Here’s the contraption in action with zero video editing, CGI or other trickery:

(YouTube link in case the above embedded video doesn’t work for you)

And here’s what the original looks like in-game:

(YouTube link in case the above embedded video doesn’t work for you)

There’s no CGI or video editing in the above video, it’s straight off my phone. There’s also no head-tracking cameras or special glasses or other tricks involved. Unlike the game version, the same image is visible no matter where you stand around it, and this works for unlimited simultaneous viewers. A whole crowd can stand around it and everyone will see not only the same image of a person, they’ll see that person making direct eye contact with them. This is actually far more useful than if it was just a floating head in space like in the game, where 3/4 people get a bad view as they’re looking at the back or sides of the head. It’s full-colour and full-HD.

How it works: the Andotrope

Readers are probably most interested in the Andotrope, which is the main mechanism in the middle that creates the omnidirectional holographic display. It consists of two specially-chosen tablets sandwiched back-to-back inside a black cylinder with viewing slits in front of the tablets, and the whole cylinder rotates at high speed (up to 1200RPM for mine, which gives an effective 40fps). Both tablets synchronise their output, effectively doubling the frame-rate by displaying two images per rotation.

Andotrope exploded diagram. As the mechanism rotates, your view through the red slits sweeps across the displays, which ensures everyone in all directions ends up with a view of the full screen.

Andotrope with the external black cylinder removed, showing the internal components.

The effect is similar to a Zoetrope. Basically, I’ve brought a 150-year-old children’s toy into the 21st century. Because this doesn’t quite meet the definition of a Zoetrope any more, and because I couldn’t find anyone else who successfully pulled this off before, I’m calling any display you could build that’s similar to this by the generic term Andotrope. Here are the key differences between an Andotrope and a Zoetrope:

• An Andotrope uses relatively few screens and can show infinitely-long animations, while a Zoetrope uses a dozen or more still pictures and is limited to showing only a second or so of looping animation.
• An Andotrope’s screens & slits are arranged so that you don’t see multiple animations at once, while in a Zoetrope you can usually see through multiple slits to see multiple animations at a time.
• Because it uses fewer screens & slits, an Andotrope rotates much faster to maintain an animation, rotating tens of times per second, while a Zoetrope might rotate only once per second.
• All combined, the main purpose of an Andotrope is to provide an omnidirectional, bill-boarding holographic* video to multiple simultaneous viewers in all directions.

It’s not an exaggeration to say I couldn’t find any other examples of people successfully pulling this off before; I searched to the literal last page in Google Image Search for terms like “Zoetrope LCD”, “spinning LCD”, “tube POV display”, “cylindrical POV LCD” etc and turned up nothing. Because of this, I’m happy to announce that this display tech is now covered under Patent Application 63/511,582!

It seems I’ve accidentally invented new technology in my quest to make a video game prop more screen-accurate. Um. Oops?

This kind of display has a wide range of applications. I’m going to get a little promotional here but imagine being in a boardroom meeting video call and the boss is in the centre of the table, so everyone sees a clear view of them. Imagine a restaurant table with this in the middle, a digital assistant taking your orders, playing games with you until your food arrives. Imagine this on your kitchen island table showing the weather, currently playing music & other information from your Virtual Assistant, viewable no matter where you’re standing. Imagine those cylindrical advertising posters/screens, but everyone all around always sees the intended view. Imagine theme parks with these futuristic displays around the place. Imagine board games with friends, with this in the middle of the table, the dungeon master talking & pointing to YOU. Anywhere people are in a group where you currently look at a display to one side, this puts the display in the middle of the group. It’s effective. It’s practical. It’s achievable. And it’s relatively cheap.

If your company is interested in commercialising or integrating this tech into your systems, contact me to arrange licensing (obviously just the Andotrope part, not the video game replica parts like the brass cage or base).

(YouTube link in case the above embedded video doesn’t work for you)

There’s lots of fine-tuning to make the visual effect actually work, and selecting the right displays is crucial. I used the Blackvue Tab 10 as it was a good compromise of all requirements. Most important is that the displays must have almost zero flicker since any flicker becomes visible at high speeds, which unfortunately rules out most OLED and a lot of LCD screens that either purposefully flicker the pixels/backlight at a high frequency for dimming or their driving circuitry has a slight voltage ripple that’ll show up. You also want the brightest displays you can get, as a thinner viewing slit means a crisper but darker image – a 5-degree viewing slit means you only see 1/36th the display’s original brightness. Picking displays that are as light as possible makes balancing them easier, and as thin as possible is good for reducing the distortion curve in the final video. Finally, they need to be rugged enough to survive what’s effectively the speeds of a washing machine spin cycle; this is an occasion where devices with poor repairability that have been fully glued shut can sometimes be preferable.

The Andotrope display without the Imager’s brass cage, demonstrating that the final display you see is actually curved. The video is Catherine’s Escape from Riven.

To get the best contrast ratio possible, the outside of the cylinder is coated in Musou Black VL fabric as a compromise to find the blackest black that will hold up to the centripetal forces. My experiments with paints revealed that they didn’t like to stay attached to acrylic spun at high speeds, and the famed “Black 3.0” paint isn’t actually as dark as this fabric. The viewing slits were covered in a layer of 3M anti-reflective film.

Multiple layers of Black 3.0 paint on a Toy DeLorean’s bonnet vs Musou Black VL fabric under a bright light. The fabric is noticeably darker than the paint.

How it’s built: the Imager’s brass cage

The whole imager is actually only 60% scale of the original in-game one, because the original was just impractically large and everyone who has seen it in-person (including the game’s creators) thinks my one is the right size & big enough. The spherical cage is constructed of around 12 metres (40 ft) of 6 mm brass tube. The 20 segments were professionally bent, cut to length, filled with resin to provide extra strength (don’t forget these tubes hold the top of the Andotrope in place, meaning they’re structural), and a hole drilled through each end. They’re secured at the top & bottom by a bolt going through that hole, through a 3D-printed holder, to a Stainless Steel plate. There’s a matching second 3D-printed holder that goes on the inside of the cage, sandwiching the tube in place between both holders. The penta-bolts squeeze both 3D-printed holders together, firmly gripping all the tubes.

I applied a clear coat to the most of the brass to preserve its shiny appearance, while leaving the cage tubes untreated to allow them to develop a natural tarnish over time. Here’s what the inside of the mounting points look like to give you a sense of how complicated they are & how fiddly it was to assemble this in the limited space.

3D-printed components

I divided the 3D-printed holders into 5 segments, because I held true to the spirit of Riven/Gehn to that level of detail. Modelling them presented challenges such as matching the curves of the tubes, ensuring proper clearance for bolt heads and access for tightening bolts, optimising the design to minimize resin usage, and incorporating drainage holes for improved printing. All of which is millimetres (or sometimes under a millimetre) away from one another. They represent the most densely complicated parts I’ve modeled and printed to date. They’re super pretty though.

