1
Games / Re: BLF OpenTTD Dedicated Server - [ONLINE]
« on: January 15, 2018, 02:46:50 PM »
Updated the config file to desert map and disabled vehicle and airport expiration.
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2
Games / Re: BLF OpenTTD Dedicated Server - [ONLINE]
« on: January 14, 2018, 06:15:32 PM »
Server is back up but for whatever reason, all company passwords have been removed. Not sure why.
There are only about 7 years left but don't be a richard and take someone else's company. I recommend logging in and passwording your company ASAP.
There are only about 7 years left but don't be a richard and take someone else's company. I recommend logging in and passwording your company ASAP.
3
Games / Re: BLF OpenTTD Dedicated Server - [ONLINE]
« on: January 14, 2018, 03:53:23 PM »
Server is down for maintenance to increase disk space.
4
Games / Re: BLF OpenTTD Dedicated Server - [ONLINE]
« on: January 14, 2018, 01:00:59 PM »
I'll look into adding mods for more 24/7 friendliness when I have some time. In the meantime it'll just restart at 2051 until I get around to it. Feel free to post your suggestions.
5
Games / Bad Rats Show - E3 Reveal - "God is dead" ~RingsOfSaturn
« on: June 14, 2016, 09:04:24 PM »
Bad Rats: The Rats' Revenge
When the Rats are in charge, cats are simply lost!
The Rats wants revenge against their historical enemies, the Cats, and with your help, in Bad Rats, this will happen. On this game you'll need to find solutions to the puzzles, and help the Rats to execute their annihilation plans.
Bad Rats is a physics puzzle game. The Objective changes every map, but it's basically to make an object (the key) to hit another (the target), using real physics principles, as the objects weights, building levers, paths and others.
The levels' themes are fully varied, but completing a map will always result on a different annihilation of a cat, with some cartoon violence, cartoon blood and some cartoon body pieces flying around.
There are countless solutions for each map. And you, Which solution can you invent?
Take a look at the videos, images, play the demo and have fun with Bad Rats!
it almost kinda looks good is that bad
6
Games / Re: OpenTTD [ONLINE] - Real-time parcel company inefficiency simulator
« on: January 01, 2016, 04:36:29 PM »
Tom, is this running mods?
7
Games / Re: I'm streaming an old 90s adventure game
« on: June 07, 2015, 05:02:08 PM »
It's got a smug balding guy on the cover, so you know it's good.
8
Games / Mr Wallet's Myst IV Stream - [Offline Until Evening]
« on: February 21, 2015, 03:24:02 PM »STREAM HERE
NO SPOILERS, NO HELPING
screw that
This is all copied from Wallet's twitch.
Be aware that there's a delay of 10-15 seconds on the video. This means that you will write your chat regarding X maybe 15 seconds after I saw X, and then you will get my reaction to that chat message 15 seconds after you sent it. If your delay is much larger, refresh the page.
About MYST
Disclaimer: All this stuff is my own impressions mostly out of my own brain with the internet only providing some names and dates and helping me remember some of the lore, so if you disagree with my interpretations then well okay then forget you but I respect your opinion but forget you.
Origins
The original MYST came out in 1993 and was the first popular 3D point-and-click adventure game, unless you count The Journeyman Project which nobody does. It used pre-rendered 2D images and even small bits of video to create the most immersive experience most people had ever had with a computer. Although the graphics were not that good even by pre-rendered standards for the time, they were definitely passable and the main draw was the creativity of the worlds featured in the game. Thanks to its accessibility to non-gamers and its low price point, MYST was the best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims nine years later. You can drop those names the next time someone complains that video games are only about violence or whatever.
