Myst Blogs is a compilation of various blogs
and journals from Myst fans all over the world.
Enter the mind of Myst fans!
Welcome to the new Myst Blogs. Read other Myst fans' latest blog posts here — and join if you have a blog! Also check out Uru Blogs to read in-character explorer blogs.
If you haven’t heard already, Uru Live has returned. To lighten up this already-light mood, here’s a David Letterman-style Top Ten list of the top ten things overheard at Cyan HQ.
10. Is the server supposed to make that sound?
9. I wonder if anyone will notice we gave Zandi a new steak.
8. Wait ’till the fans find out we’ve replaced Atrus’ intro speech with a video of a dancing cat!
7. Okay, we opened an Uru server. Now give us back Rand.
6. Seriously, guys, is it supposed to make that noise?
5. I wonder if Ubisoft will notice we Bahro’ed their servers for this.
4. You know what they say, old Uru servers never die, they just link away.
3. Don’t tell anyone we had to get Zandi to play Sutherland.
2. Is vid happy yet?
1. Did anyone remember to feed RAWA?
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.
So Microsoft announced yet another critical IE security vulnerability (shocker, I know…) that enables an attacker to access and view your computer’s entire filesystem. While the vulnerability is mitigated by IE’s Protected Mode in Vista and Win7, 66% of the Internet is still using Windows XP, and 20% of those people are still running IE6. That’s a huge attack surface.
While this once again provides an excellent argument against tying your HTML rendering engine so deeply into the operating system that such attacks are even possible in the first place, Microsoft’s proposed workaround illustrates an even WORSE idea (from the Ars piece):
… enable Internet Explorer Network Protocol Lockdown for Windows XP. It requires editing the Windows registry, but thankfully Microsoft has created a “Fix it for me” for this workaround, available at KB 980088. Just click the “Fix this problem” link and you’re good to go. The Fix It automates Network Protocol Lockdown and can be run on individual systems and deployed by enterprises through their automated systems.
Really, you’re going to let an application with open access to the Internet modify the registry because a very possibly untrusted web page told it to?! What the hell, MS?!
Also, anyone who says “well if the link triggers a security warning that’s okay then” is an idiot. The users who would most benefit from this automated resolution method are the ones least likely to either understand or care about the security implications of such an action, and because of Windows’ tedious tendency to ask the user to approve damn near everything they do, those users are going to be trained to click “OK” just to make the dialog go away. It boggles my mind that such low-level OS-impacting capabilities are exposed to such completely un-trustable resources like remote web content.
It seems like IE6 (and Windows XP in general) is becoming an ever-increasing risk to individual and corporate data security on an almost weekly basis now. I wonder how much longer it will take companies to realize that the cost of overhauling their IE6-only internal web applications is far cheaper than the cost of losing enormous piles of sensitive or even classified information to a hacker in China…
Following a slip of the virtual tongue on the Myst Online forums, a mysterious post has emerged on the DRC Site forums that may suggest Uru Live, in one form or another, may be close to being revived from its grave. While this certainly excites me, I became quite depressed while skimming through the various topics discussing this development.
An atmosphere of doom and gloom is not exactly a rare sight around the Uru/Cyan fan community, nor is it very surprising considering the tumultuous history Uru has had. Initially being supported by Ubisoft, who shut it down before it was properly out of beta, then maintained by fan servers operating for the better part of three years with virtually no contact from the guys in charge, and finally being revived for a short lived burst of life thanks to GameTap, it is easy to see why some believe any attempts to revive this collection of virtual worlds may be a lost cause. That said, I find not the lack of optimism surprising, but rather the extreme pessimism. It goes beyond just assuming things won’t work right, to actually begging that this doesn’t happen at all.
