

    A note on bugs

    When an update, especially one as large as this one, hits MOULa it is almost inevitable that unexpected bugs will show up; for all the testing that can be done, Minkata never sees as many concurrent players as the official server, and not all issues can be catched. No addition from Cyan is to be expected for the foreseeable future, apart from server updates, so all improvements and additions will come from fan developers, who dedicate their limited free time to at least try to let MOULa be the best it could potentially be.

    So the best way to deal with bugs is to have patience and report them, mentioning where you were and what you were doing, be it on Cyan’s Discord, OpenUru’s Discord or OpenUru forums. If you fancy contributing your work and/or helping with bug fixing, those places are also excellent starting points to be part of the Restoration Team 🙂

    OpenUru Build #200a Build Update (click to expand)

    Known Issues (that will be fixed in a hotfix):
    – There is a crash when linking to Myst full screen without alt-tabbing while linking.
    – If you wear Catherine’s robes, and then change while another player is in the Age, they will see through your body.
    – Serene Xmas decorations are intermittent
    Client changes:
    – [Fixed]: A lot of under the hood fixes for stability {11}
    – [Fixed]: Fix client audio caching {10}
    – [Fixed]: Fix stack trace popup on error to provide meaningful information {10}
    – [Fixed]: Graphics cleanup for modern graphics cards {11}
    Content changes:
    – [New]: A new age! {1} (Stay tuned for the opening ceremonies!)
    – [New]: Add audio player back to Kirel Auditorium Podium, new recordings {9}
    – [New]: Clothing additions (and updates from CC) {7}
    – [Updated]: Improvements and additions to Chiso Preniv, Guild of Messengers Pub and Veelay Tsahvan {2}
    – [Updated]: Serene journal enhancements {3}
    – [Updated]: SpyRoom updates {5}
    – [Updated]: Upscaled fabric textures in Baron City Office and Teledahn {8}
    – [Fixed]: Ayoheek messages reference Garrison rather than Gahreesen {6}
    – [Fixed]: Er’cana Graphical Fixes {6}
    – [Fixed]: Fix view through telescopes on ultra-wide displays {6}
    – [Fixed]: Graphical updates to K’veer {2}
    – [Fixed]: Improve bad text resolution in Baron City Office Marie note {12}
    – [Fixed]: Prevent Kirel Egg Room Bahro Stones from being active {6}
    – [Fixed]: Repair formatting in many journals and book text {12}
    – [Fixed]: Repair getting stuck in Great Zero Mission GUI {6}
    – [Fixed]: Serene Snowfall Effects {4}
    – [Fixed]: Use correct cover for Negilahn journal {6}
    Attributions:
    {1} Ametist
    {2} Doobes
    {3} Doobes, Dot, CTraveler, Adam{Hoikas}
    {4} Doobes, EhrenCG
    {5} Doobes, Hazado
    {6} Hazado
    {7} Hazado, Adam{Hoikas}, CTraveler, Larry LeDeay
    {8} Hazado, CTraveler, Tweek, Yali
    {9} Hazado, DapperAndy, Tyion, Skyisblu, Neurovac, CP-Dimensions
    {10} Adam {Hoikas}
    {11} Adam {Hoikas}, rarified
    {12} dgelessus

  • September 2021 All Guilds Meeting Summary

    Here is the summary for September’s Meeting, along with the raw and cleansed chatlogs!

    A new moderator has not been found yet, so this time the meeting had a more anarchic format – and given the Net2 error situation (see below), it was the only way to get the announcements across 🙂

    Contents

      1. Cavern Tours
      2. Net2 errors, and Korman
      3. OpenUru
      4. D’ni Language Classes
      5. R’Tayrtahn’s Story Nights
      6. Fan Ages Touring Club
      7. Cyan news

    Cavern Tours

    The Cavern Tour will be held on Saturday 11 at 11:00 KIT, starting from the Cavern Tour’s Hood.The host, Larry LeDeay, will use his Twitch channel for the presentation, so you will need to keep a browser or the app open in the background. Videos will be available for two weeks after the tour. The stream will be simulcasted on Facebook and Youtube. Due to the Net2 crashes issue, Mir-o-Bot may not be online, and the tour itself may be held entirely on Twitch.

