Myst (2020)

Well, the thing is out. (On Steam, Epic, GOG, Xbox, Mac App Store, Oculus store. Supports Oculus, Vive, Valve Index, and regular flat monitors like regular flat people use.)

(I am a flat person, by the way.)

I blog the Myst news, which means I need to write a post. Except there's no news here. It's all been said. This is the most expected game of the year. You've already read most of this.

• It's awfully nice-looking. Let's all agree on that.
• It's Myst. You've played it. Eric Anderson said, "Not the way it looked, but the way we remember it looking." And that's true! I don't remember Myst (1993) as having low resolution or an 8-bit palette. I remember the places. Now here they are again.
• Myst is now on, I think, its fifth engine and its fourth graphical rebuild. (Hypercard, native slideshow app, Plasma, Unity, Unreal. Do we count the iPad Unity version as different from the desktop Unity version? I've lost track.)
• But, yes, the textures glisten wonderfully if you turn up the graphics settings. Sunlight burns through the clouds. The mist that we speak of rolls in.
• The island is somewhat larger. The tower is closer to real scale. (The original game had a lot of forced perspective. Plus the forest felt more encompassing in slideshow mode, didn't it?) Again, this mostly doesn't come across as a redesign. It's the size the original felt.
• A couple of rooms, but just a couple, have been seriously redesigned. The added breathing space feels good.
• The interactions have been modified so that everything happens in the "batter's box", between waist-height and shoulder-height. (So that the game is playable in chair-scale VR.) This means some puzzles and devices look different. All doors are sliding doors, because in VR, swinging doors whack you in the face.
• They took extra care to make the game more accessible. No puzzles depend on red/green distinctions. You can turn on subtitles for both dialogue and audio puzzles (which includes background audio cues like water flowing in Channelwood).
• The randomized-puzzle mode is a nice touch but it doesn't make the game harder. It prods you to go read all the clues and write them down, just like you did in the 90s. It will also entertain speedrunners, which I am not.
• All the linking books are now bolted down. This fixes the "plot hole" that I had some fun with last year.
• Most of the audio is the same. I think they re-recorded Atrus's lines. Sirrus and Achenar have new faces. I gotta say, the new Achenar doesn't match his voice. That's the face of a baritone.
• I was prepared to bet that "third quarter" meant "September 30th". Cyan beat that deadline by five weeks. Showed me!
• No Rime. The developers say it's planned, but no release date.
• No Linux. Dunno what the plans are there.

The upshot is that you have a great opportunity to replay a game that you enjoyed, and it sure does look brand spankin' new. It'll kill an evening.

You're a VR fan? This release will ring all your bells. Have fun.

You've never played Myst? ...This is really the question! Nothing about this whole "definitive Myst" process is aimed at me. I'm the guy who killed an evening replaying a game for, I think, the fourth complete time in 28 years. (I admit that I had to look at a hint! I forgot how the Stoneship compass clue worked.)

Cyan said up front that this release is aimed at a generation of gamers who know about Myst but never bothered to play it. And I honestly don't know what they'll think. The reviews are written by people like me. Or people younger than me who played Myst as research or nostalgia, but they've played it, and not recently.

Myst is weird. The story is so fragmentary as to be sleight-of-hand. The puzzles have one foot in environmental worldbuilding and one foot in soup can land. The ending fizzles. Atrus does not have, and never will have, a bedroom or a bathroom. In 1993, people were torn between the world-flooding sensory detail and the confusion of a somewhat janky puzzle game.

And yet Myst happened. It just "happened to happen", as King Derwin once said. It happened to millions of people. Is it likely to happen again? Everything has come 'round again; the weird story, the somewhat janky puzzles, the flood-tide of a surreal world that looks as good in 2021 as those little JPEGs did in 1993.

Everything else is different, of course. The market and audience and the expectations. (I've put way more of my weekend into Psychonauts 2 than into Myst.)

I don't know. I don't know if it'll sell. I don't know whether Cyan will break even on this project. (Beyond the up-front funding that we're pretty sure Oculus laid down.)

