Notgames Forum

I've always been fascinated with the potential of computer games as a medium, but at the same time always been frustrated with how uninteresting most games are, with their heavy emphasis on mechanics and skills and points rather than an interesting experience in its own right. I'm not a gamer (= a notgamer?), I just happen to be very interested in games. After a quick browse through, this forum seems to be a great place.

I live in Stockholm, Sweden. A year ago I finished two years' music production education, but if there's anything I don't want to right now, it is to be a music producer. Instead my interests lately have moved in all kinds of other directions, most of them computer related; software design, webdesign, digital art, animation, games... I'm also really interested in UX and such, looking for some appropriate education to jump on.

Whenever I have some free time on my own, I tend to end up at my computer, writing down ramblings of ideas for all kinds of possible or impossible projects... ideas for games, software, businesses... I know some basic programming but not a whole lot, so while these things tend to crystalize over time, they have yet to say "hello world". I have been working on some small hobby game projects, working as a musician/sound guy, but my influence over those projects were pretty much limited to that.

My favourite game is probably Riven, the second game in the Myst series... It's incredibly well designed in almost every way, and like most adventure games there's very little "game" to it (no scores, minimal inventory...). The puzzles don't stand out and scream "PUZZLE!!" as you walk by. Sure, there's a winning state, but that's pretty much the only overtly game-ish element of it. They sure got something right, and I'd love to see new games (or notgames) picking up some of those ideas and adapting it to what's possible today. But hey, this might be a more appropriate topic for another thread.

I guess that's me and where I'm at. I'm looking forward to participating in some interesting discussions here.

Welcome, Utforska. Sounds like you've come to the right place. Exploring the potential of the interactive medium beyond games. That's why we're here. :)

Welcome Utforska!

Curious regarding your recommendation of Riven: have you played all the games in the Myst series? Most people seem to agree that Riven was the strongest in any case, but I'm just wondering (I myself have only played Myst).

Thank you for your welcomes.


I've played all the games in the "core" series (Myst/realMyst, Riven, Exile, Revelation, End of Ages) but not the separate Uru series. I think Riven is the one with the strongest, most solid designs. The gameworld is believable as a real place with a real culture - you'd have a hard time finding anything that is there just to look cool or beautiful, pretty much everything is coloured by the backstory in some way. This is not true to the same extent for the other games. For the time (1997), the graphics of Riven were also just breathtaking, and in my opinion that level of photorealism is unparalleled by any of the later games. It also has the best acting in the series.

Then there are the puzzles, which are all very well-designed, if hard. The majority of them are about manipulating machinery that has a real purpose in the gameworld, so there's a lot less of the arbitrary puzzle-for-the-sake-of-being-a-puzzle stuff that you find in Myst. You probably spend about as much time exploring and understanding the story and culture of the world as you spend solving puzzles.

I think it can still be played on recent versions of Windows - there is also an open source project that lets you run it on Mac OS X (http://www.devklog.net/rivenx/) plus I think they're working on a version for iPhone OS, so if you're curious you should try it out.

Thanks for the info Utforska. I've been interested in playing Riven for a while (I've remained quite impressed with Myst, since I played through it several years ago), and your recommendation has brought it to the front of my mind again.

Fantastic series! I wonder what the general consent is regarding QTVR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR) versus real-time 3D .. the visuals of Revelation are absolutely stunning at times, but the sense of freedom in realMyst is truly liberating for the genre.

+ There's also a Playstation ( and Saturn ) port of Riven for those who prefer their couch ;)

I think the difference between real-time and prerendered (slideshow/panorama) is pretty profound actually. And I'm not thinking about the visual quality, more the way you explore and experience the surroundings.

A nice analogy here is that of a motion pictures versus still images. We usually only watch a movie once or twice, even if we really like it. But if we like a painting or photograph a lot, we might hang it on the wall and watch it almost every day for the rest of our lives, and still not grow tired of it. That's one single image satisfying you for a lifetime, compared to maybe two hours of twentyfour images per second, which combined keep your interest up only for that time. We're occupied with following the dialogue, story and atmosphere, and couldn't possibly observe every single thing that happens somewhere far in the background in a few frames. But these details would certainly be an important aspect of the experience of a painting or still photograph.

I think there is a similar difference between the fluid, completely navigable realtime 3d worlds, and the more static prerendered environment of the first couple of Myst games. In a prerendered game, a small room might be represented in its entirety as a handful of images, or maybe a single panorama. This is all you get, and as a player you essentially have to assume that everything you need to see will be there, and the opposite - everything that's there will be meaningful to see. I can find myself looking at one single image in a game like Riven for a minute or more at a time, simply because that's the only way for me to really get a feeling for the environment, to scrutinize it.

In a real-time 3d game though, we might treat the environments more like we treat movies. We're less likely to stand still for a minute to look at the world - instead we will move closer to whatever it is that we want to see. Our brains simply have to do a lot more sorting out to cope with the information stream. We get a bit more impatient, we're forced to focus on the whole picture rather than the details, and we may miss some interesting observations.

I'm not saying that one of the experiences is better or more valuable than the other, just that they are different. Obviously, there are all kinds of merits to real-time 3d. But I think it's important to keep these differences in mind when designing the worlds. I think that generally, the prerendered format might work better for very condensed, detailed and information rich enviroments, while the real-time style works best in larger, more open worlds, where doing is more important than observing.

In light of this realMyst becomes interesting, since it is a real-time adaptation of a prerendered slideshow game. I agree with you that there is something very liberating about the free movement, but maybe something is lost as well. The pace is different.