The Uru community has been split into so many different pieces that it is amazing it is still sticking together. There are people who think Cyan could do great things with Uru if given the chance, people who think Cyan shouldn’t revive Uru themselves because they will just screw it up, people who think Uru should be forgotten all-together, and these groups are split into subgroups which are split into further subgroups. Assuming that every person in the Uru community is hoping for an enjoyable experience in some kind of a virtual world, there are generally three directions that people believe Uru should continue in:
Most people (and by that I mean the general tone that I get while skimming the forums, I have not actually taken a tally) seem to be tending toward the second option, with a handful of the less programming-oriented members leaning toward the third option. What surprises me is the violently negative reaction to the first option. For some reason, people in the Uru community seem to have this general idea that because Cyan has failed to make this game popular after two tries, the community has a god-given right to take it over from them. Where this idea came from I can’t fathom. Myst, Uru, and all related entities always have been, are now, and likely always will be owned solely by Cyan Worlds until such a time as they feel fit to give them away. Now, I’m not saying there is no support for the first option, but most people appear to feel that Uru would be better off if Cyan weren’t involved with it anymore.
To give you readers an idea of what I’m talking about, I have copied here some quotes from the forums leaving off the poster’s names in the interest of not singling them out. Note too that these are but a small subset of the posts relating to this topic. I urge anyone interested in getting all the viewpoints to visit the original threads these quotes were pulled from here, here, and here.
So, what do we have here…
An “Email” from “Tony” from “Cyan Worlds”, saying that URU Live will be live within a month…
BUT: No confirmation by Cyan. Chogon only posts weird stuff and RAWA something cryptic as always.
Cyan…You can’t fool us anymore. Please, just say either “Yes” or “no”…is it THAT hard?
Why don’t you just say something concrete that we can work with, instead of getting our hopes up for something that will never come?
URU Live, OSMO, whateveryoucallit wont come. end of message.
*sigh*
Here we go again.
So, we get another “Until Uru” type of iteration with user-made content.
An actual full-scale relaunching is probably out of the cards…unless whatever studio is attached to the Myst movie takes interest, of course.
I would love to get back into the cavern along with the friends I made all those years ago. And if Cyan thinks they can provide us with new content to keep it from getting boring, I say we let them try. The absolute worst thing that happens is that it gets closed down again. And if that does happen, oh well. It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before. But this pessimism has to stop. There is a big difference between “This will never happen, stop trying to get us excited about nothing.” and “Hopefully things will work out better this time around.” especially considering that we now have at least a glimmer of something stirring.
Cryptic posts and a possible leak of upcoming information would normally excite people because it’s a sign that things may be about to happen. Instead it gets half the community saying “Stop with these stupid cryptic posts. You’re not doing anything. Just give us the game and go away.” and there is really no reason for that. Yes we were told Cyan would be open-sourcing Uru, and yes Cyan has had a spotty track record when it comes to keeping Uru alive, but that doesn’t give us the right to essentially spit on them and tell them to get off our yard, especially when this yard isn’t actually ours… it’s theirs.
This little rant has changed directions a few times as I was writing it, and in the interest of length I’ll save my rant on Uru community hacking for another time. But for now I want to know what you people think, not about whether or not Cyan should or should not bring Uru back, but rather what you think about the pessimism in the community. Is it absolutely overwhelming and largely unjustified, or are the anti-Cyan-run-Uru comments well deserved?
I’ve been ruminating a lot on the approach that various companies, like Microsoft and Apple, have taken to the mobile computing space, and have a few random thoughts that are way too long for Twitter, but not exactly coherent enough to be considered an article or anything, since I don’t really have an ultimate point here. Anyway, I’ll just ramble endlessly as usual and see if anyone cares 
.
Microsoft’s approach has been very similar to their hugely successful approach to the desktop (and laptop) computer market: provide a powerful, extensible operating system that can run on damn near anything, and set few or no minimum requirements for hardware. This gives hardware partners an enormous amount of flexibility in how they design their phones and other devices, which they love, and it gives the market considerable differentiation between products, which both consumers and manufacturers love.
On the desktop, this approach’s greatest strength is a developer’s ability to write an application and be assured that it will, generally speaking, work everywhere (or at least, on every machine that meets the minimum requirements). In the mobile space, this is perhaps its greatest weakness instead. Because phone manufacturers are very closeted when it comes to hardware specifications, it’s much more difficult to tell if you’ll be able to run a given application. The smaller display space and variable dimensions of the screen make it difficult for developers to build truly effective and intuitive interfaces for their applications, because unlike the desktop’s relatively spacious screen real estate, a phone has very little, and building to the wrong display size can make your app feel either over-crowded on smaller screens or vacant and featureless on larger ones.
