Readying the first Myst update

Chogon · **Joined:** Wed Aug 02, 2006 7:13 pm **Posts:** 1061

Hi all,

Thanks for all the great response!

Just a heads up. We are readying the first update to the Myst app for the iPhone and iPod touch. It will probably be at least a couple of weeks before it is released (still have testing to do, etc. )

Here is a list of what will be in the first update but it may not be limited to just these fixes:

Improvements in this release"
+ In-game browser to look at help and hint guide. This means the Myst app will display the help and hint web pages inside the game. This will provide quicker and easier access.
+ Reduced app size! To about 560Meg (534Meg download size).

Fixes in this release:
+ Dunny: End game sequence did not recover properly from iPod sleep mode and a crash occurred when linking through the Myst book
+ MYST Island: in Rocket, facing organ: these two cards sometimes appear to overlap and are both seen on the screen at the same time briefly
+ Channelwood Card # 101798 - Elevator handle animation has dark square
+ Channelwood: 3rd elevator works without pipe bridge connected
+ D'ni (general) - No music in D'ni
+ Dunny: If you save the game while waiting for Atrus to return, he never shows up again after restoring
+ Myst - Treegate assets - Hideous strip of bark visible in the middle of the TreeGate
+ Myst - Library- Card # 50330 - Red line on map for Rocket hard to see
+ Myst Card # 73249 touching the open red book again after the movie starts causes a crash sometimes
+ Myst Island: Cabin: furnace sound has loud pop at the beginning of the sound
+ Myst Library background sounds inconsistent
+ Myst card 28554 - AtrusBook2 movie plays after you win, it shouldn't
+ Myst card 50330 - Library's icon is not shown on map.
+ Myst card 62704 - GearGate shown open from tower when closed, if opened before
+ Myst card 64906 - No sky through slot when open.
+ Selenitic - Wind Tunnel Asset has old plaque
+ Selenitic - maze - backtrack button functionality
+ Selenitic - maze - enlarge the hotspot for repeating the sound clue
+ Selenitic - maze - hide the compass when rotating
+ Selenitic card 7990 - Maze Hut door sliders default to bottom
+ Selenitic: Maze runner: the forward, backtrace, rotate left and right buttons need more feedback when pushed
+ Mechanical card # 50628 - concrete wall shows through elevator just before door opens
+ Myst Card # 36943 flame animation missing - pilot light
+ Myst card 36943 - The PSI gauge in the Cabin needs work.
+ Stoneship card # 2347 - battery shows green light after being tripped
+ Mechanical: Offset graphics beneath blue page.
+ White line appears on bottom of end credits, last page.
+ Page grabbed during transition goes off screen
+ Touching beside the closed door of clock tower produces door close sound
+ Selenitic - maze - Maze hub 29 - Backtrack issue
+ Stoneship compass: get stuck after hitting right button and stepping away.
+ Stoneship card 15664 & 23473 - No sound for morphing Linking Book
+ Stoneship - can get pages multiple times
+ Selenitic card 26154 - lit arrow buttons don't update correctly when switching antennas.
+ Selenitic card 26154 - corrections for lit arrows get larger.
+ Selenitic - maze - hub 40 - Infinite loop
+ Selenitic - maze - hub 14 - connection issue
+ Selenitic - maze - Maze hub 10 - Can't go NE
+ Stoneship card # 32359 - water appears drained in stairwell even tho it should be flooded
+ Stoneship Music stops while looking through telescope (card #57878)
+ Option Panel / Web Browser Interface Improvements
+ Myst-Planetarium's "Close door" button enabled when door is closed.
+ Myst card 56926 - After winning the game, red book visible
+ Myst card 83585 - Looking up at Channelwood tree gate (with tree down) causes graphics to split
+ Myst Island card # 32178 - elevator reappears in Channelwood tree gate after going up without you
+ Myst Card # 37618 - Hotspot for matchbox too small
+ Mechanical card 43114 - accessing hut rotation controls without solving the puzzle.
+ Mechanical Card 39144 - elevator unresponsive after leaving the game during up movie
+ Maze runner - get stuck and can't get out or back
+ Channelwood: Saving at water valves gets you stuck. Pop command causing problems
+ Channelwood card 44320 - light handle used when Elevator 3 is down with door open
+ Phone call during link to Selenitic cause return to black screen after call

iPhone OS 3.0 beta fixes:
+ Unable to skip movies during playback (beta 3.0)
+ Myst: Cabin safe Matchbox causes crash (3.0 beta)

Mystdee · **Posted:** Sat May 23, 2009 3:06 am

already busy testing :wink:

Gandhar · **Posted:** Sat May 23, 2009 3:54 am

Just a reply from one of the others...Keep doing what you gotta do, we can maintain..../Gandhar changes his name to MR OBVIOUS

Darn it...it didn't work...What's wrong with this game anyway????

Artic_Wagon · **Joined:** Fri Oct 13, 2006 6:00 pm **Posts:** 4095

Gandhar wrote:

Just a reply from one of the others...Keep doing what you gotta do, we can maintain..../Gandhar changes his name to MR OBVIOUS

Darn it...it didn't work...What's wrong with this game anyway????

Is this a "serious" comment ?

Christian Walther · **Posted:** Sat May 23, 2009 8:49 am

Cool! Looks like most of the bugs I reported are already fixed. I'll make sure to re-test once it's out. The reduced size should be well received by those who have complained about it. Keep up the good work, and we appreciate the progress report!

cjed · **Joined:** Tue May 05, 2009 12:28 pm **Posts:** 11

Great ! Considering the huge space gain (about 250 Mb), and since I suppose images and videos cannot be reduced more, does it mean that the musics (and some sounds) will finally be compressed as well (AAC, from masters), instead of raw original sounds and musics (uncompressed 22Khz mono if I remember well), and with better quality ?