My guess is that a lot of adventure game fans will play Myst (2020). The people who play it will mostly be people who've played it before. I think that, like me, they're happy to see it; they'll kill an evening on it and treat it as a Firmament teaser. Some newer story/puzzle gamers will try it for the first time; they'll decide it feels kind of old-fashioned but they're glad they tried it. Cyan will see a revenue bump and long tail. I don't think that anybody will still be talking about Myst (2020) in 2022.

That's fine, actually. That's a successful re-release.

Seltani Jam, Sept 19

Emily Short has scheduled a Seltani build/play jam, hosted by the London IF meetup. This will be Sept 19, 3-5 pm London time. I will be hanging around as, I don't know, groundskeeper and tour guide emeritus?

Seltani was my Twine/Myst-Online/MUD mashup project from a few years back. (Technically it is none of those things. Nor is it holy, Roman, or an empire. But that's the best way to explain it.) I haven't touched Seltani in a long time, but I keep the server running.

See Emily's post for details and how to sign up for the meeting.

Design ruminations: Subverting the ending

I played two games recently whose endings don't go like you might expect. They make an interesting contrast, though: Omno (Studio Inkyfox) and Minute of Islands (Studio Fizbin).

It is not my habit to spoil narrative in my reviews, but this isn't a review. I have to get into the details. So: complete and total SPOILERS for the stories of these two games! Play them before reading this, if you plan to. And you should: they're both enjoyable games which you can finish in a few evenings.

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ZIL tidbits and Inform 6 dev news

I somewhat randomly stumbled across these two resources from a couple years back:

Internal Secrets of Infocom Games by Michael Ko

(PDF version; forum thread announcing the project.)

This is a detailed analysis of the classic Infocom parser. As we recall, the Infocom parser wasn't built into the Z-machine -- it was a pile of ZIL code which was copied into each game.

The parser was built to be flexible, but also had to be customized somewhat for each game. So there is no such thing as the Infocom parser. Rather, there was an evolving chain of versions. This document is based on Zork 1 but has copious notes on variations in later games.

ZILCH How-to by Roman Bartke

(Forum thread mentioning the site.)

This is a step-by-step guide to getting Infocom's original ZIL compiler working. It starts with the PDP-10 ZIL source, which was dug out of old ITS tapes by Lars Brinkhoff. It then runs through emulating a PDP-10, getting ITS to run, making Muddle work, and compiling and testing Zork 2.

(Bartke uses Zork 2 as a test case because both the source and the compiled ZAP assembly have been preserved.)

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Enough with ZIL. What's been going on in Inform?

I must say up front that there's no news about Inform 7. As far as I know, Graham Nelson is still chugging away on it. No release date announced. (Sorry, but someone always asks.)

However, I have exciting news about Inform 6! Well, exciting to a few of us.

I have just completed an overhaul of the compiler's memory management. The old memory limitations are completely gone. If you've used I6, you will bitterly remember the old errors:

Fatal error: The memory setting MAX_PROP_TABLE_SIZE (which is 30000 at present) has been exceeded. Try running Inform again with $MAX_PROP_TABLE_SIZE=<some-larger-number> on the command line.

These even percolated out into Inform 7. It would sometimes choke and awkwardly suggest adding a line like this to your game:

Use MAX_PROP_TABLE_SIZE of 50000.

These all stem from Inform's history as an early-90s C program which was meant to run on DOS, classic MacOS, and other extremely ancient platforms. (Even VAX!) The compiler is careful to allocate all its memory at startup, to avoid the possibility of running out and crashing -- which might take down the entire OS in those non-protected days. The compiler also goes through some contortions to never malloc more than 32K at a time. (See the technical notes, section 11.2.)

All of this fuss is entirely unnecessary on an OS with virtual memory. Modern software ("modern" means "the past twenty years") just allocates as much memory as it needs. The understanding is that no matter how much memory the program needs, it won't crash. Rather, it will bog down ("swapping") until the user gets annoyed and buys a bigger computer. This sounds like a joke but it's actually a practical solution!

Anyhow, the memory usage of Inform is minuscule compared to your web browser. A quick test compiling Hadean Lands finds that the compiler needs to allocate about 12 megabytes of working space.

