Author: mdhughes

Myst Again

So there's yet another version of Myst on the App Store

I've so far on iOS bought "Myst (Legacy) for Mobile", "Riven (Legacy) for Mobile", "The Manhole: Masterpiece", and "realMyst" [sic capitalization]. On Mac, I played the original CDROM Mac Classic Myst, Riven, URU, and "realMyst Masterpiece" [sic capitalization], Obduction off Steam. Cyan got their pound o' flesh.

Myst (Legacy) & Riven (Legacy) has screen-by-screen tapping, it's extremely obscure what's going to happen when you do, and the low-rez screens compressed into the teeny OG iPhone size aren't great. But it's also the only version that has Riven! And it's basically playable. These are fine. Adequate. ★★★☆☆

The Manhole is super weird. It's for kids ("V is for VOID"), but you'll like it. Go experience it, it's $1.99 and maybe the best if most amateur, almost outsider art thing Cyan's ever done. You think Myst is perplexing, Manhole is 100x weirder and harder to navigate. ★★★★½ (down ½ for the tiny window & unlabelled tap areas; the content is ★★★★★)

realMyst has a pretty reasonable modern interface. You'll want to "invert look" (I just started it up for a screenshot, and couldn't get up the stairs until I flicked that switch). The graphics are fine for an early-00s 3D game, and honestly you don't need more than that. I'm not going to re-solve it, but I did so without cheats last time (sweet Cthulhu I hate the subway puzzle, and should've cheated that). ★★★★☆

Myst Mobile now, needs a pretty modern iPad, my Air works fine but got very hot. The graphics textures & grass and such are much better, early '10s quality but still not peak AAA quality. I can get better views from MineTest with shaders. I think realMyst has better lighting, or at least more consistent. Indoors in Myst Mobile I often couldn't see much of anything, at the same brightness settings that were usable in realMyst.

I picked the "randomize puzzles" option, and sure enough the puzzles are different from standard, but all solved the same way as OG, go read books and look up values in the library, planetarium, click buttons and do a little math, etc.

Movement is with a soft joystick, and drag the screen to rotate camera. realMyst's movement was much better.

The problem is the controls are all over the place. Doors are still sliders, rather than swinging open; 3D budget doesn't go that far, I guess. Some buttons you just tap (there's a new button to open the imager cave). Some switches you tap and they flip to the opposite state, some you have to pull all the way into position. Doors you tap on the handle… sometimes that works. The log cabin door was difficult to tap on, which you need to do at speed to reach SPOILER REDACTED. Knobs don't turn linearly, but sort of randomly spinning to a new value as you move your finger. The clock tower puzzle is an unbelievable pain in the ass, getting the levers to move all the way down and not release is very fussy, I bet most new players cannot get them to work. I hate literally every control that isn't a button.

The letter from Atrus to Catherine is missing, so you have no idea what the switches are for. If you know, the new CGI heads for Atrus, Cirrus, Achenar are super cheesy and plastic, like bobbleheads floating in space.

They have a camera, and as usual it only makes square, kinda shitty Polaroid photos even tho Polaroid's been dead for 20 years, but there's no journal, and they don't save in order!!! THE FUCK. I actually miss the shitty grainy, wrong-gamma, square photos & journal in URU's KI system.

They only give you access to the island first. So I opened all the Ages, and… can't go to them. It's $9.99 IAP, soon going up to $14.99. If you don't own any version of Myst, that's a good deal; if you've bought a new one every decade or so for the last 30 years, it's kind of bullshit, and I'm probably not inclined to pay for it.

★★★½☆

What I want is for them to remake Riven, maybe make peace with Ubisoft and remake Exile, Revelations, End of Ages, and URU? There's a fan-made "real URU" in progress, so at least that'll be playable again soon. Instead Cyan has Skyrim Disease, every new platform needs a new adaptation, but they never move forward. (Yes I've played Obduction; pain in the ass most tedious train simulator ever).

Screenshots are SPOILERS! (Soylent Green is PEOPLE!)

MineTest Youstubes

So I like to watch videos of the games I play; maybe learn something, maybe just recognize "oh, I do that too". Parasocial but shared-ish experience.