    The tours occasionally visit hard to reach places. Mir-o-Bot (KI# 32319) is employed for special effects and long-distance travel (and to avoid stairs). If you arrive late, you can PM Susa’n (KI# 9122427) to join the in-progress tour – but do try to arrive in time!

    Net2 errors, and Korman

    Doobes explained what is going on with the “Net2 error” crashes. They did not come up on the staging server because it does not have nearly the population that the main MOULa server does. The problem appears to be on the server side, which can only be fixed by Cyan, and is likely related to neighborhoods with too many members. In particular, DRC (67) Bevin has around 1000 members, and anyone in that hood is highly advised to move to a different one. In the meantime, this could be a good time to explore some of the fan maintained shards 😉

    He also announced the release of Korman 0.12a, the age building tool by the Guild of Writers. This iteration adds goodies like grass shaders and random sound mods to the mix, as well as a ton of lighting fixes. It also introduces a self-contained platform called Blender for Korman.

    Lastly, Doobes announced that Descent is nearing the Phase 1 final checks and will be uploaded in a Github repository soon. Descent is going through a phase system a bit different from the DRC scale, with 1 being “Near identical to Myst V” and 5 being “Final Release for MOULa”.

    To keep updated on Doobes’ work, check his blog and his Facebook page.

    OpenUru

    Rarified announced, after the Q3 update that focused on QoL fixes, the Q4 update for MOULa will focus on fan content, and a lot is planned for it.

    How to be a tester (click to expand)

    To be a tester, you will need to open an account on the Minkata shard; it is highly recommended to read the Tester’s Guide to understand what is expected. To test the cutting edge additions, you can sign up for the Minkata alpha shard.
    To report bugs, you can post on the OpenUru forum or the Discord server (channels #hood or #dev); on Discord you can ask to be added to the @testers role to be notified of testing requests, which sometimes need quick response in terms of hours, not days.

    D’ni Language Classes

    Shokhootahn Rehn gave two announcements, one for the D’ni Language Classes and one for the Story Nights. Six students are taking the classes at various stages of completion.

    More about the D’ni Language Classes (click to expand)
    • Those who would like to attend the lessons should contact Rehn via PM or KImail (KI# 58324); be sure to include your KI number in the message!
    • The Guild of Instructors’ Hood will be open and public unless a class is in session, currently on Monday–Friday starting at 12:00, 13:00 or 14:00 KIT, and on Wednesday–Friday starting at 20:00, 21:00 or 22:00 KIT, depending on the student’s schedule.
    • Last-minute changes to class times are posted on the left-hand imager in the hood.

    R’Tayrtahn’s Story Nights

    Story Night has started the stories of the Restoration. After that, there will be a special, five-part story of fan fiction written by Janai; for that, r’Tayrtahn will be assisted by Axenna. After that will be the bi-annual Bahro Glyph Tour, visiting all the ages that contain bahro glyphs; some have explanations while others just generate more questions. After that, the Stories will restart from the very beginning, the D’ni story of creation.

    More about the Story Nights (click to expand)
    • Story Nights are held in Tsahno’s Hood every Saturday, gathering at the fountain at around 23:00 KIT, with the story starting at about 23:30 KIT.
    • For Story Nights – Europe, the gatherings are on Saturday starting at 13:30 KIT, with the story starting at about 14:00 KIT. On All Guilds Meeting days, the event will begin at 14:00 KIT or 15 minutes after the end of the AGM, whichever is later.
    • The stories are told using voice chat, so you will need to have your speakers, headphones or KI devices on. If you would like a reminder, please send r’Tayrtahn (KI# 58324) a KImail with your KI number included in the text, so that he can add you to his buddies list.
    • Last-minute changes to Story Night times are posted on the left-hand imager in the hood.
    • Recording of the Stories are available on r’Tayrtahn’s YouTube channel; however some hardware issues are preventing r’Tayrtahn from uploading the latest episodes.

