Cyan

From the creators of Myst and Riven…. Myst!

by

2018 seems to be the year of HD Remakes and Remasters. With Crash Bandicoot being ported to other platforms, the first three Tomb Raiders being ported into another engine, the Devil May Cry series finally running on PC outside of a emulator (though some might argue at the moment that the emulator is still better), and now we have… Myst, Riven and maybe the other ones?

Over the last few years we’ve been working to procure the rights to make all of the Myst games available. As an indie developer, resources are limited for development, and acquiring rights isn’t always an option. But we managed to finally talk to all the right people and departments and put some funding together to try to make it happen. With agreements in place, we’re happy to announce that we’ll be releasing updated (for Windows 10) versions of all the Myst games later this year!

Rather interesting of them to make it Windows 10 exclusive. It seems like only a few years ago they released Myst Masterpiece Edition…. oh wait.

I guess we’ll see how it rolls out. I think I’ll sit this one out, until I can confirm it can run decently on my system without LOD hiccups. :zorak:

From the creators of Myst and Riven yada yada yada

by

It seems Cyan is wanting to start another project:

The video doesn’t seem to show much other than it’s a puzzle type game (Cyan’s specialty) with some nice looking graphics and a creepy voice. Of course unlike their last games Cyan wants to make this a VR exclusive title because so many people play VR… That’s the reason, right? Obviously there are waaaaaaaay more VR gamers than those zombies that stare at their multimonitor setups with drool rolling down their faces.

The team has developed what Miller called a working “experience,” similar to a demo, that will be shown later this month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in an attempt to garner interest and financial backing. It features the Mead-based company’s signature puzzle-solving gameplay, he said, in a world built from the ground up to be experienced through a virtual reality headset.

Well, that leaves me out. There aren’t enough games out to justify me getting into VR, plus I’m still pretty miffed about Obduction’s poor optimization for AMD GPU’s as well as overall optimization (broken LOD’s). Plus if I take into consideration how the last Kickstarter took place, and some of the more dramatic moments I’d rather not mention during their update posts, I really am reminded that I should play other games instead. Heck, I’ve been playing Quite a bit of The Phantom Pain lately, and that’s an NVidia Gumworks title.

That said I wish them no ill will. I would like for them to succeed and return to their former glory, but it seems unnecessary to leave people out if they can’t afford VR. Plus I would think they would make money if they developed a non VR version of their game. As it is Cyan’s core fanbase consists of about 7 people who still have use to run a Pentium III setup. :v:

Late Night Open Thread

by

Twas a long work day. Came home and I was too tired to play anything with puzzles so laid off of Obduction for the time being, which seems to be a fine choice since Cyan has uploaded some hotfixes to hopefully improve the game. Though at this point I don’t know what’s more entertaining, the game itself or the people who are getting pissy trying to run the game on inferior hardware? Some of the people at the Cyan forums who are complaining that they won’t fund another project after backing a game that won’t run on their old hardware are really out of touch. You had 3 years to come up with something to run the game, and you choose to run the game on your toaster mac and act all surprised when it doesn’t work. Amazing! It’s almost like Apple markets outdated hardware at ungodly prices to make people believe it’s still relevant… oh wait.

I have fine tuned my OBS Multiplatform setup, have the Elgato running through it rendering with the codec for my GPU. When I go to start Obduction with a new save I should be ready, assuming the memory leaks are dealt with by the time I pick it up again. In the meantime I tested with Skyrim of course, and the CPU barely moved. Framerate was literally the same recording or not, and I don’t have to worry about audio latency. I see OBS Multi has an option too for streaming and doing a local copy (with more advanced features than Elgato’s setup), so I’ll have to test that when I find time to livestream.

Sure I can run Crysis… but Obduction?

by

Obduction

I thought it was excellent timing that I had a day off on the release of Obduction. I’ve really enjoyed the game so far, so much to explore and take in. It’s like Myst without linking books, and in space. It was really difficult to pull me away from it, thankfully the memory leak in the game ate my system RAM and my VRAM.

Yeah, the release has been a little buggy for people. I count myself among the luckier ones too. I’m really glad that I don’t game on a mac. Hopefully Cyan releases some updates though, from the performance standpoint I can only say it’s “playable” at best, and that’s on a 6 core 12 thread Xeon processor and one of the best GPU’s out there. There have been some other tips and tricks I haven’t done yet to improve performance (one being deleting your save and starting over), so I’ll try that next time I play the game.