The problem with a free, open source, often Linux-based game is, nobody has working sound. And they really don't have working mics on their broken dumpster-dived Thinkpads, or video editing software. So the MineTest youstubes are mostly divided into:

  1. No audio, sub-5-minute, incoherent flailing around.
  2. [CRACKLE DIGITAL SCREAM] FREE FRAPS quality audio/video, mostly children on PVP servers, and I like none of those things.
  3. Germans. And I'm not usually one to pick on anyone's appearance, but… maybe leave the selfie cam off if you fill 90% of the view. From across the room.
  4. Handful of good youstubers; some are non-English but I can muddle thru Spanish, a few words of Portuguese, or French.
  • New: SteleCat: Just started
  • Dee23Gaming: Modded, building series
  • duckgo: Author of SurviveTest, Portuguese but either little speech or the CC will actually work on some of it.
  • Richard Jeffries: Long creative/peaceful building series

There was another one, professionally done but rather boring where he just dug tunnels in his mine, laid down glass slab floors, and rarely came up to add to a kinda artsy tower, 100+ episodes… and it's gone. He's vanished, taken down his videos? And I'm drawing a blank on his name now so I can't even find out what happened.

If you have other suggestions, that are not 1-3, comment/tell me on fedi.

ORCs Versus the Evil Wizards

A summary of this thing I've been angry about on fediverse all week/month, and how it affects my plans.

So, Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro had been working on their "One D&D"/6E playtest/previews, which has been previously held in only moderate contempt here. And then they decided to update the license.

Since 2000, we've had the Open Game License (OGL) 1.0a, which lets you reuse anything else put under it, like the System Reference Document (SRD) of D&D 3.0; I used that in my Stone Halls & Serpent Men game, mainly to copy spells & monsters. This has allowed a massive ecosystem of vaguely-D&D-ish games to flourish, as well as used for very not-D&D games like Legend and OpenQuest, and Cepheus Engine.

  • 2022-12-21, WotC announced a new OGL 1.1, with onerous financial terms on big earners, and no creative use outside books & ebooks. Nobody liked this, but we could keep using the 1.0a license, right? I started making plans to migrate off their SRD, but otherwise not super concerned. Future of OGL games is in some peril.

  • OGL 1.1 fiasco timeline

  • Saturday 2023-01-07, Basic Fantasy RPG started rewriting their books to get out from under the OGL, and go full CC-BY-SA. This is a pretty drastic solution, but legally the safest. It looks to me like BFRPG might be the new post-WotC "core OSR book".

  • Monday, the actual license was leaked, and it's a clusterfuck.
    Registering with WotC, revocation of 1.0a licenses, WotC gets to moral-police you and shut down anything they don't like; screwed if you like weird horror, sex, drugs, or violence in your games.

    Gizmodo report is pretty reasonable.

    The claim they can revoke the 1.0a license is the rough part. The original license was meant to be irrevokable, but that wasn't in the licenses it copied from (GPL, etc.), so it doesn't say that.

  • Tim Cask

    the money-grubbing pomposity of Hasbro and WotC trying to squeeze third-party produces to death — don't they make enough already? Could their insipid releases be the cause of their reduced revenues, or is it those nasty little third-party guys that have kept the hobby alive and growing? The new OGL 1.1.

    Tim Cask encourages WotC to fuck off

  • Matt Finch on how this affects Swords & Wizardry

  • Ryan Dancey, formerly of WotC and creator of the OGL, said:

    Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.

  • ArsTechnica RPG fans irate

  • Thursday, a leak from inside WotC circulated:

ogl leak

  • Then WotC cancelled their livestream, while an angry mob gathered on Roll for Combat's livestream. Yes, Dr Frankenstein, the villagers are coming for you and your monster.

  • At which time, Paizo announced their own Open RPG Creative License (ORC) … Paizo doesn't use a CDN, so their site's been down most of the day from being hugged to death, in the mean time quoted here.

Paizo does not believe that the OGL 1.0a can be “deauthorized,” ever. While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if need be, we don’t want to have to do that, and we know that many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to do so.
We have no interest whatsoever in Wizards’ new OGL. Instead, we have a plan that we believe will irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Game License. …
In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group. …
We’ll be there at your side. You can count on us not to go back on our word.

