A Series of Tubes

I just got home from Mysterium 2009, the annual gathering of Myst fan(atics). It was held in Spokane, Washington this year (as it is every few years). Spokane is the hometown of Cyan Worlds, the company that made Myst.

The convention was really great, although the last day was somewhat ruined by a flu outbreak in the hotel. It was fun to meet all of the other fans of Myst, and to know that I wasn’t even close to being the geekiest person there (ha).

On the second day we all piled into a few cars and visited the Cyan offices. We got to meet all the Cyan bigwigs, past and present, and they threw a party for us. I had Rand Miller sign my collectibles, including the copy of From Myst to Riven that I bought at their store, and the Myst concept art that Robyn Miller sent me a few years ago. We were given a tour of their awesome workspace, which I filmed, but due to some accident, I no longer have that footage.

After the party, a few members of the Uru community (Blade, Brian Fioca, Douglas Sharper, and Eleri) held a panel about storytelling in Uru, which was pretty cool as they all were (or are) celebrities in our community at one point or another. After that, the real show started with a Q&A session with Rand Miller. He answered all of our questions, covering topics from Something Else, to MO:RE, to the Book of Marrim, to many other things. It was quite entertaining, and also educational!

For those who weren’t present at Mysterium, or those who would simply like a refresher on the convention, check out the video footage I captured over the course of the weekend. The file is about 580mb, so be careful if you have a slow connection (took me about 20 minutes to download on a standard-speed connection). Also, please don’t directly link to the video file, link to this post instead. There is also a torrent of the video file available, for those who would rather use a P2P connection.

If you’re more into photos, check out this thread on MystOnline.com, this Flickr pool, and this thread on UruObsession.com.

In other news, THIS IS THE 500TH POST! Yes, you read that correctly. I have now posted 500 things to this website. Pretty ridiculous. Here’s to 500 posts, and hoping for another strong 500 in the future!

I just got home from Mysterium 2009, the annual gathering of Myst fan(atics). It was held in Spokane, Washington this year (as it is every few years). Spokane is the hometown of Cyan Worlds, the company that made Myst.

The convention was really great, although the last day was somewhat ruined by a flu outbreak in the hotel. It was fun to meet all of the other fans of Myst, and to know that I wasn’t even close to being the geekiest person there (ha).

On the second day we all piled into a few cars and visited the Cyan offices. We got to meet all the Cyan bigwigs, past and present, and they threw a party for us. I had Rand Miller sign my collectibles, including the copy of From Myst to Riven that I bought at their store, and the Myst concept art that Robyn Miller sent me a few years ago. We were given a tour of their awesome workspace, which I filmed, but due to some accident, I no longer have that footage.

After the party, a few members of the Uru community (Blade, Brian Fioca, Douglas Sharper, and Eleri) held a panel about storytelling in Uru, which was pretty cool as they all were (or are) celebrities in our community at one point or another. After that, the real show started with a Q&A session with Rand Miller. He answered all of our questions, covering topics from Something Else, to MO:RE, to the Book of Marrim, to many other things. It was quite entertaining, and also educational!

For those who weren’t present at Mysterium, or those who would simply like a refresher on the convention, check out the video footage I captured over the course of the weekend. The file is about 580mb, so be careful if you have a slow connection (took me about 20 minutes to download on a standard-speed connection). Also, please don’t directly link to the video file, link to this post instead. There is also a torrent of the video file available, for those who would rather use a P2P connection.

If you’re more into photos, check out this thread on MystOnline.com, this Flickr pool, and this thread on UruObsession.com.

In other news, THIS IS THE 500TH POST! Yes, you read that correctly. I have now posted 500 things to this website. Pretty ridiculous. Here’s to 500 posts, and hoping for another strong 500 in the future!