Gameplay
MYST games typically involve being presented with a fully-realized world and then having to figure out how things work without them being explained to you, and this constitutes most of the puzzles. For example, in the 2nd game, you eventually had to figure out (with the help of clues like access to a schoolroom) that the native people had a base-5 counting system, so that you could understand numbers when you saw them. Everything makes sense to the people who live there - you're most of the time not working against deliberate security measures or attempts to stop you - but it doesn't make sense to you until you decipher it. Machines with no obvious purpose at first glance and no glyphs or labels on any of the controls are the norm. Keeping a pencil and paper handy in real life is also the norm.
About MYST IV
Without unofficial patches, MYST IV runs at a glorious maximum resolution of 1024x768. Cyan Worlds really wanted to do widescreen, but most monitors weren't widescreen back then, so they added black bands to the top and bottom.
This means that there would be a whole lotta black if I showed the whole game. Instead you're just seeing the main game window, with the black bands cut off. There's an inventory off the bottom edge which includes my camera and anything else I might end up with; but MYST games are famous for having almost no inventory, so this probably won't be an issue for you.
Although the "main" series officially ended with MYST V, I personally see that game as a transition from old to new, from IV to URU. In many ways IV could be considered the "last" "real" MYST game. It was the last game to feature pre-rendered environments (meaning there's no arbitrary free movement through them). It was the last game with The Stranger as the protagonist (it was eventually established that MYST I-IV are 1806-1825, and MYST V brings the series into the present where URU is, set in then-present 2005). It was the last game to focus on Atrus' sons, which is what the first and third games were about, and the first to focus on his daughter, which the series would continue to do. (Since you're curious: The 2nd game was about his dad. These games are always about Atrus' relatives but never about Atrus.)
It was also possibly (we'll see) the last game before the writers completely lost their stuff, because MYST V and URU have the most bizarre "I'm 14 and this is deep" New Age hipster rants I have ever encountered in a video game. If the games had more freedom I seriously would have been some kind of supervillain in URU for all I disagree with the messages it peddles. I guess being raised as the only surviving member of your race for a few hundred years makes you loco in the coco.
Lore/Plot
General Lore
It's hard to shoehorn the lore of the series into fantasy because it's some seriously weird STARGATE-type stuff. Basically there's a secret mostly-lost art of writing in books about places ("ages") that makes them "linking books" where you put your hand on the book and you get teleported to the world described in the book.
The MYST series follows the drama around the last bloodline of the once-proud world-hopping race (indistinguishable from humans) called the D'ni, masters of The Art of writing - specifically the family tree of our buddy Atrus. They typically live to be over 350 years old.
Any further lore is intentionally omitted, but trust me there's people as into this stuff as any Trekkie or Whovian, complete with discussions on the same level as, "no there's totally a good reason for how the light saber knows when to stop!"
The Plot of MYST IV
In the first game, Atrus' two sons are each already in a "prison age" - a book describing a place in which there is absolutely no hope of being able to produce the materials required to write a link out. In the original game these are depicted as pitch-black voids, but I think I remember them showing up in this game as actual places. These were traps left by Atrus to catch richardholes, so you can imagine he was pretty upset when he found out that both his sons were the richardholes. At the end of the game, Atrus apparently destroys the books so that no one can link in to swap places with them or bring them writing tools or whatever.
"Well forget that!" says MYST IV, which basically retcons it to, "actually the sons are the only interesting part of this series so let's bring 'em back." (MYST III was a game entirely about the ruined lives they left behind. That game is about them even though they're not even in it.) So Atrus is all like "I want you to help me decide if I should let my starfish sons off the hook because it's been almost 20 years." Your role is literally to be the judge at a probation hearing.
...Thrilling.
Also we are probably totally unqualified in any sense whatsoever.
Anyway, Atrus' daughter Yeesha gets kidnapped and you have to like, find her, or whatever, so that's supposedly most of the game. I'm going into this one pretty blind, though.
Characters
Read the Lore/Plot section first.
The Stranger:
That's us. This extremely ambiguous and extremely silent protagonist is the player avatar for the first 4 MYST games, all of which are first-person with no working mirrors. (There's a camera in MYST IV but we're not allowed to take a selfie, the bastards.)