I designed four 3D-printed grips that securely hold the tablets in place and can be adjusted to balance the device. These were honeycomb-hollowed not only to save resin but also save a few grams of weight since they are part of the rotating mechanism. Including the spherical dome on top, this makes the total number of resin 3D-printed parts… 25. Gehn’s extra favourite number. Mwahaha.

The base case was FDM 3D-printed in 4 parts out of PLA+, a corn-based plastic. Modelling & optimisation took around 30+ hours for these parts, with an additional approximately 70 hours for printing. The quarters were bolted together then covered in flexible automotive putty and painted up to resemble rock. The interior was coated in noise & vibration-absorbing paint to help make moving parts as quiet as possible.

The Imager’s base

The Imager itself stands as its own work of art. I wanted it to be as authentic to the game as possible, so metal was used for a lot of the internal and external components. 3D printing, laser cutting, resin casting etc all have their places (and all were used to create this device in other areas) but none match the aesthetic appeal of actual brass. The long-necked three-way toggle switches on the front are all made of stainless steel, while the brass panel they’re attached to serves as both the access panel for the internal electronics and features an exciter on its back, so the entire panel functions as an invisible speaker. The Imager’s handle is made from machined stainless steel, mounted on a cast iron crank, connected to a brass axle, which in turn is attached to a dynamo designed for wind turbines. As a result, you can feel the weight and resistance of real metal in your hand, while it actually generates electricity and produces the right kind of whirring sound, resembling a proper machine rather than a plastic toy. Since human output is too intermittent to reliably power the device, I incorporated a power cable made of mains-rated braided twisted jute, to maintain consistency with the overall design aesthetic.

Altogether, the Imager weighs 13 kg (29 lbs), stands 71 cm (28 in) tall, and utilises over 300 bolts. Speaking of bolts, yes, those are 5-sided pentagonal bolts, or “pentabolts”. Just like Gehn used in the game. And every single one serves a structural purpose; none are merely decorative additions. I meticulously sanded off the stock markings from each bolt to maintain the 90s-basic-3D-model-shape aesthetic without any distractions. I sourced mine from McMaster-Carr.

I have to share these 3D wireframe views even though I know it’s a bit hard to see anything in them because they illustrate well the amount of complexity inside the machine. Plus, the top-down view looks a bit like an Iron-Man-style Arc Reactor. And when you’re creating things that accidentally resemble Iron Man’s equipment, that’s a sign you’re on the right track.

Internally, things are built from a mix of Aluminium to save weight, Stainless Steel where more strength is needed, pure steel for the device’s main axle, and brass where it would be visible (always the thinnest sheet I could get away with to save weight & reduce costs). The main internal structure is constructed using T-slot, opting for their slightly higher strength compared to V-slot. The mechanics come from goBILDA, a company that specialises in robotics competitions, but they’re also great for quick prototyping with all their components using a well-thought-out modular grid system. I strategically placed rubber washers and rubber sheets throughout the device to minimise machine noise & vibration. My cat Lana supervised the assembly process, because the Internet insists that all decent build logs should include at least one picture of a cat.

Electronics

Due to the intermittent nature of a human turning the crank/dynamo, the imager is powered by a Meanwell 12V power supply that accommodates both 110V & 230V. The motor driver is a DFRobot DRI0042, with an Arduino Pro Mini acting as the motor controller. A Raspberry Pi 4 with an attached DAC+ shield for audio output serves as the heart of the machine that controls all the other components. To prevent voltage spikes or reverse current from motor braking, a Pololu Shunt Regulator is used to keep the voltage below 13.2V.

The electronics inside Gehn’s Imager that drive the Andotrope display (only some of the wires are connected in this photo). From left to right: 12V Meanwell power supply, Pololu Shunt Regulator, Raspberry Pi 4 with DAC+ shield, Arduino Pro Mini, DFRobot DRI0042 Motor Driver.

Although the game version of the Imager doesn’t have them, I added five three-way toggle switches and a brass panel to control it. The first switch controls the power. The second switch controls the speed, with settings of roughly 20fps, 30fps or 40fps. Slower speeds produce quieter operation, while faster speeds result in a more stable image. The third switch adjusts the volume. The third, fourth and fifth switches are for video selection, offering a total of 27 available videos. Speed and volume adjustments can be made at any point during the Imager’s operation.

One significant aspect to making the Andotrope work is that all communication between the Raspberry Pi and the tablets occurs over Wi-Fi. Physical wired connections, such as brushes or slip rings, aren’t reliable for high-bandwidth data connections, and I know some have said that Wi-Fi can become unreliable at high speeds, but I haven’t noticed any issues in this application. MQTT handles the basic communication, and optimisations have been made to minimise latency so the tablets stay synchronised. For example, dummy packets are sent every 8 seconds to prevent the Wi-Fi chips from entering low-power mode. And because all communication happens via Wi-Fi, I can also control every aspect of this Imager from my phone – including playing back extra videos that aren’t on the switches.

I wrote a custom app for the tablets to handle network communications & play videos (though you can also run any other app to watch something on YouTube, video chat, play a game, etc). The tablets’ backlights dim in between videos to conserve battery life and maintain a visually seamless black appearance of the cylinder. This also means the tablets’ batteries last a full day between charges.

The Dabber

In case I ever need to manually use the tablets due to a pop-up menu or something, my other half created this neat little device we named “the dabber”. It’s made out of hand-carved leather & thread with a wooden handle. A conductive stylus tip is attached to the end, with enamelled copper wrapped around it down to the handle to give it sufficient capacitance. It fits through a small hole in the top of the cylinders, and when you rotate the spindle on the handle, it bends over in that direction. Removing the tablets from the brass cage requires significant disassembly, but this plus the small amount of space you get by lifting the end cap off the cylinder is enough access. If a lot of tapping is needed, a Bluetooth mouse does the job.

The Dabber. A custom tool made of wood, hand-carved leather & thread designed so you can use the tablets inside the Andotrope/Imager without removing them.

(YouTube link in case the above embedded video doesn’t work for you)

Presentation

Below is a video of my Mysterium 2023 presentation, and here’s a copy of my slides.