Further frustrating Microsoft’s approach has been the reluctance from carriers and/or hardware manufacturers to allow users to upgrade the OS when new releases become available (I’m also aware of tech-oriented work-arounds to this problem, but the average user isn’t going to want to futz with custom boot ROMs). Often the only way to get the new OS is to buy a new phone, and this often comes with a re-extension of the carrier’s contract, which is an unpalatable option for many people. This makes it much more difficult to ensure that users are on a new version of your OS, so developers are hesitant to start using any new features that these new OS releases make available to them. As a result, those users who do manage to upgrade or get a new device see very little difference in the user experience, and this further demotivates people from getting new devices.
Google’s Andriod platform seems to be succumbing to the same pitfall, in that there are no clear rules to manufactureres for implementation or hardware usage, the application market is already starting to fragment because not every app will run on every device, and once again carriers and/or hardware manufacturers are reluctant to offer the latest version of the OS to existing customers. It will be interesting to see if Google’s Nexus One phone can serve as a good example to other manufacturers on how to build a first-class Andriod device, and if the platform can resist or overcome the fragmentation and poor application device compatibility issues that Windows Mobile has presently.
By contrast, Apple’s approach, while also very similar to their own desktop strategy, has been far more effective in gaining market share and mind share. Apple treats their desktop line-up like a consumer electronics line-up rather than an a-la carte buffet as most computer manufacturers do. As a result, they have easy-to-understand delineations between each product category, and it’s fairly easy to chart their machines in a straight line from least to most capable all the way up the price range. While this does make buying a new Mac easier for first-time buyers than staring at the (admittedly improved of late) sea of complementary options on a site like Dell’s, the lack of cheap, low-end computing devices does limit the reach of this strategy for many consumers.
Apple extended this approach into the mobile space with the iPhone, creating a single, simple product line-up of identical devices differentiated only by storage capacity, and varying in price along a single axis. The hardware line-up has fragmented slightly with the latest iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch devices because of the improved graphics performance, but generally speaking, the target market for an application built on the iPhone OS is “every iPhone OS device ever sold”. This makes things much easier for developers, because they don’t have to worry about market fragmentation and reduced sales as a result. It also makes things much simpler for consumers, because they can buy applications with considerably more confidence, and know that their device will be able to run them. The fact that the iPhone platform provides a built-in place for users to look for 3rd-party applications also simplifies the purchasing process and undoubtedly increases sales, which may explain why Apple’s app store model is being replicated on every other platform under the sun.
A lot of what this boils down to, I think, is the simple fact that people want different things from a mobile device than they do from a desktop or desktop-class computer. With the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad, Apple seems to understand this difference in usage. On the other hand, Microsoft and – to a much lesser extent – Google seem to be pressing onward with their “desktop in your pocket” usage model, which fits awkwardly into such small devices and creates considerable usability issues. A phone is – first and foremost – a phone, not something to write Word documents or build 3D models with. By and large it’s something that people use incidentally for short periods of time, as opposed to the desktop’s “sit down and stay a while” usage model. The iPhone OS seems much more suited to this sort of interaction than Windows Mobile, though with WM finally getting support for capacitive touch-screens, Microsoft is at least trying to move to a more incidental use-friendly input model.
I will be interested to see whether Windows Mobile 7 turns the ship around and starts pushing into more user-friendly waters, but I think that despite the comparatively paltry collection of offerings in Apple’s mobile product line-up, they are better served by their sales approach when it comes to the average user who just wants something with which they can make phone calls, check the weather, and play a game of checkers. Choice is good (as is competition, which is why I’d rather see MS get their mobile OS into the current millennium than tell them to quit while they’re still [slightly] ahead), but sometimes giving people choices they don’t need to make within a platform just creates problems.
