A number of notes on the Age introduced yesterday.

The Age itself

It truly is quite gorgeous. While many of the elements are clearly just a variation of Eder Kemo, the different color scheme and the various minor additions (such as the slowly falling leaves, the bird ambience music, and the apparently improved water fountain animation) make it far more than just a rehash. It’s a joy just walking around in it, immersing oneself in the vastness.

Its implications

Second, like I said yesterday, it marks the first big update to Uru Live; something we never actually got to witness during the late 2003 / early 2004 days of the Prologue. This is exciting in that it proves that the model of “one big thing a month, several minor things during it” works out just fine. Some could argue that we don’t know just how far ahead Cyan is in additional content, but we do know for a fact that Eder Tsogahl, Ahnonay and Er’Cana are coming up (quite possibly in that order); plus there’s those minor areas such as the Spy Room (with Douglas Sharper’s 2004 journal on the Baron’s Office’s desk), parts of the Great Shaft and one of the Eder Tomahn rest stops (with Dr. Watson’s journal), Rolep / the Great Tree Pub / the Watcher’s Sanctuary / they’ll-never-run-out-of-names-for-one-and-the-same-thing, additional Bahro Caves, and so on. That’s three complete Ages and therefore three months, as well as smaller content to fill for in between. Then there’s Ages that have been hinted at, like Negilahn and Rahtevnee (here’s some concept art the bottom right one). Not to mention, of course, the distinct possibility that they’ll wrap some or all of the End of Ages content into this.

It seems a given that they would like, at some point, to close the gap between the Cleft (Uru: Ages Beyond Myst), the volcano’s top and the immediate tunnels (End of Ages), the Great Shaft (Uru: To D’ni and, mostly, End of Ages), several Eder Tomahntee (one in Uru: To D’ni, four? in End of Ages), Ae’gura (Uru: To D’ni / Uru Live), K’veer (tiny parts in Myst and Riven, big part in End of Ages, smaller part in Uru: the Path of the Shell), the neighborhoods, and so on. All of those, crazy as it may seem, are supposed to be in one and the same Age, and within a radius of mere miles, to boot. It would be impossibly inconvenient, of course, to actually walk from one end to the other, but if Cyan were to open up the possibility, I am positive some extreme fans couldn’t resist doing so anyway. Now, as I understand it, the current engine uses “Districts” (whereby a “District” can be an Age as well as an area within; Cleft, Eder Delin, Gahreesen, the Kadish Gallery and the Ferry Terminal are all “Districts”) to logically separate greater areas that, normally, cannot be crossed. But the Kadish Gallery and the Ferry Terminal are noteworthy in that, as of a few weeks ago, they make an exception: you can actually walk from one to the other; you don’t have to link. What does this mean internally?

A few months ago, I saw a demo of a new game; Alan Wake. I don’t usually watch such stuff. Prejudiced as I am, I expect the storyline not to be worth a dime, and the overall result to bore me. Yet, this particular demo made me excited and, at the same time, curious. While Intel naturally wanted to stress how the game leverages having multiple CPU cores (their assertion that any piece of software requires multiple cores, of course, is technical nonsense; it merely takes huge advantage of the scalability and acceleration they provide), what interests me more is the combination of massively detailed scenery with a simply humongous single world. The speaker says:

We’re using the multiple cores here to stream data seamlessly in the background, and also, we’re using the CPU, of course, to prepare data for the GPU to render.

Emphasis mine: this is what’s noteworthy. Right now, as far as I can tell, Uru Live pre-loads entire “Districts” during linking. That’s not only why linking takes quite a while in Ae’gura; it could also prove to be a severe limitation in the future. I.e., unlike Alan Wake, Uru Live to my knowledge simply cannot load (“stream”) additional data while you’re in the Age, based on where you’re actually heading. It has to predict every direction you could possibly go, which ultimately means it has to pre-fetch a lot.

Now let’s look back at the possibility of merging everything that’s supposed to be on Earth (surface or not) into one single “Age”: no linking required to get from anywhere to anywhere within it (deliberately separated areas such as the Spy Room excluded). What would this mean in Uru Live terms? If I’m not mistaken, it would mean for Uru Live to load hundreds of Megabytes (if not several Gigabytes) of data into RAM, and to keep it there until you link elsewhere, no matter how remote the possibility that you’ll actually go to a relevant place. This works just about fine right now, but I can’t fathom how it’s gonna work when bigger Ages come. Does this mean they won’t? Because that would not only be a shame; it would also affect the immersion. Uru Live is supposed to be the last word in adventure games: the ever-growing chapter of Myst with virtually infinite possibilities. Explorers playing together, interacting with each other, adding their own content, always progressing yet never reaching an end. Uru Live is supposed to give Atrus’s over-quoted “Perhaps the ending has not yet been written” phrase a wholly new meaning: it hasn’t been written and never will be. This is not your $50 computer game or your $15 novel; this is an every-evolving world. One could almost call it a “second life”. Nah, discard that thought.