(YouTube link in case the above embedded video doesn’t work for you)

Improvements

There’s lots of ways you can iterate on the Andotrope design, some of these I intended to implement but I ran out of time before the presentation. I’m sure some people interested in licensing this tech will be interested in developing some of these ideas further. Here’s a few of them:

• Wireless power, eliminating the need for manually recharging the tablets. I bought the coils for this but I didn’t have enough time to wire them in.
• Anaglyph/Red-Blue Glasses 3D. Right now, this is just a matter of playing a correctly-formatted video.
• Polarised Glasses 3D by using different polarising filters on each tablet. I had planned to implement this feature, but once again, I ran out of time.
• Different numbers of screens. I used two screens as they conveniently balance themselves and give you twice the brightness, but there’s no reason there couldn’t be 1, or 3, or even 5. Higher numbers increase cost & complexity but provide a brighter image with reduced spinning speed for the same equivalent frames per second.
• Different sizes are definitely possible, from a small cheap phone-sized Andotrope to a larger monitor-sized screen. The main limit for larger sizes is overcoming centripetal forces. A cost-effective “BYO device” version could also be developed for different sized phones/tablets.
• By carefully synchronising the timing, frames could be synchronised across screens so each one always shows a different frame vs showing identical frames. When streaming content to two screens via Wi-Fi, this could reduce the amount of data sent by half.
• Using displays with very high frame rates and carefully synchronising timing, you could present different images to different directions simultaneously. Then you really could show some viewers the sides and back of someone’s head.
• Alternative screen technologies can also be used. OLED would be awesome if it didn’t flicker, particularly a flexible OLED that you curve so the final image appears flat. I investigated both transflective and e-ink tablets for this device, as you could front-light those with very bright LEDs, but all currently available options had poor contrast ratios.
• The enclosure doesn’t necessarily have to be solid. You could use something like privacy film, shuttered lenses, or other techniques to make sure the light from the screen only goes in the direction of the viewing slit, and the rest of the enclosure could be open. Make a significant portion of the enclosure open would result in a partially transparent display. I really wanted to do this but just couldn’t manage it in the limited time I had. There’s no reason the enclosure has to be a cylinder, either.
• Positioning optics either in front of the tablet or at the viewing slit to better direct the screen’s light. This would increase the display’s effective brightness, and it could also be used to reduce display distortion.

Addendum: other videos, assembly photos

Below are additional videos of other content currently loaded onto the Imager.

The original Andotrope proof of concept – a rugged phone, inside a tomato soup can painted black & sliced open, hot-glued to a pedestal fan. Hacky as all heck, but it proved the concept works.

Riven: Gehn’s Schoolroom Imager original in-game video. Compare it with my remade version.

Riven: Gehn’s Schoolroom original video, this time played on the Andotrope.

Hatsune Miku – World is Mine, because of course I had to. This is an earlier video from before I fine-tuned the synchronisation code.

Imager Explanation Instructions. This plays if you flip all switches up.

Riven: Moiety Sickle. This is exclusive new content from the remake of Riven, not the original. This is an earlier video from before I fine-tuned the synchronisation code.

Cyan Intro Logo.
Riven: Gehn’s Age 233 Office Imager of Keta: Original In-Game Video.
Riven: Gehn’s Age 233 Office Imager of Keta: Played on the Andotrope.
Riven: Minecart Ride. This is an earlier video from before I fine-tuned the synchronisation code; you can see a smoother version of this during my presentation.
Riven: Mag-Lev Ride. This is an earlier video from before I fine-tuned the synchronisation code.
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Death Star Trench Run animation.
Riven: Catherine’s Freedom. This is an earlier video from before I fine-tuned the synchronisation code.
Myst IV: Intro video.
Myst IV: Atrus’s Intro Speech.
Myst 3: Amateria Ball Ride.
Obduction Mayor Introduction video. This is my personal favourite.
Firmament Trailer. This one does a good job of showing the maximum size a video can be.
Riven: Gehn’s Opera Easter Egg. Because I couldn’t resist being silly.
Gehn: “I apologise for the cage” (except I really don’t).
Riven Remake Teaser Trailer.
Mind Blown Meme Guy.
Mr Burns Computer Greeting.
Cool-looking Exploding Particles.
A Cat. The internet demands it.
Generic 3D Animal Imagery.

Here’s a few action shots of the assembly process.

Partially-assembled selfie!

Assembling the imager.

Assembly yoga.

Finally, if you like the Andotrope technology at the heart of this video game prop replica, you should check out my version 2 Andotrope proof of concept. It’s smaller, faster, quieter and cheaper – aka better in so many ways!

The post Gehn’s Holographic Imager/​Andotrope appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

What’s New:

• Implemented support for mobile/tablet touch devices, with adjusted & enlarged click/tap areas throughout. Puzzles using drag-and-drop mechanics have been modified to incorporate larger touch zones & pieces now snap to their correct positions when placed close enough (good puzzle design says the challenge should be the puzzle itself, not navigating the puzzle’s user interface)
• Dynamic zooming customised per page, so the content originally designed for 640×480 CRT monitors no longer looks like a postage stamp on your widescreen 4k monitor (also scales to the maximum possible size on your phone/tablet to make seeing things easier)
• AI upscaling to 4k resolutions to all images so it doesn’t look like a blurry mess on big screens, with an option on every page & integrated into every puzzle to switch back to the original images (worry not purists; the original images are still there, completely untouched, and will never go away!)
• The entire server codebase has been completely rewritten from the ground up, replacing three old languages with only current-day PHP 8.2 (running server-executable code just to deliver plain HTML is, like, so 1996)
• Numerous changes throughout to leverage modern web features for improved functionality, speed & accessibility (eg prefetch/preload, img srcset, cursor & draggable hints, alt text, async decoding, etc)
• A hints, tips & solutions section added to my main Riven Journals page. Get stuck & need help? Just want to look at the rewards? Got ya covered!

Journal 1 puzzle. Top row: the original 1997 images
Middle row: upscaled but original resolution with less compression
Bottom row: 4x upscaled

In the spirit of full disclosure, I used Topaz Photo AI for the majority of the AI upscaling. This means it’s not the controversial generative AI but instead upscaling AI. The models used were trained exclusively on content licensed for use in AI training, it was run locally on my computer not in a datacentre, it was powered by my house’s solar renewable energy, and no water was consumed for cooling. I hand-tuned the model & parameters of each image for the best quality one at a time, generating four different resolutions up to 4k, which was most definitely not a quick basic bulk export. This included regenerating a version at the original resolution but without the original’s heavy jpeg compression. These were all integrated into the Riven Journals’ ~250 HTML files manually using Notepad++, and the HTML has ballooned to almost 5 times its original size. This represents around 2,600 images manually added into the Journals via srcset, with a total of around 5,800 images involved when counting individual frames of animated gifs and uncompressed versions (but not counting the many thousands generated, edited, integrated, then tossed out & recreated from scratch when I found a higher quality technique). Additionally, I manually processed around 1,100 of these upscaled images through Photoshop for touch-ups, once again by hand one at a time. I compressed all final images individually with mozjpeg, pngquant & FileOptimizer to get the most bang-per-byte like was necessary in the dial-up days of 1997 to get the fastest load times. In short, this was absolutely not a simple load-export-dump-and-overwrite job but one where each image upscale was processed one at a time, by hand, with the care and attention to detail they individually deserved.