I'm slightly disappointed their promo image is their dumb Human Fighter "iconic" leading the charge, and not an Orc.

WELL THEN

So my retroclone is toast. I'd have to scrub a lot of monster & spell text to get rid of the SRD, and that's being done better by BFRPG. I can package some of what I wrote as a sourcebook for that. It's B/X-ish, not Holmes, but I'm adaptable, and I can fix some of the tone by making new species-as-class combinations and minor rules tweaks. Might be a good zine type thing.

My roguelike is based on my retroclone, but it's mostly naming issues, easily fixed. Fucking Hasbro claiming OGL doesn't cover videogames, I'll show them a pantomime.

I toyed with shifting to d100 and I can borrow more from OpenQuest than Legend and be legally safer, but I dunno if that's useful to anyone. Just play OpenQuest, delete all the divine & shaman nonsense, and throw 50% more zombies at everyone, and it's just like I'd done it!

My sword & planet game I'll keep working on, and either release as CC-BY-SA, or ORC, depending on how that looks.

UPDATE 50 MINUTES LATER

Oh, WotC's PR flacks sweated this all night:

However, it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1.

[canned Big Bang Theory laff trak, meme face of Sheldon looking cross but robotic]

It has become clear that it is no longer possible to fully achieve all three goals while still staying true to our principles. So, here is what we are doing.

[paraphrasing]

  1. Removing our principles.
  2. Doubling down on extortion over non-book products and anything Pat Pulling would've objected to.
  3. Fuck over "major corporations" some other way.

RPG Tilemap

I had a useful JavaScript utility hidden away in the source for my Stone Halls & Serpent Men game, so I extracted it into its own thing:

Especially with people doing the challenge, it may be helpful for quickly drawing a dungeon, roguelike style.

I'm pondering doing a full wilderness + dungeon adventure again sometime soon, and I'll likely use Tilemap for it, but I sure won't be doing a room a day or anything like that!

An Atari New Year!

I spent a little time this evening making some fireworks for tomorrow night!

Download, unzip, launch in your favorite Atari 800 emulator, like Atari800MacX

Pick Y from the menu, ESC to end, reboot to get back to the menu. See you in a year!

(I didn't get around to putting an emulator page on my site; I will before my next actual game)

Game Project Status Report

OK, thinking about projects time, what I've done with my 3-year summer vacation (extended, 2022 edition).

  • Scheme for local problems, sysadmin tasks, just general dorking around on the computer: ?, best decision I've made in some time. In case it's not clear, Chez Scheme and Thunderchez.

    Schemers in general are annoying but less annoying than LISPers, so if the LISP community pissed you off, Scheme's might be 50% less toxic. I still have to block some people in IRC because they won't STFU or tolerate anyone Doing Things in Unapproved Manner. You know what would be amazing? A language as technically awesome as Scheme, with Python's friendly community. Python the language is trash, tho.

  • Haunted Dungeon, Scheme roguelike. Needs at most weeks of work, and then I can take a day and grind out binaries for various platforms (UUUUuuuugh Windows & Linux suck so much to interact with; Mac does for different reasons), ship it. It ballooned past my original tiny roguelike design long ago, but it's still not that big.

  • Multiple small Scheme programs & games, once I do that ship day I may just make a bunch of binaries. None of these are amazing but some are nice. Don't ask a developer to praise their own software, you know?

  • New Perilar CRPG, also Scheme. I have this at like 60% functionality, map generation's beautiful, and fuck-all for story, it's fine, same shipping problems, so much I need to think about if I get it to a playable state. Or it may be a learning experience.

  • Little Atari 8-bit game. Dungeon crawler with no purpose but it's cute, was meant to be a ZX SpecNext game but that's still not shipped after 2 years so… It's now at like 30% done, but I have some vision for it.

  • Open world action-adventure game I've got a bit of design for (in my paper sketchpad! Not even on the computer!), it could either be Scheme or Atari 8-bit or whatever. I don't actually know of anything like this design, tho original Zelda & Metroid are the parents (I clearly don't understand genetics) of all such games. Needs so much mapping & writing before I even start, but all the technical side is easy for me.