About a month ago, I decided (most likely thanks to Jevasi, DanTheMystFan, and all the other great people I was talking to at Mysterium this year) to get back into the world of Writing (the process of creating a custom Age for Uru), after a year-long hiatus. I returned to find the community in good health, happily churning out very high-quality ages one after another. The tool used for Writing, pyPRP (which is actually just a plugin for Blender) had improved and advanced tenfold since I last used it, now supporting animated textures, custom cameras, and something called ‘AlcScript’, which allows for simple actions to be scripted, making it easier to Write dynamic ages (my only finished age, Galamay, has no interactivity whatsoever, because when I Wrote it years ago, you had to actually write code to do that stuff…). The Guild of Writers Wiki, with its big list of tutorials, was endlessly helpful as I re-learned the little I remembered, and quickly advanced to new levels of ability.

The only problem with this Age Writing is the fact that I use a Mac, and Uru is built for Windows. The classic problem. My first solution was Dropbox, an easy file-syncing program that automatically copies files to every computer you’ve registered, every time the files are modified. This worked well enough, but I still had to wait on my network to move the files, and then move them to the Uru directory on my PC once they were synced. It worked, but it was definitely flawed.

So I began to think about another option. What if I could run Uru on my Mac? That would solve my problems, because then I could Write and test on the same machine. But how would I do it? My first thought was Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, which both run Windows on top of OS X, meaning that the game would definitely run exactly as it would on a PC. However, a virtual machine would only cause more problems, such as the time it takes to load a virtual machine, or the lag that would be produced by running 2 operating systems. I thought about the latter problem for about two seconds before the answer hit me:

Wine. A self-referencing acronym standing for Wine Is Not an Emulator, Wine allows users of non-Windows operating systems to run .exe files meant specifically for Windows. The great thing is that it does this without having to run the entire Windows OS, just the specific parts that it needs to make the program work. This means that there’s no added lag, and programs really do run as if they were native to your own OS (in my case, Mac OS X, but it is available for Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, and any platform you can build it on really, since it’s an open-source project).

The first thing I tried was DarWINE, a Wine project dedicated to getting Wine to work on OS X. Using the installer on the Uru Disk, I got through all of the initial installation before it gave me a strange error (Cannot find string ERROR_CANNOTLOAD), and crashed.

Next, I tried CrossOver Games, a commercial version of Wine dedicated to making Windows games work on Mac OS X and Linux. This behaved exactly as DarWINE did when I gave it the CD with the installer.

Frustrated, I thought more about my past experiences with Uru. I have found in the past that you don’t actually have to install Uru: all the installer does is unpack the data from the CDs to the hard drive. If you can get the files from another source (such as a past installation), you can simply run it without any other modifications. Perhaps the installer makes some registry changes, but they aren’t necessary for the game to run. Following this line of thought, I copied the files from my Uru install to my Mac, and tried opening UruExplorer.exe with CrossOver Games.

Presto! Flawless Uru, running directly on my Mac. Everything that worked on my PC works on my Mac, and given the fact that my PC doesn’t have speakers, the Mac can actually run Uru better than my PC!

Here’s how to do it:

• Install URU:Complete Chronicles on a PC.
• Install Drizzle, and get the No-Disc patch, flymode, OfflineKI, whatever add-ons you want. Drizzle is natively Mac-compatible, so you can always modify these settings later on.
• Make sure all of that stuff works on your PC.
• Copy all the files in your Uru directory (C:/Program Files/Ubisoft/Cyan Worlds/Myst Uru: Complete Chronicles by default) to somewhere on your Mac.
• Get CrossOver Games if you don’t already have it. The link is a trial, the full version costs $39.95 unfortunately…
  Based on various reports, it seems like Crossover Games 8.0.0 works the best for Uru, newer versions can have some odd issues. You can download the trial for that here.
• Create a WinXP bottle in Crossover (“Manage Bottles” from the Configure menu).
• Programs > Run Command…
• Hit browse and locate UruExplorer.exe on your hard drive
• Save the command, to make it easier to launch again later
• Hit Run, and Uru will launch. You can ignore the error message that might pop up, Uru will launch a moment later.

You can also just find UruExplorer.exe in Finder and double-click it, Uru should launch just the same.

More pictures:

If you love Uru, but are tired of exploring by yourself, you should install Myst Online: Uru Live Again on your Mac and come play online!