(As an aside, I think it’s interesting that it wasn’t until the iPhone SDK was released that gaming on mobile phones really became a big, profitable deal… Nokia tried entering that market at least twice but their devices never seemed to get any traction, and I could probably count on one hand the number of games that exist on Windows Mobile.)
Paul ‘chip’ Querna: Facebook & Open Source: Community is just as important as the Code
When you create an open source project, you gain almost nothing but a PR hit if there isn’t a community built around it. [..]
Just look at the massive community that has exploded around Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop — Yahoo could of kept this infrastructure project internal, and sure, it might of fulfilled their original goals, but they wouldn’t of ever received the thousands of external contributions, which has turned the Lucene/Hadoop world into one of the most diverse and thriving open source communities of late, giving Yahoo a thousand times return on their investment in Hadoop.
Paul discusses the importance of letting company-created open source projects thrive by fostering a vivid community, and encouraging their use in competitors’ products against what might be considered common business sense.
Consider the contrast between two of Apple best-known open source projects: the earliest, Darwin, never took off the way Jobs had promised (and perhaps hoped for) back in 1999. Projects such as OpenDarwin (which eventually shut down), PureDarwin, GNU-Darwin have always lacked proper leadership and interest and suffered under opaque, unclear, apparently inconsistent policies on Apple’s part.
On the other hand, there’s WebKit: once given a proper website with a public blog, issue tracker and repository and allowing external reviewers, its success exploded — and in spite of the fact that many of Apple’s competitors now use it, Apple, too, reaps rewards. The sum of the contributions simply exceeds the initial loss of control and propriety by a wide margin.
Perhaps this kind of success is only possible with a limited amount of projects, but as a company, you have to be willing to take that risk.
I was happy to attend the “Facebook Technology Tasting” event tonight, where they gave a presentation about their newest open source project, HipHop for PHP.
HipHop is definitely some very cool technology, built by an enthusiastic team, solving real world performance issues in large scale websites, and I have no doubt other companies using PHP (Hello Yahoo!) will find it invaluable, and hopefully help turn it into a successful open source project.
What I find most interesting and encouraging about Facebook’s most recent open sourcing efforts, HipHop today and Tornado last year, is how they are taking a dramatically different approach to their earlier open source projects like Thrift or Cassandra.
Thrift, purely as an example, was one of their first projects built internally, and later open sourced. It originally open sourced on April 1, 2007, but it had a difficult time building a community around the code. The approach was a blog post, and code basically ‘tossed over the wall’. External developers did try to contribute, but I believe the interactions were less than optimal, as the original forum for discussion was a Facebook Group — they learned from this quickly, programmers didn’t like web forums for submitting patches, and later proper mailing lists were setup.
Cassandra was another project that was essentially thrown over the wall, code was available, but there was no imitative to build a community around it.
Today, both Thrift and Cassandra found their way to the Apache Software Foundation, via independent paths. Apache Cassandra is turning into a very healthy community, having made many releases, and is in the process of graduating to a top level project. Apache Thrift, made their first release in December 2009, has been slowly gathering more external contributors and an open community built around the code.
What I see happening with both HipHop and Tornado is completely different, and that is what is most encouraging. From the start, they are doing everything right to encourage an open community be built around these projects. Open Communities are what create successful projects, and give companies creating the open source projects the most rewards.
When you create an open source project, you gain almost nothing but a PR hit if there isn’t a community built around it. For infrastructure projects, like HipHop, Cassandra, Thrift, Scribe, and Tornado, the most important thing that gives you the most rewards from open sourcing it, is having other people hack on the code — but more than that, to use the code in their own company.
Just look at the massive community that has exploded around Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop — Yahoo could of kept this infrastructure project internal, and sure, it might of fulfilled their original goals, but they wouldn’t of ever received the thousands of external contributions, which has turned the Lucene/Hadoop world into one of the most diverse and thriving open source communities of late, giving Yahoo a thousand times return on their investment in Hadoop.
Thank you Facebook for getting it — community is just as important as the code that you are open sourcing, and I would like to wish the HipHop for PHP developers the best of luck with their new open community project!