In the first game, The Stranger stumbles upon a link to the age of Myst where he gets caught up in the D'ni family drama and helps out basically because he's a nice guy and has nothing better to do, because he has no idea how the forget to get back to Earth on his own. He ends up helping out Atrus, making them "friends".
Atrus:
Not to be confused with Aitrus, his grandfather, as if the lore wasn't already hard enough to figure out. This guy's family is what MYST is all about.
Half Dn'i by blood and one of the only good guys in the whole series, since Atrus has no friends and is Forever Alone, he confuses you being a decent guy with you wanting to be friends, so he immediately is like "hey thanks for fixing that linking book so I'm not trapped here anymore, anyway please help me rescue my wife who's been kidnapped by my dad who literally thinks he's a god who created her and then after that maybe I have time to help you get back to your age [Earth]" and it just keeps going from there. So now in this game he's like sending you letters and asking you to judge whether his sons should be trapped in void dimensions for the rest of their lives. (BTW these guys are going to live another 300 years so don't forget this one up.)
His wife Catherine is a no-show most of the time, and this game is no exception as far as I'm aware. There's not a lot of canon on her but she's generally presumed alive and well for the duration of this game.
Portrayed, as in every game, by Cyan co-founder Rand Miller.
Sirrus and Achenar:
Sons of Atrus and Catherine, 1/4 D'ni by blood. They grew up to be total bastard sociopaths who will do or say anything to get what they want and have literally no concern for others, including their continued being-alive. I can't say anything for this game but their general themes have included: + Sirrus: Red, refined and deceitful, boundless avarice for material wealth. + Achenar: Blue, wild and violent, enjoys torturing animals and destroying beautiful things.
You are originally called back to meet with Atrus to help him decide impartially whether they've reformed by being alone with their own bastard thoughts for twenty years and nothing to occupy their time except making plans for revenge. I mean, that's what I'd be doing...
Also "impartial" is stretching it because the first time I got one of the bad endings in MYST by trying to be nice to one of these forgeters it terrified me as a little kid. It's good that the proceedings are interrupted by a kidnapping or the moment we started I would immediately suggest escalating to the death penalty.
Yeesha
The product of "I'm sorry our sons are dead to us" love between Atrus and Catherine, sister to the brothers and also 1/4 D'ni. She gets kidnapped early in this game. Either this is extremely traumatizing or she does a lot of opium in the 19th century, because by the year 2005 a hundred and eighty years later, she is completely batstuff. Seriously she babbles about "the least will become the greatest" and "you must walk the path of the shell" and "the tree grows once again" and I don't even loving know what else. She thinks she's some kind of messiah but I think we're just lucky she apparently doesn't know about cats because I'm pretty sure she'd have like 30 of them.
Anyway in this game she still seems pretty normal.
Others?
I don't know! We'll have to wait and see.
About Cyan Worlds
Cyan Worlds is a company apparently run by wacky hippies, and other than a lucky break with MYST, they've never really been able to find their footing. No single developer seems to have tried so many different formats of doing business, from indie Kickstarting to selling their souls to a big publisher to even signing an exclusive deal with GameTap! (Remember GameTap? No you don't. Nobody remembers GameTap.)
After the first two games, which were hugely successful, the millennium ended and pre-rendered 3D graphics could no longer capture people's imaginations as they could before. Or maybe they just couldn't capture the same magic after the 2nd game because one of the two founding brothers left the company forever, who knows. Cyan Worlds has been in a state of permanent financial struggle, and after the production of MYST V it even laid off most of its small number of employees with the real possibility of shutting down for good - only to rehire almost all of them when MYST V did better than expected. Their next project, URU, is a long and mostly-depressing tale. They've recently gone to crowdfunding for a new IP in the same general vein as MYST. I wish them all the best but they seem like terrible businessmen. They are incapable of securing revenue so they continue to exist by remaining tiny and low-overhead.