Realistically, there are many limitations to how far it can go. But at the same time, a lot of them keep in becoming more and more negligible. Computer specs keep on getting pushed further and further, with seemingly no end in sight. So probably, in a few years, we’re gonna laugh about my above concern and say “a few Gigabytes? So what?”, for that will soon enough be the low-end configuration of a computer. I would know; my first one had 64 Kilobytes; my current MacBook Pro has 16777216 times as much: 1 Gigabyte. Because of this quick pace of technological advancement, I’ll never truly understand those who keep complaining about high-level APIs that make for software which isn’t quite as optimized as it could be: who really cares when it makes for far more readable code?

(Tangent. Sorry.)

Despite the continuous increase in how far Uru Live can push a computer’s specs, I still feel it would make for a great improvement if it would avoid the current concept of pre-fetching data. It should be possible to reasonably predict where a person is heading to, and to load data (“stream it live”) accordingly. Again: not primarily to shorten the initial load time (though that sure makes for a nice side effect), but to allow for huge Ages while keeping RAM usage within reasonable boundaries.

Eder Delin itself, of course, is rather small. Not Nexus-microscopic. It doesn’t, however, take long to get from one end to the other. That’s okay, but I hope it isn’t a sign of things to come. Since you’re getting tired of my Earth/D’ni example, how about another one, Teledahn? Or Gahreesen? Will we always have to deal with the additional panels that their linking books have, or will we actually be able to walk, say, from Gahreesen’s second island’s interior (through the normal link-in point) to its top (through the alternate one from the prison cell) and back? If we had a boat, could we get from Teledahn’s “normal” parts to the strange stump? Or back? If not, why not? The crux of my argument: technical reasons should never be in the way, and I hope Cyan is already developing a newer client/server system where, in this particular context, they won’t be.

This concern for the far future aside, Eder Delin makes for a compelling entry into the concept of delivering new content to the explorers (and, thus, soon the paying subscribers) on a frequent, mostly regular basis. It always appears to introduce a new story arc, though little of that is actually visible at the time.

(Spoilers in this paragraph; if you want to enjoy the Age to its fullest and figure its puzzles out on your own, don’t read.) It isn’t just the first Age delivered exclusively through the “Live” mechanism and concept, though: it’s also the first one that works exclusively in a multiplayer context. And radically so: two explorers aren’t enough; one group of five claims they managed, but ideally, you’ll want to have as many as eight. It’s a timing-based puzzle, so you’d theoretically be able to do it all on your own, except you wouldn’t possibly be fast enough (good luck!).

This currently doesn’t quite work as intended: with eight people, it can already get somewhat lagged, and with more, it gets very hard to play. That’ll get better over time as Cyan works out the kinks, but it’s still rather unfortunate, though likely unavoidable, that we have to deal with such glitches. What’s more interesting is the idea itself.

I’ve always been more of a solitary person (I can hear many of you thinking “duh?” right now), and that extends to something like Myst as well; I enjoy working in the fan community with people I know well, but more often than not, I feel more comfortable by myself. Whether it’s a trust issue or whatever else is besides the point here; this is about how you enjoy exploring an Age the most, and I’ve found that there is a large variety of preferences to that. Some solve puzzles, others don’t; some keep stopping to enjoy the scenery, others don’t; some have more fun playing together and discussing it with each other, others don’t. For Eder Delin, one of those three choices is gone: you can choose how much to focus on the scenery, and you can skip the puzzles by reading a hint guide or downright walkthrough, but you simply don’t get to play alone, nor in a small group. Eight persons? That takes some time to get together. They all have to be online at the same time. They all have to have Uru Live running. They all need to be in your neighborhood, or you all need to find a common neighborhood, because otherwise, you’ll wind up in different instances of Eder Delin. This is not your opportunity to say: “I’ve played it a dozen times, I can speedrun this thing!” You don’t get to do that; you rely on others far too much.

And it’s not like you administrate the Age’s instance, or something. You can’t kick someone out. You could ask people to leave, but arguably, it’s not even your place to even do that. Almost inevitably, you might run into people that are also in your instance but not only won’t help you, but might actually be in the way and jeopardize your attempt at solving the puzzles.

This type of coordination, of course, exists in other MMO games. I see Maik participating in a World of Warcraft raid every now and then. He’ll use voice chat with Teamspeak; there’ll be a guild leader who gives commands, and there’s several dozens(!) of guild members (including Maik) who follow. And the concept works. It can be done. But every time, there will unequivocally be at least one thing that doesn’t go quite as planned. Just like in real life, you rely on so many people that at least one of them will inadvertently do a mistake, and you rely on so many factors that at least one of them won’t be foreseen. Perhaps that’s part of the fun of it.