I tried recording some clips with my the Elgato software but I’m still running into little annoyances with video/audio latency. So I’ve switched over to OBS Multiplatform earlier tonight and tested that. I still need to refine it but I can already tell it runs much better, the desync issues aren’t there and if they are they are not as apparent. And unlike old OBS I can actually use my AMD codec! Meaning I can record from the capture card, use that codec and save CPU/GPU usage. And the nice thing about OBS? It looks like that will let me stream and record at the same time much like Elgato’s Game Capture HD, which I didn’t know since up until this point I’ve been using classic OBS.

With all of this stuff I can honestly say I’m never bored. 😛

Obduction gets delayed… again

by

Obduction

In case someone out there hasn’t heard Obduction has been delayed yet again for further polishing and bug stomping. Not that it bothers me, as I’ve mentioned before and as self evident as it is I’m not exactly bored. If anything I feel almost sorry for people who took vacation time specifically to play this game, only to find out that it won’t be released. Which in all honesty is a pretty silly thing to do in the first place. Or for that matter people who only play games released by Cyan. Talk about a limited selection.

On a brighter note when the game DOES finally get released I’ll be able to capture it in all its glory with my new capture card coming in the mail. Might have to do a livestream, when I get around to it of course. 😀

Cyan at E3

by

If anyone wants some Rand talk and Obduction eye candy, here it is:

I find it funny how at the end of the PC Gamer interview Rand had to say that The Stanley Parable was one of his favorite games. If only the rest of the Myst/Uru Community knew that him (and others) had a sense of humor… and learned how to develop one.

One can dream. 😉

The Obduction Updating Frenzy

by

Ever since the specs for Obduction have been declared things have been rather interesting at both the MOUL and Cyan forums.

Seems there are more people in the community than I expected that will actually be able to run Obduction. It is funny though watching people on ridiculously ancient hardware have sads about not being able to have a system that can run the game.

Well, I’m guessing it was enough for someone at Cyan to step forward and say something. I recommend reading the whole post in the link. Here are some of the bits I found interesting:

Between in-house testing, and a 3rd party hardware lab taking a look at the title, we really tried to find that minimum spot where the game was perfectly playable without the performance taking enough of a dive to be an issue. In reality, the game will start on anything that supports DirectX 11, but on the early DX11 cards they’re just too old to be able to push what we’re doing. The one gig of video memory limitation is honestly aiming a bit low as well. The game at it’s lowest settings can stay within this, but you’re looking at a pretty poor visual quality. Turning the graphics up past the lowest point, you’re going to start seeing a large amount of stuttering and hitching as the game has to swap between video memory and system memory. A 2 or 3 gig card helps, but the 4 gig of the recommended specs is highly recommended. If you’re picking up a new card for the game, try to aim for at least 4 gig of video ram.

Funny, even they admit that 1GB is kind of a stretch when it comes to minimal requirements.

I am afraid that there is a can of worms to open however: the AMD vs Nvidia battle. To be upfront and honest, the game runs about 15% faster on nvidia cards than the equivalent AMD card. The nvidia cards also seem to deliver a bit smoother experience as well. There’s nothing wrong at all on the AMD side however and both companies really do offer the same visual quality. You won’t lose or gain any pretty effects with either manufacturers card. But if you’re picking out a new card for the title, be aware you’re going to need a slightly faster Radeon than you will a GeForce if you’re looking for that super-fluid 60 fps experience.

I am going to reserve my judgement until I play the game on my hardware, but I’m not exactly happy to see another game that may possibly fall to GameWorks.

Hard drives and storage:

The one area that makes a huge difference with the game, and isn’t necessarily reflected in the system specs is hard drive/ system storage speed. We do a *lot* of streaming from the drive during gameplay, and slower drives have a terrible time keeping up. A generic traditional mechanical hard drive is going to see a lot of hitching and pausing during the game while it loads in. Outside of a video card, upgrading your drive to a solid-state drive if you haven’t yet will make a huge impact in how smooth of an experience you’ll have with the game, along with being a very nice and very noticeable upgrade for your machine in general.