    Fan Ages Touring Club

    Korov’ev gave a quick update on the Fan Ages Expeditions he is hosting on the Deep Island shard, every Sunday at 11:00 KIT.

    Recently, they explored two ages by by Jhon J. Jaguar, Tentsahveet and the recently released Edereden; then two ages by Semjay, Terahgrahm and Zahlto. Lastly they started Koh-dalan, by Corvus, Wodan, Itep Edor and other creators.

    For September, the plan is to finish Koh-dalan; then they will begin the Path of the Lost Ages by Melvin, starting in Palamary bay.

    More about the Expeditions (click to expand)
    • After the expeditions, the participants will be able to share their observations in dedicated threads in the Guild of Writers’ forums (listed in the index). The expeditions are streamed (without comments), and the videos will be available for two weeks after.
    • After the tour, those who still have the energy are welcome to Korov’ev’s Gahreesehn for some Wall training (send a message to #194197 for an invite).
    • A gallery of fan ages with some details is available on the Writers’ wiki. Setting up a Deep Island client can be a bit tricky in some situations; a quick guide is available in our Troubleshooting section.

    Cyan news

    The release of the new Myst for PC/VR was mentioned, which recently got a patch that, among many fixes, officially gives the option to use the old FMV animations (except for the ending, where it was not possible).

    The original game’s 28th anniversary is also near, on Friday 24.

    And that was it for this month. Please consider donating to keep the Cavern open!

    August ended with the CavFunding at 102% (CavCon 4.0) and the reserve at 377%, with no extra expenses. Population was at 41,649 (⇑487), with 1382 unique visits. Another good month of donations with an increase in new accounts, all despite persistent server crashes that started after the last update. Top MOULa devs are hunting for this elusive bug!

    The next All Guilds Meeting is planned for Saturday, October 2 (Leevot 15) at 13:00 KIT.

    Until then!

  • Mysterium 2021

    Mysterium 2021

    Like last year, the XXII Mysterium was held entirely online, on July 16–18, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.

    Friday started at 18:00 KIT with Rand Miller playing through Myst and giving some insights in the design process. One highlight was the medallion on the planetarium door.

    At 19:00, it was time for the discussion rooms, this year held on the Mysterium Discord server, and for the marker missions in MOULa. You can still get them by PMing Mir-o-Bot (#32319) or MinBot (#9292763) the command “sendme 10800192” for the Red markers or “sendme 10801032” for the Blue ones. While you’re there, make sure to grab the Mysterium shirt in your Relto wardrobe, it won’t be available afterward!

    Saturday started at 8:30 KIT with a message from the Committee, giving some info on the organisation of this year’s convention.

    The first panel was at 9:00, with some members of the Myst IV: Revelation team: Meinert Hansen (Art Director/Sr. Concept Artist), Brian Wrench (Actor – Sirrus) and Geneviève Lord (Producer), discussing how Myst IV evolved in its looks, styles and immersive design.

    At 11:00 it was time for the Myst State of the Union panel, with Eric A. Anderson (Creative Director) and Hannah Gamiel (Development Director) presenting Cyan’s newly re-imagined version of Myst before its release for PC/VR and Mac.

    At 12:30 the Cyan Dev Team Q&A panel, with Abner Coimbre, Brandon Collins, Hannah Gamiel, Karl Johnson and Josh Van Veldhuizen discussing what it means to be a developer at Cyan and how they adapted to working from home.

    At 13:30 the Cyan Art Team Q&A panel, with Eric Anderson, Blake Bjerke, Jeremiah Castro, Autumn Palfenier and Derrick Robinson talking about how the look of a game is established and what inspiration they draw from in designing worlds.

    At 15:00 Vincent Weaver presented his Apple II Myst Demake, talking about the challenges involved with getting a fully playable version of Myst working on an 8-bit system from the 1970s, fitting on a reasonable number of floppy disks. To learn more (or try it yourself!), see Vince’s website.