Despite my best efforts, I’ll be the first to admit that the upscaled versions aren’t always better than a basic blurry bicubic resize of the originals, but I think they look better more than 95% of the time. There’s a button to compare them with the originals on every page & every puzzle (though some puzzles only update to reflect the change upon the next action like clicking on pieces etc). That button’s also useful for investigating situations where the upscaled version looks weird but it turns out that’s because the original images lack sufficiently clear detail for proper extrapolation, or where the originals also look weird too and the upscales are faithfully replicating that oddity.

That said, here’s some examples of the upscaling in action!

Text example – original version above, 4x upscaled version below

Line art example (this one’s actually a reddish transparent .gif floating above the tan-coloured parchment background) – original version above, 4x upscale below

Here’s some full-screen examples:

Compare with Imgsli

Compare with Imgsli

Happy 26th Birthday Riven, and enjoy the freshly-upgraded Riven Journals!

The post Riven Journals upgrade: mobile/tablet support, upscaled images & more! appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

…Or I’ve come up with a convenient narrative excuse for making Riven Village/Tay Cake Pops! 😉

The cakes are dark chocolate, tequila & chilli flavoured, as that seemed like a very Riven-esque combination to us. The outsides are all coloured white chocolate. Everything except the cake pop sticks and the stand is 100% edible with no armature wire or other supports used.

@made_meka and I first tried Tay itself, but melting the chocolate to make the window depressions didn’t work very well at scale, so we pivoted to villager huts.

There are NO supports/wires in any of the bridges/ladders/etc; those are 100% chocolate! Each piece was made individually, then “glued” together with liquid chocolate in an air-conditioned, humidity-controlled room.

Cake pops need a stand to hold them up, so we built Tay’s cliffs. They were made from 5mm foam board, traced freehand while watching the flyby video.

A super big thanks again to @made_meka for their help with this!

Now it’s time for me to pop some Rivenese cake pops!

The post Riven Village/Tay Cake Pops appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

Time for me to release a fully restored version of Riven Elementary.

Riven Elementary Restored. Playable once again, after so many years!

Download Riven Elementary Restored

What’s Riven Elementary?

Riven Elementary was a basic maths game inspired by the Wahrk counting number toy in the schoolroom in Riven (more information on it at the Guild of Archivists). The player has to work out what the D’ni symbols for the numbers 1-10 are by observing what happens when you play with the toy. Riven Elementary takes this a step further, and the player has to work out not only the D’ni symbols for numbers using the Wahrk toy but also the D’ni symbols for addition/subtraction/multiplication/division based on which questions they get right & wrong. It was originally released on the 26th of August 1998, 10 months after Riven’s original CD release and coinciding with Riven’s DVD release. A contest was also part of the original release of Riven Elementary – you could only submit your details if you won a perfect game, and there were two winners a week earning a free CD copy of Riven.

The game itself was made by Jig Interactive using Macromedia Director and designed to play in-browser using Macromedia Shockwave Player, the precursor to Adobe Shockwave. The original version went offline around 20 years ago, but fragments of it lived on in some mirrors. Before now, if you were dedicated it was possible to re-create most of the game to have a functional-but-not-with-original-graphics version you could get running with an old version of a web browser that still supported plug-ins (like I had it running on my Myst book). But what I’m releasing here is a restored version using not only all the original graphics, but in a form that’s easily playable on modern computers.

Wait, is this canon?

The all-authoritative RAWA has said many times that the mathematical operand symbols in Riven Elementary are officially not canon. But hey, they’re also the only mathematical symbols we’ve got, official/canon or not. So people have been hungry for them anyway.

D’ni Mathematics. As easy as one, two, three fah, bree, sehn!

How did you get this running again?

Huge thanks goes out to @tomysshadow for most of the effort! They managed to track down the old Jig Interactive employee, Gabe Jensen, who originally programmed the game (he’s now a children’s book author; you can check him out at gabejensenbooks.com). He still had the original source files, which filled all the gaps missing from the versions you could recreate from the Internet Archive. @tomysshadow also leveraged their experience dealing with old Shockwave files to create a projector for the ancient game so it could be played on modern Windows systems without needing an old web browser with the Shockwave plugin installed.

What’s the system requirements?

Riven Elementary was originally designed to run on Internet Explorer 4-era of Web Browsers with the Macromedia Shockwave Player plug-in installed. Thankfully the world has since moved on from such dark, rudimentary times. What I’m releasing has been tested & confirmed to run on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and it’ll probably run on earlier releases of Windows too. Sorry MacOS users; Apple’s long-term war against backwards compatibility and Adobe Director’s discontinuation in 2017 mean no easy export to a modern native .app for Shockwave files. Those who know how on MacOS/Linux may have some luck with Crossover, WINE, a virtual machine, or similar emulation/virtualisation environment; if you do, let me know in the comments! Other system requirements like RAM or CPU speed mattered back in the day, but today they’re so low a calculator app may be more demanding so they’re not worth mentioning.

Ok, let me at it!

Just download the zip file, extract everything somewhere, run rivenelem.exe, and you’re away!

Download Riven Elementary Restored

Some anti-virus providers may not like this game, likely just because it’s old Shockwave content. I’ve scanned these files thoroughly through the likes of VirusTotal and others, but to make sure nothing’s been tampered with here’s a description of the archive’s contents plus their SHA-1 hashes:

• Riven_elementary_restored.zip – the whole archive
  SHA-1 hash: 0d026a3632e2e41e7235372a5822e585cd6edc36
• rivenelem.exe – the Projector to play the game. This is what you want to run
  SHA-1 hash: 19bbe067c7ef3eae964c10bc8951e76d61b4e64f
• rivenelemcheat.exe – a Projector with “cheat” mode enabled, in case you need a little help
  SHA-1 hash: cf718dc85e69d20fffb83c53cd2b35272dac53cb
• rivenelem.dcr – the original Macromedia Shockwave file, used by the Projectors
  SHA-1 hash: a37395cad4bc9de20fef6f1eeafa8b89c7a62af2
• dswMedia folder – images used by the game, originally pre-loaded during the intro screens

Speaking of early internet web games based on Riven (such an incredibly niche topic!), if you haven’t seen it before check out the Riven Journals Restored. It’s another online game based on Riven I’ve also restored, this one originally made as part of the lead-up to Riven’s release. The puzzles were originally written in Java but they’ve been rewritten in JavaScript to work on modern browsers.

Happy 25th anniversary, Riven!

Like this game?

Did you find this fun? Donate to my Ko-fi, comment below or drop me a line to say thanks! The more donations/encouragement I receive, the more likely I am to write more articles, guides, tools & games like this in the future.

The post Riven Elementary Restored appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

(YouTube link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

We started with planing the design – specifically, how could we make a unique approach to this cake, so it wasn’t just another iteration of Myst island. That’s when I had the idea to show a cross-section of the island to display the subterranean caverns. Meka loved this idea, and with his background in architecture, he was well equipped to visualise the final product.