So I've spent the past couple of months rethwacking all of I6's memory handling to "allocate what you need, when you need it". (Thanks to David Kinder for maintaining the I6 source code and reviewing my changes.) I fixed a few obscure bugs while I was in there, too.

These changes have not yet made it to a release, but you can get the I6 source and compile your own binary. You can even install it into your I7 package and get the benefits immediately. (Although if you're using the Mac version of I7, you'll need to unsign it first... probably not worth the hassle.)

I was worried that this rewrite would have a performance penalty. After all, the compiler is now calling malloc and realloc more often. But no! You'll be happy to know that I6 now runs both faster and slimmer. In my HL test above, the new compiler used 11% less RAM and ran 10% faster than the original (the 6.35 release).

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With that out of the way, I am considering the future of Inform 6.

There are three major compiler features which have, historically, almost never been used. It's worth considering whether they can be stripped out of the codebase.

The temporary file option (-F1). This tells the compiler to put some of its working space in a disk file, instead of keeping it all in RAM. In other words, it's a cheapass virtual memory feature for machines that didn't have any.

Again, this is quite irrelevant on any machine less than twenty years old. As far as I know, even people doing retro development on old machines aren't using this option. (See forum thread.)

Module linking (-M, -U). This allows the user to compile parts of an Inform game (e.g., the standard library). Then, when compiling their game, they can recompile only the parts that have changed. This is analogous to the C model of compiling object (.o) files and then linking them together.

The module feature was a heroic effort by Graham Nelson. He comments in the tech notes:

(I have by now designed and painfully got working three different versions of the linker, and would not go through all that again for all the tea in China.)

Sadly, this appears to have solved a problem that nobody had, even in 1996. Module linking only works for Z-code. (I skipped it when adding Glulx support, and have never seen a complaint.) It is irrelevant to I7 development, as the I7 compiler generates monolithic I6 files which cannot be split up.

Infix mode (-X). Infix is an inline debugging feature for games. Some of its code is in a library file (infix.h); some is added during compilation. Infix allows you to examine game variables and object properties, and change them, at any time during play. (See DM4 chapter 7.6.)

This is an ambitious feature, which, again, doesn't seem to have gotten much use. Like linking, I skipped over Infix support when implementing Glulx. Like linking, Infix is not very useful for I7 games. In both I6 and I7, authors have generally added custom debug actions where needed, and not bothered with the idea of a generalized debug tool.

Rearranging command-line options. (This is a footnote, not a major feature.) I'm considering rearranging Inform's blizzard of trace/stat/report options into a tidier set. See notes here.

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So what do we think?

I like the idea of ripping out the temporary-file and module-linking options. These don't let you make better games. They just let you compile the game you've got in "more convenient" ways -- which are worthless on any modern machine. Removing these options would simplify the compiler codebase for no real cost.

Infix mode, despite its limitations, is a real feature. One of the goals of I6 is to be able to recompile old Inform games, and that includes old games which use debug features. So I am inclined to let Infix stand as-is. I'd even accept a patch to support Infix for Glulx, if someone wants to put in the effort.

(A debugging interpreter, using the copious symbol info generated by the -k option, seems like it would be more useful than updating Infix. I leave that discussion to another time!)

What do you think? (I hate blog posts that end like this, but it's a real question.) Have you ever used any of these features? Would you shed a tear if they were dropped? Let me know.

Kickstarter boost: of pawns & kings, Blue June

I back a fair number of story-game kickstarters. Usually I blog about them when the game ships and I've had a chance to play the complete game. But today I'm pushing a couple of projects which are still crowdfunding.

(I have no connection with these games except that I saw them on Kickstarter and said "hey, that looks cool.")

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of pawns & kings is a point-and-click set in a lush 3D-rendered environment. A boy goes off into the wilderness to discover what happened to his grandfather. The author cites Monkey Island, Riven, and Labyrinth as inspirations. I just wanna run around that jungle and mess with puzzles.

There's a demo, but honestly I backed it on the strength of the KS intro video, which bubbles with enthusiasm.