Anyway, the takeaway here is that MYST IV didn't do much to support them as a company. The point-and-click adventure game was capital-D Dead in 2004 and MYST IV did nothing to change that. Telltale Games would spearhead efforts to revive the genre starting in late 2006 and arguably would still be defibrillating it well into 2009. Arguably it would still be failing as a genre if not for the advent of indie development allowed by Steam and Kickstarter. This is why you've never heard of MYST IV even though it got good reviews.
screw that
This is all copied from Wallet's twitch.
Be aware that there's a delay of 10-15 seconds on the video. This means that you will write your chat regarding X maybe 15 seconds after I saw X, and then you will get my reaction to that chat message 15 seconds after you sent it. If your delay is much larger, refresh the page.
About MYST
Disclaimer: All this stuff is my own impressions mostly out of my own brain with the internet only providing some names and dates and helping me remember some of the lore, so if you disagree with my interpretations then well okay then forget you but I respect your opinion but forget you.
Origins
The original MYST came out in 1993 and was the first popular 3D point-and-click adventure game, unless you count The Journeyman Project which nobody does. It used pre-rendered 2D images and even small bits of video to create the most immersive experience most people had ever had with a computer. Although the graphics were not that good even by pre-rendered standards for the time, they were definitely passable and the main draw was the creativity of the worlds featured in the game. Thanks to its accessibility to non-gamers and its low price point, MYST was the best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims nine years later. You can drop those names the next time someone complains that video games are only about violence or whatever.
Gameplay
MYST games typically involve being presented with a fully-realized world and then having to figure out how things work without them being explained to you, and this constitutes most of the puzzles. For example, in the 2nd game, you eventually had to figure out (with the help of clues like access to a schoolroom) that the native people had a base-5 counting system, so that you could understand numbers when you saw them. Everything makes sense to the people who live there - you're most of the time not working against deliberate security measures or attempts to stop you - but it doesn't make sense to you until you decipher it. Machines with no obvious purpose at first glance and no glyphs or labels on any of the controls are the norm. Keeping a pencil and paper handy in real life is also the norm.
About MYST IV
Without unofficial patches, MYST IV runs at a glorious maximum resolution of 1024x768. Cyan Worlds really wanted to do widescreen, but most monitors weren't widescreen back then, so they added black bands to the top and bottom.
This means that there would be a whole lotta black if I showed the whole game. Instead you're just seeing the main game window, with the black bands cut off. There's an inventory off the bottom edge which includes my camera and anything else I might end up with; but MYST games are famous for having almost no inventory, so this probably won't be an issue for you.
Although the "main" series officially ended with MYST V, I personally see that game as a transition from old to new, from IV to URU. In many ways IV could be considered the "last" "real" MYST game. It was the last game to feature pre-rendered environments (meaning there's no arbitrary free movement through them). It was the last game with The Stranger as the protagonist (it was eventually established that MYST I-IV are 1806-1825, and MYST V brings the series into the present where URU is, set in then-present 2005). It was the last game to focus on Atrus' sons, which is what the first and third games were about, and the first to focus on his daughter, which the series would continue to do. (Since you're curious: The 2nd game was about his dad. These games are always about Atrus' relatives but never about Atrus.)
It was also possibly (we'll see) the last game before the writers completely lost their stuff, because MYST V and URU have the most bizarre "I'm 14 and this is deep" New Age hipster rants I have ever encountered in a video game. If the games had more freedom I seriously would have been some kind of supervillain in URU for all I disagree with the messages it peddles. I guess being raised as the only surviving member of your race for a few hundred years makes you loco in the coco.
Lore/Plot
General Lore
It's hard to shoehorn the lore of the series into fantasy because it's some seriously weird STARGATE-type stuff. Basically there's a secret mostly-lost art of writing in books about places ("ages") that makes them "linking books" where you put your hand on the book and you get teleported to the world described in the book.