    Currently Atari stuff's in TurboBASIC-XL which is less bad than you'd think, but still really sucks compared to having a modern language; both Pascals and C's I have access to are less useful. I've been borderline to making a new language that compiles to 6502 ASM, but I know I'm lazy at tools-to-make-tools support.

    One nice part with Atari 8-bits is, shipping is easy. Put it in an ATR file, with an Atari emulator as seen on archive.org. One click, any browser shows it. Down side is, can't really charge money for this. Beg for patreon support; which I need to be better about giving you goodies in return for your cash, my fine patrons. Shall I write thee a sonnet?

  • Update & reupload my iPhone stuff. Should I even bother with Castles? I liked the underlying game but the UI is unbelievably shit, I had no idea what I was doing and limited by iPhone 1 screen/UI constraints. But Perilar, and some utility stuff, and maybe patch Brigand to be paid-up-front instead of IAP and say "this is what you could've had!". And I have my 3D game which never got shipped, just shown as demos. Worth spending some time on this and then never looking at it again.

  • Tabletop RPGs. Fuck this third goddamned plague year, which has made playing & playtesting RPGs just a nightmare. Every online group I try flakes out so fast they may be composed entirely of microscopic black holes. So I have my "original dungeon game" retroclone, and my much nicer sword & planet game, and a couple tiny gamelets. And with Hasbro's sabre-rattling at the OGL and "One D&D", I'm inclined to just ship only the sword & planet game, and turn the rest into world books for it. But I'd like to test it more than once with other Humans and also not get infected with plague. So. State of that world is uncertain.

Sing

Rather than my longer music playlists, I often just sing one song to fediverse, like this. It's a slightly manual process, but I have part of it automated:

nowplaying.applescript

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Music"
    set t to current track
    set msg to (t's artist & " " & t's name)
    msg
end tell

urlencode

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
import urllib.parse

for line in sys.stdin:
    line = line.rstrip()
    print(urllib.parse.quote(line)) # unquote for the urldecode script

sing

#!/bin/zsh
q=`nowplaying.applescript|urlencode`
open -a Chromium "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!yt+$q"
open -a Chromium "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!genius+$q"

Then I just type sing, it pops up Chromium (my garbage media browser), I pick the best YT video and paste that, grab some lyrics and paste them, I have o/ bound as ♫ in Text replacements, and add a tag.

I suspect I could automate it a bit more, pick the first result on Genius and YT, but I trust neither to be right. Apple Music would be easier, but not everyone has it. I could grab cover art and paste that and a template into my appdot.net toot box. Anyway, it's the post-Human touch that shows I care. It's amusing that I have three scripting languages to get one thing done (urlencode/urldecode scripts date back to the '90s).

MineTest SurviveTest

One of the games (modpacks) for MineTest I've been trying, is SurviveTest. It's much closer to vanilla MineTest Game, but with a good selection of mods to make a survival/mining game, and the developer is updating it regularly, and making youtube videos (in Portuguese, but you get the gist).

The Awards panel is pretty good at driving you thru the game. Some things are less obvious, tho.

  • Fishing: Every videogame expands until it can do fishing. Put your fishing rod in a slot, and bait in the slot right of it. You can get worms by left-click hoeing ground, then right-clicking the worm as it comes out, or rip up bread (in crafting area) to get bread bait. Then left-clicking water with the rod places a bobber, and in some time it may go under and right-click will pull a fish! It's not very visually friendly, but works.

I mostly just swordfight sharks that jump fences to get into my garden every morning (that is a sentence nobody sane would ever write).

You can also combine signs with fish to make trophies, and for servers there's a fishing tournament UI.

  • Gardening: Apparently now most crop seeds can only be got from traders (for gold) or dungeon chests? But I find a lot of wheat seeds at least digging grass blocks, and apple trees grow apples, so you won't starve. Cotton bushes drop seeds, and cotton can be made into string or wool. Water only hydrates land 3 blocks away, not 4 as in Minecraft/MineClone2. But kindly reeds grow up to 3 blocks away from water. Chase crows away from your farms, they will steal from you. I dunno if scarecrows actually work, but I put them up anyway to look cool.