For Uru, and for the Myst community at large, that’s still mostly new. There were various activities you could do in groups in Uru before, but this is the first big, “official”, “essential” one. You have to have a number of people. The timing has to be right, within seconds. You can use text chat (though that might waste too much time), voice chat in Uru itself and voice chat through Teamspeak. But whatever it takes, coordination is vital, and it’s something that many will have to learn, whether they like to or not.

And what if they don’t?

They’ll be locked out. But then, at what point is it still okay to be locked out from some of Uru Live’s aspects and “perks”, and at what point is it pushing it? Should explorers always succumb to the underlying grand vision from many years ago, or are they entitled to say “hey, this isn’t working for me” without unsubscribing? If influencing the overall storyline is to be one of our many powers, can we steer it towards a direction where people who prefer to explore in solitude and people who prefer to explore in sizeable, organized groups can happily live together in one and the same virtual reality? Can Cyan roll out enough content that both types of people will be fully pleased? Or is that simply not realistic?

It might not be. Uru Live might just not be for everyone, not even for every Myst fan. Some of its concept is so one-of-a-kind that, for many people, it might be a little too out there.

Rehearsal Abuse

Naturally, Eder Delin is also the first major piece of content that had been thoroughly tested not just within Cyan’s own QA team, but also in their small-scale, NDA-based content test, the Rehearsal. Members of it were picked based on prior activity (quality and quantity of filed issue tickets) in various beta tests as well as community involvement, though people are also welcome to apply on their own for the position and might have a chance to be added. (I’m not in it, I thought about it and concluded that, ultimately, I wouldn’t want to be. Of course, you’d be inclined to take that with a grain of salt as, if I were part of it, I would have to legally deny so.)

The Rehearsal, assuming it still works the same way it did (or was supposed to) in 2003, where I did participate (but no particularly noteworthy content ever came out of it), is basically a wholly separate version of Uru Live. Its own slightly modified client, its own network of servers, and, of course, its own content. The content in Rehearsal ultimately reflects what is to become the content in “Live” a few days or weeks later. In other words, while most people received the final, public version of Eder Delin yesterday, Rehearsal testers did so at least days ago; more likely a week or two, if not even a month. They evaluate the content not only based on bugs (just like in any sort of pre-release test), but also in giving feedback on whether the puzzles make sense, are easy enough, too easy or too difficult, whether the storyline is approachable, too simple or too complex, and so on. It’s a great way for Cyan to anticipate how the greater community is likely to react to the roll-out; further, it gives them the opportunity to make some final changes.

I think it was maybe a week and a half ago when I was warned by a Cyan employee that a Rehearsal was giving hints to people, thus being on the verge of breaching their NDA. If you take away the legal side of a non-disclosure agreement violation, there are several other implications to this. Depending on how close you are to Cyan (several long-time community members are friends with employees; most Rehearsal members, though, probably hardly even know them), this could be a breach not just of a legal contract, but of very personal trust, and depending on your moral composition, this may be far more severe than just breaching a contract – though, make no mistake, Cyan and especially GameTap (Turner! Time Warner!) may very well inflict some legal pain on you, especially when the information you leak is particularly obvious and comprehensive.

It’s not just about legal and personal issues, though; you could also be under the wrong assumption that you’re doing the community a favor. That may be true when you do it in private, to specific people, as to say (very vaguely): “there’s some exciting stuff coming up soon”. You’re not supposed to be telling them that, especially because they aren’t supposed to know that you’re under NDA at all, no matter how close you are to them. But it’s nowhere near as precarious and deplorable as sending out detailed information, perhaps even screenshots (videos?), puzzle solutions, and so on. That’s not what this person did, as I understand it; I’m only giving you the two extremes. An NDA breach can have various levels of extensiveness, a scale from accidental to deliberate, and, of course, the concept of prior offense or lack thereof. Cyan is unlikely to take any steps when hardly any noteworthy information got out, only a small number of people received it, and the “offender” didn’t mean to do it, has never done it before and vows never to do it again. Setting up uruliverumors.com and posting a regular stream of screenshots and in-depth descriptions, on the other hand, may very well get you in trouble, and likely should. The particular offense that Cyan employee brought up to me, though, was to be expected; this kind of thing simply happens, and I believe the person got off with a warning, in the end.

But what if someone doesn’t breach the NDA, yet still leverages the information protected by it? How do I mean? Say you run a website that provides walkthroughs and screenshots, or you’re part of the team that administers/moderators/operates it. Thanks to the Rehearsal, you get very early access to new content, and get a very early chance to test it thoroughly, figure out its puzzles (probably even thanks to the help of other fellow Rehearsal testers) and make screenshots of the whole thing. You have plenty of time to do this. Before it makes it to the Live server, you can’t release any of the results, of course. But when it does? Tada! You can easily be first!