The MYST series follows the drama around the last bloodline of the once-proud world-hopping race (indistinguishable from humans) called the D'ni, masters of The Art of writing - specifically the family tree of our buddy Atrus. They typically live to be over 350 years old.
Any further lore is intentionally omitted, but trust me there's people as into this stuff as any Trekkie or Whovian, complete with discussions on the same level as, "no there's totally a good reason for how the light saber knows when to stop!"
The Plot of MYST IV
In the first game, Atrus' two sons are each already in a "prison age" - a book describing a place in which there is absolutely no hope of being able to produce the materials required to write a link out. In the original game these are depicted as pitch-black voids, but I think I remember them showing up in this game as actual places. These were traps left by Atrus to catch richardholes, so you can imagine he was pretty upset when he found out that both his sons were the richardholes. At the end of the game, Atrus apparently destroys the books so that no one can link in to swap places with them or bring them writing tools or whatever.
"Well forget that!" says MYST IV, which basically retcons it to, "actually the sons are the only interesting part of this series so let's bring 'em back." (MYST III was a game entirely about the ruined lives they left behind. That game is about them even though they're not even in it.) So Atrus is all like "I want you to help me decide if I should let my starfish sons off the hook because it's been almost 20 years." Your role is literally to be the judge at a probation hearing.
...Thrilling.
Also we are probably totally unqualified in any sense whatsoever.
Anyway, Atrus' daughter Yeesha gets kidnapped and you have to like, find her, or whatever, so that's supposedly most of the game. I'm going into this one pretty blind, though.
Characters
Read the Lore/Plot section first.
The Stranger:
That's us. This extremely ambiguous and extremely silent protagonist is the player avatar for the first 4 MYST games, all of which are first-person with no working mirrors. (There's a camera in MYST IV but we're not allowed to take a selfie, the bastards.)
In the first game, The Stranger stumbles upon a link to the age of Myst where he gets caught up in the D'ni family drama and helps out basically because he's a nice guy and has nothing better to do, because he has no idea how the forget to get back to Earth on his own. He ends up helping out Atrus, making them "friends".
Atrus:
Not to be confused with Aitrus, his grandfather, as if the lore wasn't already hard enough to figure out. This guy's family is what MYST is all about.
Half Dn'i by blood and one of the only good guys in the whole series, since Atrus has no friends and is Forever Alone, he confuses you being a decent guy with you wanting to be friends, so he immediately is like "hey thanks for fixing that linking book so I'm not trapped here anymore, anyway please help me rescue my wife who's been kidnapped by my dad who literally thinks he's a god who created her and then after that maybe I have time to help you get back to your age [Earth]" and it just keeps going from there. So now in this game he's like sending you letters and asking you to judge whether his sons should be trapped in void dimensions for the rest of their lives. (BTW these guys are going to live another 300 years so don't forget this one up.)
His wife Catherine is a no-show most of the time, and this game is no exception as far as I'm aware. There's not a lot of canon on her but she's generally presumed alive and well for the duration of this game.
Portrayed, as in every game, by Cyan co-founder Rand Miller.
Sirrus and Achenar:
Sons of Atrus and Catherine, 1/4 D'ni by blood. They grew up to be total bastard sociopaths who will do or say anything to get what they want and have literally no concern for others, including their continued being-alive. I can't say anything for this game but their general themes have included: + Sirrus: Red, refined and deceitful, boundless avarice for material wealth. + Achenar: Blue, wild and violent, enjoys torturing animals and destroying beautiful things.
You are originally called back to meet with Atrus to help him decide impartially whether they've reformed by being alone with their own bastard thoughts for twenty years and nothing to occupy their time except making plans for revenge. I mean, that's what I'd be doing...