As a way to take stock of what ingredients are available to make this edible diorama, we took a few trips to different stores to find the best ingredients for sculpting and cake decorating. The grocery store had a decent selection that would have been fine, but the trip to a specialist cake decorating shop had fantastic things such as bronze food paint & powdered food colouring.

The making process begun with choosing an appropriate scale to make the cake. Using a 3D model of Myst Island, we found a size that would allow Meka to sculpt the smallest models we wanted to include, as well as considering how much fruit cake we can realistically eat (side note: this is Australian-style fruit cake, which is far more edible & tastes far better than its international counterpart). The board is around 600mm by 300mm, or around 2′ by 1′. I then printed out scaled drawings of the plan view of the island for Meka to start sculpting. Being able to consult these wireframe images, as well as measure dimensions straight off the 3D model, was super handy to make sure everything was scaled correctly & in the right place. Sculpting all the individual buildings, trees & artefacts took many days of fiddly work until we had the majority of the chocolate and sugar cake toppers finished.

2 days put from the deadline, the cake sculpting began. A copy of the island plan was made on baking paper, which was used to make approximate placement of the landscape, contours, buildings & the dock. Again I was in charge of scaling the elevations of the landscape, while Meka’s sticky but far steadier hands sliced away at the cake.

Once we were happy with the overall shape of the island (taking into consideration the underwater portion of the island that Meka approximated), the cake was generously drenched in rum so that it would stay preserved for weeks. There was also the added bonus that the rum helped pull the crumbling cake together after much cutting & piecing together.

It was now time to put on some top soil. A thin layer of brown fondant was stretched across the fruitcake & massaged into shape. The rock portions of the island were painted with a palate of royal icing in different colours to approximate granite, and a layer of moulding chocolate put on the cake board, ready for the ocean water (a mistake we would soon find out) The tricky job of making the sectional view of the internal chambers took a little planing & creative licence. As many Myst fans may know, the chambers don’t exactly fit in the island faithfully, and to make a clean section, a small amount of artistic license was required.

Grass made of crushed digestive biscuits mixed with shredded coconut was applied to the appropriate areas. The buildings, pathways, stairs, ships, pillars & trees were positioned and blended into the landscape, before a dam of packing tape & cardboard was constructed around the cake ready for the sea water. The ocean water was made with agar powder, water, sugar & flavouring, which was cooled to 40’C/105’F before being poured around the cake. The underwater chocolate & the fondant of the island began to dissolve in the agar, even though the jelly was hard. This was not a major problem as the colour stayed in the jelly, and the dissolving fondant dripped slowly, which we continued to mop up.

After removing the jelly mould, the cake was almost done, but there was a blank space on the side where the island was cut off. Meka had a plan for this – literally! He drew out the plan view of the island, as though Atrus was still in the process of writing the island into existence. It was finished with a chocolate version of Atrus’s quill and ink, along with his memorable words.

Aside from some small amounts of armature wire to hold up things like the trees, everything else in this cake is edible. Most importantly, most of the sculptures are chocolate-based instead of being fondant-based, so it actually tastes good too (eg the quill is entirely white chocolate). And now that it’s finally done, it’s time for us to enjoy some cake after staring at it all week! *nom*

The post Myst Island Cake appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

It tells you the time both in our “surface” time and in the D’ni cavern!

Technically it’s more a “chronometer” than a “clock” – the main difference between the two is that chronometers have far higher accuracy & precision, to the point that they can be used for scientific experiments. For this one, it’s generally safe to assume it shouldn’t read outside 0.003s of the actual time, but in practice it’s usually under 0.001s of the actual time. It’s no atomic clock, but it’ll do for most of my slow-mo needs. The whole project’s been designed to be as cheap, low-tech, skill-free, and expensive-tool-free as possible.

(Youtube Link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

First up, a little primer – the digits used in the Myst games, aka D’ni digits, are a base-25 numbering system. This means they count up using symbols like [1], [2], [3], [4] … [22], [23], [24], [1][0]. That is, what they call “10”, we call “25” – the same way that in hexadecimal “10” represents what we call “16”. The numbers themselves are based on the numbers 0-4, which are then rotated anticlockwise 90° to represent 5/10/15/20. Here’s an example of D’ni numbers, showing how you add the row & column header symbols together to get the final number symbol:​

Each D’ni “day”, or “yahr”, is roughly 30 hours, 14 minutes long and each D’ni “second”, or “prorahn”, is roughly 1.4 seconds. The Guild of Archivists has more details on how the actual D’ni timekeeping system works if that interests you. There’s nothing like these digits anywhere out there on the market, aside from something way over-complex like using LCD displays, but that didn’t interest me much and wouldn’t meet the goals of cheap or low-tech. So I had to come up with my own… And here’s how that turned out!

There’s so many places I could start with describing how this project was made so I’m gonna pick the one that probably interests most people reading this – the custom D’ni digit 25-segment displays! These are basically like my own custom 7-segment displays, but they’re easier to read with much higher contrast than store-bought 7-segs. I couldn’t find any instructions or guides out there on how to make your own (I’m sure there has to be some out there somewhere), so I had to work it all out myself from trial and error. The design itself was all made in Inkscape. Laser cutting holes in sheet acrylic and filling them with translucent resin was the way to go. The trickiest part is to have even light diffusion throughout an entire cell. The black parts are made from laser-cut 4.5mm black acrylic.

Laser-cutting D’ni digits out of acrylic

To help bounce light around inside each cell as much as possible, I airbrushed them with a thin white paint before filling them with resin. For the side that was to be the “front”, aka the good-quality side, I wanted the poured resin cells to be smooth & flush with the surface of the acrylic, which is tricky. I placed a piece of clear packing tape on a table with the sticky side up, stretched it out as far as I could, then carefully placed the front of the acrylic piece on the stretched tape. This kept the packing tape under constant tension, so that the resin cured against a smooth flat surface. The empty cells were filled with a 7:1 mixture of clear resin with super fine plaster of paris (mixed before pouring, obviously), which was the best-looking diffusing medium I tried. If you try this, sift the plaster into the resin while stirring to make it as evenly distributed as possible and to reduce plaster clumps in the resin. Use a needle to break up the remaining clumps and to remove any air bubbles that might be stuck in the corners. I recommend carefully picking up the cured acrylic blocks and looking at them from underneath to check for any plaster clumps or bubbles too. A vacuum chamber would be great if you’ve got one to remove the bubbles, but I didn’t have one. Once the resin was cured I carefully removed the packing tape and the segments were ready.

(Youtube Link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

At 4.5mm thick, a single layer of diffusion from this material is likely good enough for most people, but just to make the light segments look extra smooth I used two layers of resin-filled acrylic. However, in this video you can see that there’s a lot of light bleeding from one cell to another, so to seal the edges well, I laser-cut some cardboard gaskets out of 2mm thick black cardboard backing board. I painted the interior edges with a silver pen to increase reflection. I used these gaskets between the two layers of acrylic as well as between the acrylic and the circuit board. I tried adding layers of proper light diffusion film between the gaskets, but they did so little and they would’ve been so fiddly to place in each cell that I didn’t bother.