    At 16:00 Chuck Carter (original Myst Artist) presented his reworking of the Selenitic Age for Unreal Engine 5, which will add some new twists (e.g. the maze ship is now destroyed). The redesign will have original music by Conductor/Composer Lucas Richman. You can follow Chuck on his website, Twitter and Instagram.

    At 17:00 it was time for the discussion rooms, with two focused chats beside open discussions: “Unwritten Character Workshop”, about creating a character for the Myst RPG, and “Dancing with Annacat”, to get some exercise after sitting and watching streams all day.

    Sunday started at 8:30 KIT with a message from the Committee, giving some info and announcing the location of Mysterium 2022, one that will give attendees the true Myst experience 😉

    The first panel was at 9:00, with Maxx Hirsch’s honors thesis “Finding Tomahna”, analyzing Myst as a product of American 1990s cultural movements and ideas, considering attitudes towards war, violence, new technology, reading, community, and diversity. You can read the full text here.

    At 1o:00 documentary filmmaker Phillip Shane gave an update and a sneak peek of the Myst Documentary, along with his collaborators Elana Bogdan, Will Cavendish, Rachel Kittner, Anais Michel, Katie Postma, Joshua Reinstein and Randy Woods. You can follow and support the development of the documentary on the official website.

    At 11:30 the Uru Worldbuilders Panel, with Eric Anderson, Mike Hines, Doug McBride, Steve Ogden and Bill Slease discussed about the original development of Uru, from DIRT and Mudpie up to the GameTap era.

    At 12:30 the MOULa Fan Development Panel, with Mark “Chogon” DeForest, Patrick “Doobes” Dulebohn, John “Marten” Johns, Adam “Hoikas” Johnson, Keith “Tweek” Lord, Darryl “dpogue/Paradox” Pogue and Paul “rarified” Richards discussed how fan developers and creators are keeping Uru alive and well, with client bugfixes, QoL improvements and new fan-made ages. To get involved, you can contact the OpenUru team (testing) on Discord, or the H’uru team (developing) on GitHub and IRC.

    At 14:00 the Unwritten Update panel with Veronica Hamilton gave some updates on the RPG and its role in Cyan Ventures, discussing the design and how it focuses on non-violent solutions. To learn more, visit the official website.

    At 15:00 it was time for Cyan Games Completed Rapidly, a round of speedrunning, with some unusual categories like Myst on the Apple II, and a few races.

    At 17:30 it was time for the discussion rooms, with no preset topics, and the Speedrun After Party, in which the speedrunners chatted with the attendees about the runs and racesfrom the panel.

    Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.

    Looking forward to next year!

  • Gehn.28 Is Now Live!

    Gehn.28 Is Now Live!

    A few days after the 10th anniversary of H’uru/Plasma, the Guild of Writers H’uru team has released the latest version of the Gehn shard with Gehn.28!

    This update was a long time in the making, and as such there are a host of new fixes and additions, including:

    • Add /roll command for rolling n-sided die/dice
    • Add latest revisions of all fan Ages from Doobes
    • Allow KI commands to match player names without regard to case
    • Change out most of the guts
    • Fix /p KI command to not be case sensitive
    • Fix Er’cana harvester position issues if Age empties while in motion
    • Fix issue whereby the bahro would fill the server error log with nonsense if they were smoking in Relto
    • Fix many goofy colliders in several Ages, especially Ae’gura
    • Fix many memory leaks
    • Fix Neighborhood clock globe animation
    • Fix Relto hut dark mode
    • Fix remote players not placing hand on book before linking out
    • Fix shroomie gate state being toggled (on re-link) if the power is off
    • Fix spurious noises in the Teledahn workroom
    • Fix working line obliteration issue when accessing chat history
    • Improved output of some KI commands
    • Migrate to publicly auditable build process
    • Update from PhysX 2.6 to PhysX 4.1
    • Update from Python 2.7 to Python 3.9
    • Synthesize gravity

    To get the latest version of Gehn Shard, simply log in to the shard as normal and the client will do the rest. If you have not signed up for Gehn Shard yet, you can find step by step instructions for Gehn in our guide to installing the shards.