Uru got me into the Myst series, the opposite of most Myst fans. I can't play the old 2d versions. People go on and on about how amazing Riven was. I remember running across a forum thread about how real-time 3d couldn't possibly look as good as Riven (this was only a few years ago). Um, what? Are they playing the same game I played? It's looks terrible - grainy, poor quality video and washed out colors and a complete lack of detail. I think their memory is bumping up the quality quite a bit. CryEngine can easily pump out graphics that blow away anything you think you saw in Riven. In fact most modern 3d engines can. I really like realMYST though! If it isn't obvious, I think real-time 3d is far more immersive than Quicktime videos. I like to explore an environment, not be locked down in one view, especially in a game like Myst where exploration is everything.

Interesting to hear the different opinions on realtime vs. pre-rendered. I definitely agree that there is a big difference, though I would also agree with Utforska in that I don't think one is superior to the other. I'm interested to play realMyst, but I can't imagine it having the same slow, thoughtful pace, and dreamlike feeling that the original version had for me.

Indeed, Riven is grainy, low-res and has terrible video compression at times. The textures are occasionally very blurry by today's standards, and if I want to be picky I can find all kinds of technical glitches in the modelling, rendering and compositing. The lighting might be better than most real-time lighting, but in some places it still looks crappy. The real-time water animation post processing is laughable.

You could argue that at the time, Riven was an astonishing feat in sheer technical terms, and that the stills largely look very good by today's standards too, despite the stuff mentioned above.

But it's also interesting to compare it with Revelation for instance, the fourth game in the Myst series, the last to be based on prerendered graphics. Revelation might be much more advanced technologically, but in my eyes it's still not as realistic as Riven. On the other hand, the Revelation team (Revelation was not developed by Cyan) probably weren't going for the highest possible realism, so it's hard to compare. I'm not a 3d artist so I'm not really the right person to say exactly what it is that gives Riven and Revelation there respective looks, in technical terms. Apples and oranges.

But my position is that while the technological advancements will keep making the games of yesterday pale in comparison for a good few years more, the designs themselves can be timeless and high quality enough to outlive that. I think Riven by far does this better than any other game in the Myst series. To me, that's what it's really about. That's what I mean when I say that Riven is the most photorealistic game in the series. It's more about the designs themselves, rather than the execution of those designs. Making something believable requires many things to work together, and the presentation is only part of it.

Would be interesting to see whether pre-rendering all paths* completely in 360° ( allowing the player to walk around "freely" ) gives you a similar immersion as the same game in real-time 3D.

(http://www.nuon-dome.com/pix/riven1.jpg)

*Most of the movement in these games is "on-rail" anyway ( see above ).

And while I certainly agree with ghostwheel that the environments could be done in real-time without too much wizardry these days, achieving that level of photo-realism in the actors (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKLbPRlsZrM) is a little more tricky :)

I never played Revelations but it does look nice and the QTVR is cool but the fades between movement points kind of ruins the immersion.

A lot of people go on about how great the real actors are in most of the Myst series. Except for a couple of one exception (David Ogden Stiers as Escher) most of the acting is direct-to-DVD/SyFy-Original movie quality. I'd rather have good voice acting with stiff 3d physical appearance. But that's just a personal preference I suppose.

Quick lunch-break experiment trying out QTVR on movement-paths. Horrible scene / resolution / framerate, but it's the idea that counts :) Left mouse button is movement, right mouse button is looking around.

Download (http://www.filedropper.com/qtvr) ( Windows )

@ghostwheel - Good voice-acting is just as rare ;)

Shucks, I wish I could've tried it.

I'm not sure I understand what it is though, in what way is it different from the style of Exile and Revelation?

I can get you a Linux or Mac OS X build if you like.

The difference is that instead of jumping from panorama-to-panorama ( Exile / Revelation ), I'm rendering out intermediate steps which enables you to move "fluently" while still being able to look around. You do end up with a lot more data though :P

Sounds very interesting, I'd love an OS X build!  :)

That is cool! It's a good demonstration. I'm not sure what the point in using something like this would be. I suppose if you wanted to render everything instead of using real-time 3d for some reason. Though, I can't think of one.

There are certain benefits of ray-tracing over real-time rendering .. but you could for example want to go with live-action film ( 360° lens ). That way you can simply use / rent a location instead of having to build it ;) The possibilities are obviously a lot more limited compared to real-time, but it works pretty well in for example Railfan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8LoofFLxw) ( PS3 ).

@Utforska - Send you a PM

Thanks for the OS X build - certainly an interesting effect! How many individual panoramas are there in this version?

You'd likely end up with way too much data (as well as way too long rendering times) if you tried to do something like this with hi-res, full color graphics though. And then there's the additional problem of adding in animation - you would need to render the same movie again for every single one of these panoramas, so you'd end up with a huge amount of data just to get away with that.

These guys have some interesting stuff going on - www.areograph.com (http://www.areograph.com). Their technology also makes it possible to turn a photographed or prerendered scene into a live 3d world. They seem to have the same problems with animation and moving lights etc though...

That's the exact reason that animations are scarse / short in the Myst games. Their solution still works though .. animated areas are layered on top of the static background. Plus, you'll only need a limited range of angles. Once you get far enough from a animation, simply scaling / transforming the footage will be sufficient. And there's always the option of mixing in real-time 3D ;)

Lighting pre-rendered scenes dynamically is not that difficult. Instead of rendering RGB(A), you use a deferred setup ( Albedo + Normals + Depth ) and calculate the required coordinates on the fly.

*The build uses 32 frames at 15 fps.