The 5 layers in the 25-segment digital D’ni display modules – acrylic layers on the left, cardboard gaskets in the middle, circuit board on the right

The custom circuit boards were all made in EasyEDA, which is simple enough to use that it runs in your web browser. The layout was imported from Inkscape’s SVG and I used that to properly position the LEDs. Each board has 50 individual LEDS in strings ranging from 1 LED to 4 LEDs long. There’s 36 discrete cells, or resin-filled holes in the acrylic, but some are always lit up together so there’s only 26 controllable segments. There were 2 different voltages used for these boards – 9 Volts for the strings of 4 & 3 LEDs, and 5 Volts for the strings of 2 & 1 LEDs.

EasyEDA’s logic-level layout of the 25-segment D’ni Display

Silkscreen layout of the 25-segment D’ni Display

I know a lot of people like to rag on the autorouter feature of EDA software, but for something like this it works perfectly. Aside from a few starting obvious straight traces I put down myself, and a few extra links added right at the end to reduce the chances of the top or bottom planes acting like antennae, everything else was autorouted.

LEDs and a couple traces placed on the 25-segment D’ni Display circuit layout

Final circuit layout of the 25-segment D’ni Display circuit, mostly autorouted – I didn’t draw this, it was automatically drawn for me

With so many tiny SMD LEDs needing soldering, I definitely recommend paying extra to order a solder stencil along with your circuit board. I have pretty shaky hands due to some medication I’m currently on, but I could manage placing them on the small pads of solder paste left by the stencils. It’s called solder paste but it’s easier to work with (and more accurate) if you think of it as a bunch of tiny beads in oil, rather than an actual paste. If you’ve ever wondered what solder paste looks like up close, here’s some microscope photos!

You can use a fancy reflow oven or an electronics hot plate to fuse the solder, but you can also just use a frying pan on a stove, so long as your pan is actually properly flat. Getting the right temperature is important so check with your brand of solder paste – I used Maker Paste which needs 140’C/284’F. Note that standard cheap IR spot thermometers won’t normally work on metal pans (the pan will reflect the IR light giving a wrong reading), but thermal cameras or cooking thermometers work. One clever hack is to add a few drops of water to the pan & count how long it takes for those drops to boil, add half of that time again, and you should be at around 140’C. Preheat the frying pan and the moment the paste all melts & goes shiny, remove the board from heat – this should take under 10 seconds.

Frying pans totally work as reflow ovens

Pro tip – you can use baking paper to help make it easier to pick up when you’re done, but make sure you use paper that’s rated for whatever temperature you’re using. This is what happens when you use cheap paper that’s not rated that high. Oops. Made a super pretty pattern, though.

I asked a couple dozen people for guesses on what made this bubble-like burn pattern and no one guessed baking paper on fire. Go figure.

And here’s what they look like with the solder paste melted solid. Note that you don’t have to actually get the LEDs perfectly lined up when you’re using solder paste to do SMD soldering, if you’re slightly off then surface tension will (hopefully) pull them all into near perfect alignment.

I tried 0804 LEDs but they were too big to fit within the segments so I dropped down to 0603, which if you don’t know what that means, they’re 0.06 inches by 0.03 inches, or around 1.5mm by 0.76mm. This is 100% tweezer territory. Here’s a size comparison for you.

Hi I’m a tiny 0603 LED! These are my friends, a US penny and an Australian 5c coin!

Here’s what the circuit board looks like all lit up

(Youtube Link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

Here’s what the final thing looks like with only one layer of diffuser over the top! It honestly could’ve been fine like this, but because I went the extra mile and made 2 diffuser layers, those segments are more evenly lit than the standard 7-segments I used for the normal digits!

(Youtube Link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

Just because, this is what the digit circuit boards look like with a thermal camera, which is a great way to make sure that all the connections are good. This step certainly isn’t necessary, but I have access to a thermal camera with work, so I figured why not use it.

Thermal camera photo of a D’ni digit

Put this all together, and you get a finished 25-segment display module for showing D’ni digits! The screws are carefully positioned so the threads will go through the case but the head of the screws overlap the modules to hold them in place. Here’s what they look like – layered like an onion, or maybe an Ogre.

Overview of the layers of a 25-segment D’ni Display Module

Here’s what the insides look like without any wires connected. Bottom left in pink are some TLC5947 constant-current variable brightness LED drivers, and they’re sitting in standard off-the-shelf breakout boards with heatsinks attachedto them. These are what turn on/off all the LEDs behind the D’ni digits. Bottom right is some power supplies to convert the 9V in to the 5V some chips require (this takes some of the heat load off the TLC5947’s for the segments with only 1 or 2 LEDs in them).

The inside of my 25-hour D’ni clock, without any wires connected. The top right is a voltage level converter that I screwed up its size in the circuit board design step, so I just extended it up to have enough room to fix the error

Top middle is another custom circuit board with high-current shift registers to display the “normal” digits. This whole board was designed to be through-hole, as an “easy” design for a beginner solderer to start with. The reason why I’m using a bank of shift registers to control all the LEDs instead of just alternating between them in banks is that this means the display has no flicker and still works during high-speed/slow-motion photography experiments – which is part of what makes it a chronometer and not just yet another fancy clock. Rounding it off is the guts, a branded (not Chinese knock-off; they often have bad power regulators) WeMos/Lolin D1 Mini ESP8266. Having 802.11n-speed WiFi capabilities means it’s already equipped with a reasonably accurate Quartz crystal, to the point that I found an external timekeeping regulator like a temperature/oven based crystal to be unnecessary. The logic it runs isn’t too complicated – connect to the nearest available WiFi point, perform a geoIP lookup, perform a timezone lookup for that location, then poll a few of the nearest NTP servers every few hours. The initial sync is pretty much always within 3ms, and by keeping track of the ESP8266’s clock drift as well as the latency/jitter to the nearest NTP servers (plus a few additional tricks like time of day to estimate the crystal’s temperature variance and waiting for a quiet moment on the WiFi network before transmitting to reduce jitter), its accuracy is refined with each update. Internally it calculates its accuracy in picoseconds (that’s the unit prefix smaller than nanoseconds), but that’s mostly because I’ve been stung enough times by weird edge cases that I try to avoid floating-point maths wherever possible. Officially I’m only calling it accurate to within a best-case of 1ms because that’s a nice round number & is already beyond my home DIY abilities to measure or improve, and just to make extra sure I’m not “overselling” its accuracy that’s why the display only shows a 100ms & a 10ms digit, but not a 1ms digit. One hidden feature of this chronometer is because of the choice of drivers used for the LEDs, I can fully control their brightness and not just turn them on or off – for instance, at night the display dims and the squares around the D’ni digits turn off so it isn’t blindingly bright if you have to go to the bathroom at 2am.