Also "impartial" is stretching it because the first time I got one of the bad endings in MYST by trying to be nice to one of these forgeters it terrified me as a little kid. It's good that the proceedings are interrupted by a kidnapping or the moment we started I would immediately suggest escalating to the death penalty.
Yeesha
The product of "I'm sorry our sons are dead to us" love between Atrus and Catherine, sister to the brothers and also 1/4 D'ni. She gets kidnapped early in this game. Either this is extremely traumatizing or she does a lot of opium in the 19th century, because by the year 2005 a hundred and eighty years later, she is completely batstuff. Seriously she babbles about "the least will become the greatest" and "you must walk the path of the shell" and "the tree grows once again" and I don't even loving know what else. She thinks she's some kind of messiah but I think we're just lucky she apparently doesn't know about cats because I'm pretty sure she'd have like 30 of them.
Anyway in this game she still seems pretty normal.
Others?
I don't know! We'll have to wait and see.
About Cyan Worlds
Cyan Worlds is a company apparently run by wacky hippies, and other than a lucky break with MYST, they've never really been able to find their footing. No single developer seems to have tried so many different formats of doing business, from indie Kickstarting to selling their souls to a big publisher to even signing an exclusive deal with GameTap! (Remember GameTap? No you don't. Nobody remembers GameTap.)
After the first two games, which were hugely successful, the millennium ended and pre-rendered 3D graphics could no longer capture people's imaginations as they could before. Or maybe they just couldn't capture the same magic after the 2nd game because one of the two founding brothers left the company forever, who knows. Cyan Worlds has been in a state of permanent financial struggle, and after the production of MYST V it even laid off most of its small number of employees with the real possibility of shutting down for good - only to rehire almost all of them when MYST V did better than expected. Their next project, URU, is a long and mostly-depressing tale. They've recently gone to crowdfunding for a new IP in the same general vein as MYST. I wish them all the best but they seem like terrible businessmen. They are incapable of securing revenue so they continue to exist by remaining tiny and low-overhead.
Anyway, the takeaway here is that MYST IV didn't do much to support them as a company. The point-and-click adventure game was capital-D Dead in 2004 and MYST IV did nothing to change that. Telltale Games would spearhead efforts to revive the genre starting in late 2006 and arguably would still be defibrillating it well into 2009. Arguably it would still be failing as a genre if not for the advent of indie development allowed by Steam and Kickstarter. This is why you've never heard of MYST IV even though it got good reviews.
9
Off Topic / Re: Waifu Thread v1.Final title, vote is pure again
« on: February 21, 2015, 02:57:17 PM »
10
Gallery / Re: Brick Built Island (name needed)
« on: December 23, 2013, 12:30:17 PM »
Terrain looks really nice and the cliffs blend in well.
9/10
9/10
11
Gallery / Re: [Halo] [3107 Bricks] Assault on the Control Room (Exterior)
« on: December 05, 2013, 03:58:48 PM »Thanks, that's a great idea. Looks waaaaay better.Make sure to post updated pictures!
12
Gallery / Re: [VIDEO] Car...with souuund.
« on: December 05, 2013, 03:57:33 PM »Only on the Blockland Forums.It sounds weird that it keeps shifting gears. At max speed you should just loop the sound of the engine at max revs.
Can we just stay on topic? I really do need input on ideas for the car to make it completely satisfactory.
13
Gallery / Re: Utopia City - Release page - 100%
« on: December 05, 2013, 12:40:34 PM »pppstThat book... *shudders*
it's a euthanasia clinic
ever read the forgetin Giver
I don't know about you but the lengths they went through to create a "utopian" society almost sound distopian once you find out about the changes.
14
Off Topic / Re: Would you forget, marry, hug, or kill the above user's avatar?
« on: December 05, 2013, 03:09:11 AM »
Hug <3
15
Modification Help / Re: Having a DataBlock inherit the properties of another DataBlock using variables
« on: December 05, 2013, 02:51:33 AM »I'm dying of laughter.