    Congratulations to the GoW for another successful release!

  • March 2021 All Guilds Meeting Summary

    Here is the summary for March’s Meeting, along with the raw and cleansed chatlogs!

    Contents

    1. Saint Patrick’s Day
    2. International Women’s Week
    3. Cavern Tours
    4. A new era in D’ni
    5. Korman
    6. OpenUru
    7. Fan Ages Touring Club
    8. D’ni Language Classes
    9. R’Tayrtahn’s Story Nights

    (more…)

  • News roundup #11

    • The Guild of Writers released Korman 0.11a.
    • Cyan announced a lore partnership with the Guild of Archivists. For years fans have spun up different websites for the different aspects of the games’ lore; unfortunately, over the years much of that work has been lost. Cyan is now formally committing to provide server space and support to ensure the Archive and other Archivists resources will remain online, independent, and ad-free forever.
    • Cyan is hiring for Myst, Firmament, and secret projects:
      • Character Motion Lead
      • Technical Environment Artist
      • 3D Environment Artist
    • The latest Firmament update showcases what Cyan called “The Glacial Age”.
    • Two updates for Myst (VR) have been released: 1.0.1, 1.0.2. Try finding a secret message in the latter 😉
    • Explorer IwonK dedicated two cartoons to Myst: first, second.
  • Guild of Writers Releases Korman 0.11

    Guild of Writers Releases Korman 0.11

    The Guild of Writers released a new version of Korman, the age exporting plugin for Blender 2.79b (compatibility with 2.80 is still in the works). This release primarily focuses on bugfixes and improving existing features, with 64 commits and about 1,600 lines of code changed since the previous version.

    Changes in this release:

    • Added a help menu for Korman (Thanks to Deledrius for authoring this patch)
    • Added support for exporting font/text objects (Thanks to JulyForToday for co-authoring this patch)
    • Added support for tying object animations to SDL variables (Thanks to Doobes for co-uthoring this patch)
    • Added the ability to animate the material diffuse color
    • *Added the Blending modifier
    • Added the option to specify a proxy object for triangle mesh colliders
    • Added toolbox operators for toggling double-sided mode on meshes (Thanks to Doobes for authoring this patch)
    • Added toolbox operators for toggling packaging of sounds (Thanks to Doobes for authoring this patch)
    • Changed the exponential fog export option from `SetExp2` to `SetExp`. (Thanks to Doobes for authoring this patch)
    • Changed the export of Myst Online: Uru Live files to not apply any form of encryption
    • Fixed a crash in the exporter when baking vertex colors to objects that share a single mesh data block
    • Fixed a serious issue in which exporting with a DECIMATE modifier on a Plasma Object would cause very bad problems (Thanks to TikiBear for authoring this patch)
    • Fixed a serious issue in which the toolbox enable/disable Plasma Object operators would change the page of objects enabled outside of Korman
    • Fixed a traceback in the Add Lamp Flare operator (Thanks to Deledrius for authoring this patch)
    • Fixed an issue in which material animations would not export with the correct duration if the Blender FPS was not set to 30 FPS (Thanks to TikiBear for co-authoring this patch)
    • Fixed an issue in which new sounds under 4 seconds in length might not play in Path of the Shell
    • Fixed an issue in which objects with alpha vertex paint might not be sorted into a blending span (Thanks to Paradox for authoring this patch)
    • Fixed an issue in which responders might get stuck due to the way Blender internally sorts the node links
    • Fixed an issue in which sound volume animations did not function as expected
    • **Fixed many issues preventing runtime lighting from affecting objects
    • ***Fixed many issues with physicals (eg colliders and regions) parented to animated objects (eg subworlds)

    If you never used Korman, or need a refresher, there are wiki tutorials available.

    You can read the full release forum topic by clicking here.

    Keep checking back here for more Age building news!