The project has a week to go and is only at 27%. I say this is a shame.

(Web site; KS page; demo.)

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Blue June is a 2D point-and-click about a girl pulled into a nightmarish dream version of her school. Stylized but atmospheric.

(KS page; demo on Steam, Itch.)

The project is in its last 24 hours and is 75% funded. Give it a push.

Mysterium 2021 report

Another Mysterium has come and gone. It was online again this year. I took lots of notes! But if you want to go directly to the goods, check out the Mysterium Youtube channel.

Some highlights:

Rand Miller doing a live let's-play of Myst. Not all of it, just an hour's worth of running around with off-the-cuff directory's commentary. This was Myst Masterpiece Edition (1999, still slideshow-style but improved resolution). Favorite bit: all the trees on Myst Island were rendered as perfect cones with a foliage texture. But when you look at screenshots, you see that the silhouettes are a little bit fluffy. Why? Because Rand loaded them up in Photoshop and smeared all the edges with the thumb tool. CGI magic!

Of course the big upcoming news is the Mac/PC/VR port, which is due "third quarter" -- which is to say, by the end of September. They did an hour-long State of the Union report on that.

(Panel, Youtube.)

I see they called it Steam Deck

I wrote about Valve's rumored portable a couple of months ago, when the rumors surfaced. Now we see the thing! It is called the Steam Deck.

The point is that the Switch is super-duper-popular, but it only runs Switch games. The iPhone is super-duper-popular, but it only runs iOS games. Your regular gaming PC isn't portable, but it can run all games (except for a few console exclusives, but whatever). Fill the gap.

I don't have any particular clue, but this seems like an obvious winner move on Valve's part. In my earlier post I talked about wanting a portable device for quickie games -- puzzlers, micro-roguelikes, small narrative games. That's what this is. I'm not going to play giant immersive adventures on it. I'm going to play little things while I eat lunch.

Possible pitfalls for the Steam Deck? It's not cheap. It's heavier and bulkier than the Switch. The battery life can't possibly match Apple's vertical engineering. Valve is trying to support every possible game interface (thumbsticks, trackpads, touchscreen); at least one of those will probably suck. (Cough cough trackpads.) The GPU can't melt tungsten blocks, which means the noisy people will hate it. And Steam needs to trim their storefront down into something that makes sense to casual players on a small screen.

Doesn't matter. The wide-open Steam ecosystem is the selling point. I think that will be sufficient. As I said, I will go out of my way to make sure Meanwhile is a joy to play on it.

"But the Steam Machine flopped!" Okay look. The Steam Machine -- a custom Linux gaming box -- had no selling point over a "regular" Windows gaming box. It had fewer games. The hardware wasn't inherently better or cheaper. You saved the cost of a Win10 license, but that's marginal. As a replacement for the (huge, established) "buy a PC" gaming market, the Steam Machine had no leverage.

The Steam Deck is a new market. It's not a replacement for anything. There is no established line of Windows-compatible gaming portables. People who want that form factor have either a Switch or nothing, and this has way more games than the Switch. (I'm sure you'll be able to stick an Itch.IO client on it too.)

Also, Linux portability is way past where it was in 2015. Valve's developer page says that "most [Windows] games work out of the box" thanks to Proton. (Proton is basically WINE tuned for Steam games.) Developers will have to test on Linux, but Valve is betting that a burgeoning Steam Deck market will push most of them into it.

As I said, it's a smart move. If it works, it sets up a world where Windows and Linux are equivalent gaming platforms -- developers will support both and players just won't care. Then Valve will be in a position to relaunch the desktop Steam Machine. Right? No more MS tax, no more MS ads in the start menu, no more MS redesigning the UI every few years. Just two thumbsticks and a screen that plays games.

So, anyhow, yeah. I'm going to preorder a Steam Deck tomorrow. Maybe it'll all fall down again, but it's my fun-money. And Meanwhile will be well-tested on it, at least.

(I'll make sure Hadean Lands runs too. But a seven-inch screen with a virtual keyboard might not be ideal for parser IF. I'm still working on redesigning the parser model from the bottom up, sorry...)