I think it’s time to turn to the interwebz for help with this one… I’m looking for a simple, snappy TV listings app for the iPhone. I’ve tried several, and while they tended to start out decent, they’ve all suffered from bloat and feature creep in successive releases.
I’ve tried i.TV, the comcast listings app, and What’s On. i.TV ultimately got so bloated and unstable on my iPod that I just gave up on it. Comcast’s app had annoying full-screen ads that showed up on every launch of the app, and had a generally lackluster interface IMO. What’s On was good for a while, but it’s starting to get bloated now too, and is also starting to use more and more ads throughout the UI, including the annoying full-screen ads on launch.
Does anyone have suggestions? I’d even be willing to shell out a couple of bucks for an ad-free app, so paid apps are by no means off the table here.
Isn’t it nice that Cyan didn’t take our advice? They could have held out on Uru and kept trying to find people who would fund it. Instead, we now see Cyan beginning the process of rebuilding a second time. The good developments:
iMyst was #16 on the iTunes list for top-selling games of 2009.
If you were to tell someone in 1993 that, in seventeen years, Myst would still be selling and it would be selling on a phone, you would have been laughed at. Then again, if you were to say that, in seventeen years, Apple would be profitable again and that it would be at the hands of Steve Jobs, you’d also be laughed at. In the long run, a fairly cheap application for he iPhone isn’t Cyan’s future, but it has been its lifeboat and the surest sign that Cyan has learned its lesson from Uru’s first demise.
Myst, Riven, Manhole, and Uru: Ages Beyond Myst on GOG.com’s weekly best-sellers.
As of this writing, only Myst, realMYST, and Riven are in the top ten best-sellers. However, there was a time not long ago when the four Myst/Uru games on GOG.com were in the top five (only the #1 spot going to a non-Cyan game). Again, a strange occurrence for a game nearly two decades old. This is almost certainly an initial buying period which will taper off, but it still is important to note the remaining selling power of the game. Also, this highlights one very crucial thing Cyan got done. They made sure their games were still out there.
Development of iRiven and the potential for Uru’s return.
Chogon has posted recently that Cyan is working on an iPhone version of Riven. Along with continuing Cyan’s success in portable gaming, this brings a more visually interesting game with a more complex story to the iPhone.
Hand-in-hand with this is the recent apparent leak from Tony Fryman that iRiven might be out in the summer with Uru coming within a month. Whether this holds up is still being determined, but it is a sign of recovery in the company. Now for the poorer developments.
Cyan is still fairly uncommunicative.
Things aren’t bad by any means. Chogon even made a post with no news, just to check in, something critical which people have asked Cyan for years. The problem is that communication from Cyan still comes when Cyan has something to say. For a company which could, should, can, and must get more community involvement, Cyan has yet to come looking for help from their fans.
Cyan hasn’t re-branded.
Or, if they have, they’ve re-branded to the wrong thing. The other topics I mentioned in my article to the new community manager are not implemented either, but this one is one of the most crucial and the one I’ve seen the least action on. The only products Cyan is selling, and thus the only brand they are now associated with, are ports of their old games. Whether it is to the iPhone or to GOG.com, Cyan’s revival is largely based off of re-selling their old games. However, you can’t continue forever on this path. Cyan needs to spend time and energy on finding what will work for them and then make sure they communicate why it will work for them.
Rand, like everyone who owns a business, had a dream of what he’d like to do. The thing about dreams is that they are largely open to interpretation. When the dream has been going on for nearly twenty years, that interpretation is bound to change and it must, these days, to keep up with modern life. I’m sure Cyan has done that changing as finances dictated, but they still need to articulate that. To inspire a new generation to get excited about Cyan’s games.
So the excellent Wandering Nomad is once again doing his Cyan Chat Radio show for Valentines Day (or V*lent*nes D*y).
When the 14th rolls around you can tune into it via the CCR site.
Anyway the Llama asked a bunch of us to make some posters for the event which we have done so and you can check out on his blog.
Pleased as I was without my poster turned out, I decided to make it into a iPhone/iPod Touch wallpaper and thus I present to those of you who may want it yourselves.