These circuit boards are held up by custom 3D printed standoffs – sure, I could’ve just bought some, but 3D printing some was cheaper.

This design was very cheap and very modular, but its one problem was a ridiculous number of wires were involved – over 450 (!) connection points, all of which have to be connected to wires long enough that you’ve still got enough space to access them, which occasionally gives signal integrity flickers. If I was doing this again, I absolutely would design the digit circuit boards to at least have the shift registers included on them, to drastically reduce the number of potential failure points.

The final step was to laser cut a box to fit this all within. I used the fantastic online tool Boxes.py to make this happen – this is the “Display Case” option. All I had to do here was place holes for the displays & power cable, then get laser cutting. I recommend doing a small test first to make sure you get the play or burn correction settings right depending on how snug a fit you want. This also shows what the box actually looks like, since it’s so hard to photograph glossy black acrylic.

The warning label is true – lasers are awesome.

Oh and before I forget – don’t ever give up on your electronics projects just because they seem too hard. I started trying to build this clock nineteen years ago by trying to assemble it out of individual transistors, because modern cheap easy-to-use microcontrollers like Arduinos weren’t a thing, and higher-speed wireless-enabled ones like the ESP8266 were even further away. Building things with electronics is literally getting both easier and cheaper every single year. So if you think something is “too hard” right now, wait a few years and you’d be surprised what other options might be available for you! Here’s one of my failed attempts to build this project from back in 2002 (yes really that old!).

Finally, here’s the SVG of the D’ni Digits including segment numbers, and Gerber files of both the SMD 25-Segment D’ni Display Digit circuit boards and the through-hole normal digit shift register circuit board. You’re free to create whatever you want with these – just credit & link back to me plus let me know so I can see what cool stuff you make! I officially unveiled & presented this chronometer at Mysterium 2019, the annual fan convention for Myst fans. Here are my slides for the presentation, and you can watch my presentation below – I skip over some of the more technical areas but I go more into actual D’ni timekeeping than I do on here.

(YouTube link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

One final final thing – just to show that the 10ms digit really works and isn’t just a random blur, here’s a slow-mo recording of it at 240fps.

(YouTube link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)
(Before anyone tries to correct me – yes I know there are technically 36 discrete light cells making up 26 controllable segments in these displays, neither of which are 25. But I asked myself “what will people search for when looking to find this project?”, and since D’ni numbers are base-25 that’s what people are likely to use, so that’s why I decided to call them 25-segment displays instead. So there. 😉 )

The post 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

The Myst Book

It seems to be pretty well made. It’s bigger than mine/Cyan’s book, but I kindof expected that might be required to make the ink well parts fit. To try and compensate for this the covers are thinner than the original, which I think is a fair compromise. I need to point out that the outside cover has been made with a lot more detail than is immediately obvious – this thing’s been constructed in enough layers to impress an ogre. There’s the plain bare cardboard, which is most easily visible through the infamous damage notch on the left. Then there’s the dark brown leather/cloth layer on the left side and on the two corner triangles, which has had both a bit of a shine and a rough surface added to it that roughly matches the shine & feel on the original book. On top of this is the main central texture as a normal paper print, and on top of that are sections that have been raised/embossed, and on top of that are sections that have been gilded. Some of the damage marks on the book aren’t just in the image’s print but are actual cut-out holes where one layer gives way to show a lower layer, which I think is all pretty darned cool. This applies to both the spine and the back of the book too – speaking of, the back of the book is what the back of Cyan’s actual book looks like; for once it isn’t just a mirror of the front texture like it is in all the games!

Speaking of just the front texture, it’s a bit different to what was shown in the Kickstarter. The Kickstarter version was a blend between Cyan’s actual well-worn physical prop book and my own replica, whereas this final version is mostly like Cyan’s one (and for what it’s worth my one was supposed to be my interpretation of what the Myst book might’ve looked like when “brand new”, mostly because luck meant I found a copy of the right book in near-perfect condition, which is why it had no damage). There’s a couple design points similar to mine – for instance the font used for the raising/gilding looks like it’s been modified a little from the original MYST font to straighten the serifs a little, the same as I did, which makes it look better when embossed or raised. The main image is also darker than Cyan’s actual physical book, and has had more damage added to it than Cyan’s book actually has, particularly around the edges. It’s worth mentioning here that back in 1993 Cyan did scan their physical prop book to use as a texture, however back then they modified that image so it had less damage in-game vs what it had in real life. This makes one more version of what this book is supposed to look like, and when you add in how it looked during Myst 5 I think I’ve lost track of how many different versions we’re up to now. 😛

The original 1993 version of the Myst book 3D model as shown in Strata

Because I knew people would ask, I took a few photos comparing the Kickstarter Myst book to my replica Myst book so you can see the size difference. I also took a few photos comparing it to the original book Cyan used as the Riven descriptive book (The 1954 printing of the 1951 edition Webster’s Unified Dictionary & Encyclopedia if you’re curious). Turns out it’s much closer in size to Riven’s descriptive book than Myst’s linking book!

The LCD & Electronics

The book has been enlarged but the linking panel LCD has been kept the same size, so it looks a little smaller than it should be. However it’s sized so that on the lower tier versions the images on the game disc sleeves can be the linking panels themselves, so it’s not like they could’ve made the sleeves much larger. Its colours are bright & vibrant, its got a pretty fantastic viewing angle, and its brightness level has clearly been tuned so it looks “right” for normal indoor brightness levels – as in, it looks close to a window to another world and not a brightly glowing LCD, and it photographs very well. The video plays automatically when you open the book, which is cool, and the battery level indicator displays momentarily in the top right, which is nice I guess but I wish there was some way to turn it off. In case you’re wondering, it’s got a standard 3.7V 800mAh 2.96Wh Lithium battery inside which charges from the included USB cable at 1A. The best way to store this battery long-term is to leave it at around 50% capacity, which isn’t too hard to do given the book has a battery level indicator. Loading alternate videos onto the book seems like it would be easy but I haven’t tried it to see what formats or codecs it can handle. I like the “hidden” button markers that are smudges on the page, they’re sneaky. The speaker in the top right is a bit quiet, a bit tinny and seems to be peaking a lot – I haven’t pulled apart the electronics yet but I think it’s because it’s hidden behind the front paper. There’s only so much you can do when a speaker is obscured like that. I suspect a few holes in the paper would improve the audio quality but pulling that apart is another job.

From personal experience I can say that there aren’t many options for suitable LCDs around the right size with the right specs for a linking panel. Particularly if you want 15,000 of them, and you’re not willing to spend $80/panel. For reference the LCD for my Myst book cost $140USD, and that’s for just the raw LCD panel itself without the driver board, embedded computer to feed it content, battery, charging circuitry, etc. Cyan only charged an extra $70 for the tier with all the electronics, so to pull that off at scale their choices would’ve been limited and I’m super impressed they managed to do it on such a comparatively tight budget.