This has me a bit concerned. If you need to run your game on an SSD to stop hitching and stuttering then something is really really wrong. I didn’t get this with any UE4 game I’ve played so far, and that’s on a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Ultrastar with 32mb cache.

I know I’ll be able to play this… But between the NVidia favoritism and info regarding drive performance I’m not sure what to think. Guess I’ll figure that out on release.

Oh, and psssst, Cyan! Stop Uncategorizing your posts! Only n00bs have the excuse to use Uncategorized as a category. That’s a big no no with for a blog/website as it’s hard to find uncatagorized posts. Search engines have a better time finding your posts when they’re tagged and categorized properly! Unless… Finding your blog is supposed to be a difficult puzzle in of itself. Never mind.

Obduction gets a release date

by

Obduction

It isn’t June, but I’ll take it. 😛

Cyan, Inc. the award-winning creators of Myst and Riven, today announced that Obduction, their highly-anticipated adventure game, will be launching simultaneously on PC, Mac and Oculus Rift, and will be available for download from Steam, GOG.com, Humble Store, Mac App Store, and the Oculus Store on July 26, 2016 for $29.99.

Cyan also released a Kickstarter update explaining why the delay:

  • Fit and polish. That extra month gives us some quality time – to up the… quality – a good thing!
  • Unreal Engine 4 updates. We don’t control these, and Epic just released a big new update that changes a few things.
  • Oculus Rift VR version. This doesn’t affect everyone, but it helps us to tie everything into a larger launch event.
  • Avoid industry noise. There are a few big industry things happening at the end of June that our small company doesn’t need to try to shout over.

I don’t mind the wait. Plenty of other stuff for me to do in the meantime…

72850_20160601194225_1

Cyan releases a Teaser Trailer for Obduction

by

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1INKH_iBak8

Well, the graphics look real nice which is to be expected by Unreal Engine 4. The release date is June later on this year. I will definitely have this in my library upon release as a prize for having to mentally torture myself through the whole Kickstarter drama that unfolded by doing tons of exploring (not that I haven’t been doing that with Skyrim already lol).

However I will point out one thing that I’ve thought since the announcement of the Obduction Kickstarter, and I’m only pointing this out because someone over at RPS pointed out what I’ve been thinking since the beginning.

I didn’t play Myst back in the day and have heard wildly differing opinions about it. Obduction sounded interesting but talk of Myst ended up overshadowing talk about Obduction so I ended up drifting away. With this trailer I’m still not sure. I think it’s hard to communicate gradual unravelling of mystery in a trailer – I didn’t really get a sense of that side of The Witness til I was playing it – so I’m not really getting a feel for that side of things and it’s ended up at more of an environmental showcase kind of level for me.

This.

It seemed like whenever Cyan went to talk about Obduction they just couldn’t stop talking about Myst. We get it, Myst was an excellent game for it’s time and extremely unique. You can’t deny that. But it doesn’t quite look right to other people when you keep talking about one of your two successes constantly. This would be like if Bethesda talked about the first Elder Scrolls game ever made when introducing Skyrim, or the makers of Tomb Raider harping about how great the first one from 96 was amazing. Or if Valve kept talking about the first Half Life when trying to introduce a new product. It’s ok to talk about and remember those classics, but we’re not here to talk about your past products when you’re trying to tell us about your newest one. We want to know what you’re making NOW.

Obduction for Linux? Yes please!

by

The Unreal Engine is getting Linux support (as of version 4.1) which means companies and groups who choose to develop with it will be able to make their games available to not just Windows and Mac users, but to the Linux platform as well. Cyan is developing Obduction under Unreal Engine 4 so it would only make sense for a couple people to ask about it. Cyan answered via Kickstarter today… sorta.

Linux support

Epic has announced that the Unreal 4 engine will have Linux support. We would love to support Linux and we are currently evaluating what it means for the scope and cost of development.

I hope they go through with it (especially since it would mean more copies sold to pure Linux users). Gaming under Linux is in still a young idea that’s still getting better, and I’d like to see Linux someday with a nice library like Windows has of equal RPG/MMO/FPS instead of the FPS’s being outnumbered by RPG’s and simulators. There needs to be more versatility, and with companies like Valve, Unreal and Croteam already switching to OpenGL that’ll set an excellent course for the future of Linux! Now if only the neckbeards could cooperate better…