Unfair? Arguably so; everyone I’ve asked agrees that it is. An NDA breach? No, probably not. And yet, ironically, you do “breach”, or circumvent, the very mechanism the NDA exists for: due to your early access, you leverage a competitive advantage, where your “competitors” are other websites that also might publish walkthroughs and screenshots, but, because none of their team happens to be on the Rehearsal, they don’t get the same early access as you do. Again: when the content does make it to the Live server, you’ll be way ahead of everyone else. They’ll just get started figuring out the puzzles and making the screenshots, let alone write any hint guides or walkthroughs.

Within hours of Eder Delin’s release, one website had a complete hint guide and walkthrough of it. It prominently advertised this on its front page, naturally. To be fair, the two screenshots it provides have been available without any NDA at all for a long time; they were promotional material (with one shot dating back, if I’m not mistaken, all the way to May 2006). So they did not take advantage of the screenshot aspect, but I’m very convinced (and I’m not alone) that virtually all of their hint guide and walkthrough was drafted, written and tidied up long before yesterday. Would it have been possible to do all this within those mere hours? Perhaps. The puzzles aren’t that tricky; once you get the general idea, the hardest part is in finding enough people and, as explained above, coordinating them and the timing. But I still find it very hard to believe that they didn’t exploit their head start (and again, I’m not alone in this).

So is this an NDA breach? A defense attorney could probably argue, easily, that they didn’t really publish anything before the public release. But that’s not what the NDA is about. The NDA is there to prevent a situation of competitive advantage. In particular, if a competing game developer or publisher were to have employees or “friends” of employees in the Rehearsal, they could learn from Cyan’s “craft” early on, before Cyan is even done: they wouldn’t even just see the results, but also some information of how Cyan achieved them. That situation may sound exaggerated and unlikely, but in reality, that is an example of the original purpose of such an NDA. Now, a fan website about a product of Cyan’s isn’t exactly a competitor; uncritical as they tend to be, they are arguably quite the opposite (they’re fans, after all). But in addition to wanting to protect its own interests, Cyan likely wants to ensure fair play for all of its fans, preventing giving any of them an unfair advantage (though that may not always be avoidable). And in this case, the NDA either didn’t have that purpose (I doubt that), failed to exercise that purpose (it appears so), or did exercise it, but Cyan has let the instance slide (could be), or has yet to decide on whether they wish to take any action (perhaps this one’s most likely).

It is, of course, possible to have invite a representative from any major fan website to the Rehearsal. That way, all the big sites would have the information early and could do one and the same thing: prepare walkthroughs and more weeks before anyone actually gets to see them, or the relevant content. But I am sure you can see the problem here: that’s even more unfair to “smaller” websites, which have to fight for growth and relevance (if they wish) as it is, and now would be explicitly excluded. Moreover, defining how big is big enough is not only bound to lead to battles; it’s also simply something Cyan wouldn’t want to and shouldn’t have to deal with.

Therefore, the proper solution here is to disallow this practice, plain and simple. The purpose of the Rehearsal is not to give anyone early access that they can leverage for their own purposes, be it entertainment or preparing a website. It is to put some final touches to an otherwise nearly finished piece of content, days or weeks before it is to be let out to the masses. With one website already having begun abusing this concept just so they can do “FIRST POST!”, I can only hope that Cyan realize how grossly unfair this is to other websites, especially smaller ones that don’t have and might never have the resources to pull something like this off.

Looking Forward

I don’t want to end this post in a sour taste. I’m really very happy, actually, that Cyan has finally fulfilled another aspect of the vision they have had for so long. Things are really beginning to unravel. Just a year ago, I would have been immensely skeptical whether Cyan would actually get this far ever again. And two or three years ago? Shortly after Prologue’s untimely ending? Hah! Things sure weren’t looking bright.

They are now. Sure, we’ve had some ugly final days of the liaison concept, but then it took a turn for the better with D’net, the D’ni Network. (I was gonna write about this, but no promises. Bit of a loaded topic.) Sure, we haven’t launched yet (but virtually have a long time ago), and we might run into subscription/payment/account problems, especially in non-GameTap countries such as the-one-where-yours-truly-resides, otherwise known as Germany. And sure, for Cyan, GameTap and the community, there’s still many, many problems to fix, concepts to work out, future outlooks to ponder. But overall, I’m having fun. If you aren’t, you need to get out more. And if you got the impression from most of this post that I’m sad or upset; not at all, I just love to deeply analyze something and give readers something to think about from what may be an unexpected perspective.

Uru Lives. Cyan does and the community does, and GameTap, for the most part, has proven a respectable partner that – no offense to the people I know at Ubisoft – simply “gets it” a lot, lot better, or at least gives Cyan and the community the freedom and space that they need. And that’s something worth celebrating. And pondering.

Long post? I’m done!