Thanks

Cubkyle · **Joined:** Wed Nov 08, 2006 4:00 am **Posts:** 347

Wow, that's a lot of fixes!

woxel1 · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 2:06 am **Posts:** 120

I had a minor bug in my playthrough where none of the linking books from Myst had animated panels. I see (thanks to Riveal) that the movie resources are in the game, but the linking panels appeared static. The fly-bys played as usual, but they didn't loop like I expected them to: I was ushered into an age after the first playthrough.

Christian Walther · **Posted:** Sun May 24, 2009 10:14 am

cjed wrote:

Great ! Considering the huge space gain (about 250 Mb), and since I suppose images and videos cannot be reduced more, does it mean that the musics (and some sounds) will finally be compressed as well […]?

727 - 534 = 193 in my book, not 250?

I wrote:

The reduced size should be well received by those who have complained about it.

… if you openly communicate that the reduction is (in large part, at least) due to correction of a mistake that was in the first release, and not due to reduced quality.

I fear that this is incomplete or vague information that will lead to clueless people exclaiming "OMG they compressed Myst to death to save 190 MB". (But don't take me seriously on this until I've seen for myself, I don't want to make any unfounded accusations here.)

woxel1 wrote:

I had a minor bug in my playthrough where none of the linking books from Myst had animated panels. I see (thanks to Riveal) that the movie resources are in the game, but the linking panels appeared static. The fly-bys played as usual, but they didn't loop like I expected them to: I was ushered into an age after the first playthrough.

As far as I can tell, that's the intended behavior (necessitated by the constraints of the iPhone platform).

cjed · **Joined:** Tue May 05, 2009 12:28 pm **Posts:** 11

Christian Walther wrote:

727 - 534 = 193 in my book, not 250?

Oups, sorry, I used 770 instead of 727... :-)

Christian Walther wrote:

… if you openly communicate that the reduction is (in large part, at least) due to correction of a mistake that was in the first release, and not due to reduced quality.

I fear that this is incomplete or vague information that will lead to clueless people exclaiming "OMG they compressed Myst to death to save 190 MB". (But don't take me seriously on this until I've seen for myself, I don't want to make any unfounded accusations here.)

Sorry if I was misleading, I said the opposite in fact : I really don't think the devs will compress anything to death to save 200Mb (in fact images and videos still seem to use the best compression algorithm available, so we couldn't do better), I just think the sounds and music will use AAC from high quality masters - and stereo music - (instead of raw 22Khz mono from the original game). Then we will have a far more better audio quality, wtih less space used (a 16 bits/22Khz mono sample uses more than 500 kbits/s... we could save half the size and get near lossless quality with AAC 256 kbits/s - if high quality masters are used that time).
... but from the link you pointed it seems we will get only the same audio materials (and with bugs fixes), subversion version control files (.svn) will just be removed (these are useful only for devs).

Mystdee · **Posted:** Sun May 24, 2009 1:45 pm

I am testing the updated version and it still looks awesome. . . . No loss of beauty or quality at all. :lol:

cjed · **Joined:** Tue May 05, 2009 12:28 pm **Posts:** 11

Mystdee wrote:

I am testing the updated version and it still looks awesome. . . . No loss of beauty or quality at all. :lol:

Thank you Mystdee for the info, it is was I supposed (but not what I would have dreamed of).

Except the unuseful svn files, we can only gain space by doing rework on the audio part. Raw 16 bits/22Khz mono sound requires about 700 kbits/s. At least we could expect work on the musics, to have instead AAC (and stereo) versions from the masters (that were used for the Myst audio CD release). For sounds I agree the original versions are ok, and I suppose there isn't any high quality masters. However they could also be compressed (they wouldn't suffer too much). I suppose we could then gain about 150-200 Mb, and benefit from better musics and/or sounds quality at the same time !

I'm also waiting for a non-streched mode for pictures (original size is 544*333, and iPhone size is 480*320... so the strecthed down trees - horizontally - in Myst Island). Then I wonder if the pictures were rendered again for the iPhone version, or original masters (that were probably tiffs with a better depth than the versions that had to fit on a CD) were just compressed using jpeg (that wasn't available when the original game was released). Videos have been rendered again to fit well with the deeper images colors, that is a nice work !

That is just some ideas, I think some work on the audio part could complement nicely the great work that has been done visually for that version (I agree the visual is the most important for an iPhone adventure game if we use the built-in speaker - that is mono... but better and stereo music using recent codecs could be nice when using the headphone. Moreover it wouldn't be too much work, and would allow even more space gain). :-)

Mystdee · **Posted:** Sun May 24, 2009 7:48 pm

cjed, they probably did what they had to, or perhaps preferred to do, with the sound, however, you can submitt a ticket with your suggestions and feature requests, and the Devs will review it and if they agree, and it can be done, they just might do it. . . . . here's the place to do this . . . http://support.cyanworlds.com/

cjed · **Joined:** Tue May 05, 2009 12:28 pm **Posts:** 11

Thank you Mystdee, I think you are right, they probably did the best they could with the materials they had, or perhaps they wanted to provide exactly the same experience with the sounds. But as images and videos were enhanced, either they thought original sounds and musics formats were ok, or they hadn't access to better masters (could be also due to some copyright stuff with the music CD editor).
I'm confident the developers will take that in consideration and will do their best if they can and are allowed to. They still did a great job (far more better than the DS version).

cheers,

CrisGer · **Posted:** Mon May 25, 2009 2:24 am

Cyan always does the very best they can with resources and time and budget, it is a wonderful new breath of life for the first game of the series, and I am glad they accomplished this port so successfully.

Readying the first Myst update

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