A Few Questions

[darkspine10]

I have a few questions about the game.

Firstly, will the game have a flashlight like RealMYST Masterpiece Edition? It might help at night.

Second, what will the average timeframe for a Rivenese day be? Will it be adjustable in the final version?

What kind of weather patterns can we expect? Will there be fierce rainstorms, or even rain at all?

Will the cloudiness and wind speed vary with time?

Will Age 233 or Tay have day/night cycles, or is that just too unnecessary?

Will you be using the original dialogue from Riven, or rerecording your own?

Do you have access to all the tracks from the original game, or do you only have the released soundtrack? You used an unreleased track in the Prison Island demo, and I was wondering how you got it.

Thanks for the answers, and keep up the really great work!

[darkspine10]

PS

Will the game have Mouse drive like Myst V and Uru, or will you have to move with the arrow or WASD keys, like in RealMYST Materpiece Edition, and your Prison Island demo?

[zib_redlektab]

So, these answers are going to be disappointing, I think.

For a number of reasons, we decided to drop support for day/night and weather cycles from the game, at least for the foreseeable future. We've detailed our reasons for this elsewhere (I think), but the simplest reason is that any element that will complicate the already near-impossible task of making Riven a realtime game is unnecessary. Our goal is first and foremost to bring Riven to the 21st century, then we can think about whether or not it's possible (or really even desirable) to make changes to it.

So, with that in mind, we don't intend to have a flashlight. You could see what you were doing in the original (when you needed to, anyway), you'll be able to see what you're doing in our version. Cloud/wind speed will most likely be a constant, although that is definitely open to changes in the future.

Currently our plan is to use the original dialogue from Riven, we don't think anything we can produce can rival the original performances. This is an area we still need to spend some time working out all the details, however.

We are still working on figuring out the specifics of our navigation system, and of how users will interact with the game overall. We actually just brought on a guy to work on just that, we're looking forward to locking down some of those details.

For my own part, I'm very invested in having some form of mouse drive, I think that it makes the game much more accessible.

Sorry these answers are so late, and that (I'm sure) they're probably not quite what you wanted to hear!

[tomysshadow]

I'm kind of disappointed about opting not to do the day and night cycles, because:

1) You're going to need to code the ability to change the sky anyway when it turns red at the end of the game.
2) realMyst did it. Part of the whole reason I want Starry Expanse is to see what Riven would look like if it were a living, breathing world rather than still images. What's the point of making the game in realtime if you're not going to take advantage of all the things realtime allows you to do? You might as well just have nodes you stand in and click to move forward and keep everything still then, and just have Riven exactly the way it is with updated graphics.
3) It is canon that Riven has a moon because it is the first thing you see in the intro to Myst, so it'd be good to have a nighttime so the moon can be seen, and the night was gorgeous in the Unity demo from 2012.

For the amount of effort it would take, I think adding a day/night cycle would make Riven even more real. I realize that I'm not the only opinion here though, and that if it wasn't done well a night cycle could make it difficult to see. But cmon, you're telling me you can 3D model the entirety of Riven, bending water with code... but can't add a day/night cycle, a common thing that exists in a lot of other games already and as such could probably be implemented with ease?

I have to agree about weather though, having rain would mess everything up. How would it interact with lava, interact with other water, would it make ripples in water which is being moved over because of heat?

[zib_redlektab]

There are a number of concerns beyond it taking more time, mainly the question of how it would affect the puzzles and aesthetics of the game. A number of the puzzles rely on visibility to be solved, we don't want to end up in a situation where the player has to wait for morning to find a clue.

The flashlight mechanism in realMyst is, in my opinion anyway, an incredibly clunky solution to this problem. If we were to do nighttime, it would have to involve clever applications of moonlight and in-game lamps, etc. Which sounds like a lot more work.

I want this thing done in the next few years, and I think most people would agree. So for now we're focusing on the game itself. Then we can talk about bells and whistles

[Andross]

Yeah, hard to argue with that.
I'd be all for including the night and or weather/cloud cycles if you can down the road, but I'd much rather have the game in the mean time.