Bread is more realistic: 4 wheat make 1 dough, cook dough and it becomes bread. The pies & cookies are fun, but take much more resources than they're worth, and I haven't been able to reliably farm chickens for eggs yet. Soups are a pain, they don't stack.

  • Fruit Juice: Barrels are W-W-W, I-x-I, W-W-W (Wood, Iron), slightly expensive. Place them out, right-click TWO fruit (strawberry, apple, or melon) into each; it'll take all your fruit for nothing. Wait for an intolerable length of time and the barrel will change color. Make some bottles G-x-G, G-x-G, x-G-x (Glass), 10 bottles per 5 glass. Put ONE bottle in your bar, because if you click with multiple bottles they will be destroyed. Right-click one bottle on the barrel, and you get fruit juice. You can restack the bottles of fruit juice, and use them as a stack and it'll only consume one. Seems one of the higher value foods, out of otherwise very cheap food, and it's just a fun little farming activity, other than the bottle bug.

The bottle rack W-W-W, B-B-B, W-W-W (Wood, empty Bottles) gives an OK-looking shelf for 2 rows of bottles, no indicator as to how full it is but it looks nice enough next to a bookshelf, which holds a similar number of books.

  • Traders: Currently they spawn on "special jungle wood floor" wood, which you can steal from villages and put in your local trading hut to make them spawn. They'll trade gold for items, often pretty good items, or rarely crops & such for gold. They don't move, they don't do anything except vend goods, which is kind of a relief after dealing with MineClone2 villagers.

  • Mining: Mineral levels are much deeper down, see chart below. Stone tools suck when you dig hundreds of blocks down. As soon as you can, start making bronze tools from the extra tin & copper you get, I just carry a stack of bronze with me now and craft more tools as I go (I also bought a nice Mese pick from a trader). Then every 50-ish depth, I make a little mineshaft grid, get some of that level's minerals, go further down. I'm finally at diamond and below, looking for the Dungeon Master. A lot of MineTest players do ladders and falling, but I prefer a staircase so I can safely get off.

Coal = 0
Tin, Copper = -100
Iron = -150
Gold = -200
Mese = -350
Diamond = -500
Dungeon Master (Boss) = -600
Mese Monster = -350
  • Storage: Drawers work mostly like Storage Drawers mod for Minecraft. 1, 2, or 4 chests & wood between makes a drawer, right-click places materials in it, left-click withdraws. Make "upgrade templates" (a one-chest drawer with sticks around it), combine with steel, gold, obsidian, or diamond, to make an upgrade, right-click the border of the drawer, and put the upgrade in the arrow slots, to get 2x or more. Sadly this mod doesn't show upgrades visually, or have a redstone fill indicator, or such, but it works fine for the vast amount of junk you accumulate. I just keep chests now for loose things I won't need more than a stack of, or tools. Hm, some of the MC mods add shelves for things like tools, that might be a good idea.

Smurf You, Gargamel

Mastodon 4.0.2 has been released, with one of the worst UI choices ever: Changing "Toot!" to "Publish!"

This aggression will not stand, man!

  • stupidcomments.css - now changes it back to Toot!, and hides the mastodon image. Import this into Safari with Preferences, Advanced, Style Sheet. The sheet also blocks a lot of comment forms and other crap, you can just delete all rules above and below the mastodon entry if you only care about that.

Update 2022-12-01, removed all the excess whitespace from the post UI, and enlarged emoji so I can read them. Maybe too much, but I like it. If you're not so happy with that, edit (carefully!) and remove the padding rules, or change 0 to 4px or 8px to taste; you'll have to use Safari preferences to un-choose and then re-choose the file to make it reload.

Before:

After:

Sidebar after:

Footnote about the title, because it's come up from yapping commenters who know nothing: Peyo, the artist who created the Smurfs, was emphatically not anti-semitic, Gargamel is not a racist stereotype, he's just an evil/misguided alchemist character borrowed from Rabelais, and we mock "Gargron" with his name. You savages. How dare you.