Screeshots from MYST IV Revelations

[Syclone1]

Is anyone else having trouble getting the big trailer to run? Im running QT 6.5.1 Pro and says that its a file that QT doesnt understand? Is there a certan codec that I need of something? BTW I also tried it in WMP9 and no go also.

-dave

[Biohazard]

Hi guys,
Many thanks to both of you for your long descriptive messages and your dedication to the Myst series.

I like the way you see puzzles, in different ways sometimes, and how this is linked to your own conceipt of pleasure and leisure. Myst is all about that. Different people enjoying different experiences by playing the same game.
In that case, our game will probably fit more your expectations than Exile did, even if Exile did not deeserve the Myst series at all.

But for more information about these topics (puzzles, puzzle difficulty, hint system, in-game features, story plots, mysteries, evolution till Myst Island, etc), I invite you to visit http://www.mystobsession.com.
That's a big community of dedicated people. Some members of the team (Lead game designer) are roaming on the forums of MO and many many big fans are there too, ready to discuss every aspect of the whole series (And plus, because they all love adventures games to the death).

I have a question about the fantastic URU : Ages Beyond Myst, it has a 3d engine, so was the graphics job different? (Your team did URU, right?)

I guess so. But Myst 4 is developped in house at Ubisoft Montreal and Uru was done at Cyans HQ (original Myst dev). Making a game is a quite long process (2 to 3 years sometimes).

I would like to know what method was used for indirect illumination secondary bounces, (direct or photon mapping),

IMAP all the way. Pre-rendered very often, always or almost always when rendering full-screen cinematics.
Some will say it's a pity, but after some months of tests, we decided, because our renders were using many lighting tweaks, that we didn't need secondary bounces. 2ndary bounces tend to complicate the GI solution and in some cases, add more noise if the settings are too low, in animation (and guess what, we had many sort of little graphic glitchs and problems to solve, due to the amount of various data we had to put together).
That wasn't a too big problem for a whole environment rendering, but for objects composited automatically in real time, later, yes. With 2dary bounces, light and shadows tend to escape unpredicably far from your objects (on mattes), and we could not expand the surfaces of these animated textures (size / datarate) too much without control. So we cut the 2dary bounce.

About modelling, you use max? or some kinda pluggin?

Let's say Vray is a plug-in of one 3d package only for now. I cannot say much about it because I need the word of my boss but you may put the missing words easilly here. We've done an heavy use of this package, and modelled almost everything in polygons.

No problem, there's no magic in these settings. I'll post some presets tomorrow from the office. But do not forget that these settings are in many parts used for our kind of environments and won't do the job in your case.
We are using many ''by-the-book'' and ''voodoo'' tricks with our ''3d package'' and Vray to spare memory, digest 5M polys, 1GB of bitmaps, run on OUR PCs, and so on (and I won't provide all of them, nonono. )
So some of our compromises may seem useless to you until you have a scene to render like the one in Myst (And I wish you good luck in that case too, lol. )

Cheers guys, I'll love to read your hardcore comments about the game when you'll put your hands on it.

[Biohazard]

Is anyone else having trouble getting the big trailer to run?

Some few ppl had this problem.
They solved it by redownloading it, as far as I know.

But in the case the faulty .Mov is now on an internet cache somewhere between the site and your ISP, that may be tricky to get a clean version (Mirror?).
I hope it will run fine in your case.

[suitaloon]

Let's say Vray is a plug-in of one 3d package only for now. I cannot say much about it because I need the word of my boss but you may put the missing words easilly here.

Starts with an m?

[Biohazard]

Lol,
That might be a smart bet indeed. Mexsi?

[graphicsgriffin]

Thanks Gwen for your kind words, and for making our life full of gaming fun.

Wish you good luck with your team work.

Your's

[jujubee]

Wow, I'd love to get that in a near future. What I've seen at the last Siggraph was some real time GI and raytracing prediction and the guys were already getting a first bounce at 10fps with 10.000 polys.

I was under the impression that all DirectX 9 cards had the capability to support realtime HDRI. Doom III, Half-Life 2, UT 3 Engine, (and COD?) 10fps is painful but still amazing nonetheless.

Nevertheless, your screenshots are flawless- gotta love those environments.

[Biohazard]

You are welcome graphicsgriffin.

Jujubee, our target video card is a Geforce MX and our game is supposed to be ported to Macintosh as well... But there are some features in our game to simulate projection of shadow over our environments (tweak tweak)...

Yep, 10 fps was a bit slow, but I stayed voiceless for a moment !!

[Erik de Graaf]

Well, i didn't read all the posts here but i just want to say that i also played all the three games, and i don't play them because one has more realistic renderings then the other one, but i play them for the fantastic environments. You guys have so much imagination, how do you come up with these fantastic worlds. Seeing these images of new worlds (ages) makes me want to run to the store as soon as it comes out.

I have a myst III collectors edition with a strategy guide. Will myst IV come out with one as well ?

Keep up making these great games.

Erik

[Biohazard]

Yes, you can expect both a gold edition and a collector edition summing up all 4 Myst games in a near future (Am I telling things that I don't know for sure? ...Yes. ) .

But I think Ubi will release Myst 4 alone at first (I'm not in the sales department, so take this with some spoonfull of salt).

I've got problems to make ml_vray_preset manager work theses days. That's the format I wanted to give in order to serve so imap settings.
If somebody has a clue (the rollups a running, but then, I can't open any "browse" button to select and Imap on disk until I close MexSi). Gosh, I did it again...

[The.Magician]

What a great work you have done with these screenshots!
I love all of them! And I am definetly going to buy this game (as I did all the others from the Myst-Series) .... Each one is a big peace of art and the new one well be, too!

Are you still thinking about posting some VRay presets? I am really looking foreward to those!

[mike.edel]

I've got problems to make ml_vray_preset manager work theses days. That's the format I wanted to give in order to serve so imap settings.
If somebody has a clue (the rollups a running, but then, I can't open any "browse" button to select and Imap on disk until I close MexSi). Gosh, I did it again...

I've had problems running the script in max6 at all
had to edit it in some places (obviously there is no draft renderer to assign to any more so that's not working...)
the max5 version is still working fine over here...

I mailed my version to marc lorenz but he said he had not gotten any complaints before - concluding that there was only a few people using it after all.
I can send you my version if you want...

Mike