Now, the content on the book. First off – the original classic Myst intro has been re-rendered at 30fps at the resolution of the book, so it looks amazing! 😀 The other content on the book is a bit of a mixed bag and honestly feels a little like they got half-way through making videos for it when they hit the deadline and abruptly stopped. There’s no videos from Revelation or End of Ages, and only a single video from Uru. You totally need to check out the Uru video, UruFly.mp4 – I don’t want to say any more, just play that one and enjoy! Cyanlogo.mp4 looks like a re-rendered version of Cyan’s original 1993 logo just for this book – the blurred text at the end is different but the model is the 3d model is the original one, and it’s crisp like it’s been rendered at the right resolution. There’s plenty of classic Myst, realMyst Masterpiece and even re-rendered classic Myst flyby videos, Sirrus/Achenar/Atrus videos, Riven flybys, and even Exile flybys (even if they are weirdly labelled “Energy” “Jnanin” “Life” and “Matter”)… But no Revelation or End of Ages. It’d be cool if Cyan offers a few flybys from the missing games for download in the future, but who knows if that will happen.

The “extra storage” section contains a bunch of high-res images in here which make me completely drool – I don’t know which have been re-rendered and which are from their archives, but a 4000×1000 pixel panorama of Gehn’s Age is beautiful, Gehn’s Stained Glass is something I don’t remember seeing before, and the 3692×3075 Channelwood photos are so clear I wish I could be there in person.

I hope I don’t get in trouble for sharing this, but it’s located in the book’s readme file, you can find it yourself by literally just searching myst.com for “myst” and 10,000 people are about to know this URL when their books arrive sooo I figure it’s gonna be public soon anyway – you can download a copy of all this from https://myst.com/mystbookfiles/. Get on it and enjoy those high-res images & exclusive re-rendered videos!

I don’t know the full capabilities of the video player but as a data point for you, the main video is an mp4 file with the video in H264 AVC encoded at Level 3.1 complexity, 800×480 resolution, 30fps, ~2367kbps, while the audio’s AAC, 44.1KHz, mono, ~125kbps.

The Inkwell & Pen

Oh man. This thing is gorgeous. My expectations have been completely blown away. It’s made of what feels like clear-coated brass, and there’s over a dozen separately-cast parts to this thing that have been assembled together into sub-pieces ready for your final assembly via the included screwdriver & two screws (I had four screws; I guess extra in case you lose some). It feels solid & heavy, it feels well machined, and above all it feels well made. The D’ni writing is cast into the actual mould instead of just engraving it. The legs are held on magnetically (which makes the legs handy to use to simulate closing the book while it’s open – the reed switch is in the middle center right). The top has a small plastic bottle hidden inside it to hold the ink (which you can access & completely remove via a screw on the beetle’s underside). And there’s even little rubber feet on the bottom of it – five of them, in fact – which wasn’t necessary but goes to show that every part of this had thought put into it, not just as a quick throwaway thing.

Assembly is pretty easy – the parts are all keyed so they can only go together one way. There’s only two screws involved, both different sizes, and that’s it. But just in case you can’t work it out there’s some instructions included too (the oil smudge on the front page didn’t come with it, whoops). The whole thing comes in a form-fitting foam box to keep everything in place & protected during shipping.

Speaking of the foam box, I’m pretty sure the inkwell is the reason why the book had to be enlarged. Here’s a side-on view of how some of the inkwell pieces fit inside the box. There’s not much width left over. I’m sure some clever 3-dimensional stacking arrangement would’ve been possible, particularly if you’re re-using some of the empty space from the other box, but that would’ve made it all so much more complex than it already is.

Finally, the dip pen. This looks like a standard pen with a beetle/ink nib marking on the sheath. It’s subtle, but shows that this is a custom part too and not just something they grabbed off the shelf to use unmodified. The included replaceable nib is a #5, because of course it’s that number. If you’re having trouble finding the pen, look below the flap on the bottom edge of the book.

Overall, I gotta say that I’m pretty happy with these rewards. It definitely feels like I got my money’s worth, and the end results are higher quality than anticipated. I’m one satisfied backer!

The post Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter Book & Inkwell Rewards Review appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

It’s no surprise where part of the idea for a Myst book with a screen inside it likely came from. To quote Rand Miller (Cyan’s CEO and Atrus actor) from the Kickstarter Live AMA, “we’re doing a book with a real linking panel because we’ve wanted one ever since RIUM+ did his”. There’s nothing much I can add to that quote, really. 😛 I plan to do a full teardown & comparison of Cyan’s one once mine arrives (UPDATE: teardown & comparison blog post here!. For what it’s worth though, based what specs I’ve seen so far their implementation carries my personal tick of approval – it looks like it will do a fantastic job and make a beautiful product for a reasonable price.

But that’s not what this post is about. This one’s about music. It’s been over a decade since I last played the piano so I’m a little bit rusty, but I’ve dusted off the old skills for a very special purpose.

In honour of the Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter, I decided to transcribe & play a piano rendition of Cyan’s logo music!

(YouTube link in case the above video doesn’t work for you)

It just so happens that 10 Instrumental covers is one of the #Myst25 Community Goals. And I have word straight from one of the people managing the Kickstarter’s community goals that the Cyan intro theme music counts. As such, here’s the files so you can play it too!

Cyan Logo theme PDF
Cyan Logo theme MusicXML
Cyan Logo theme MIDI
24-bit 96KHz FLAC of my piano rendition

A couple notes on these (pun intended) – both the chord complexity and their representations are sitting in the middle between being perfect representations and being easy to play. By this I mean that I’m skipping a few notes from the chords as I wanted it to be reasonably easily playable on an actual piano, and the timing in the sheet music isn’t 100% spot-on because doing that was far more complicated to describe & decipher than I thought was worth it. Feel free to adapt this to a different instrument, add or remove notes for your own personal style, or fiddle with the timing in the midi file if you’re only intending digital playback.

Play on! 🙂

The post Cyan logo music played on the piano appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

This website isn’t the only thing that’s new though, I’ve just finished another round of modernising the Riven Journals – just in time for Riven’s 20th anniversary!

What’s new:

• The background music now plays on more modern browsers (including on most smartphones)
• There’s a new compatibility shim to display the mouse hover text, which replaces window.status which has been deprecated for quite some time
• All Perl code has been modified to work with newer versions of the language, which means the cookie handling parts work properly again. This means all .cgi pages work, there’s no more script errors, and Journal 5 is actually completeable now
• All PHP code has been modified to work with version 7 of the language
• Personally checked to make extra sure that the Easter Eggs are actually accessible, since no one’s found them yet (they’re pretty hard to find!)
• A couple logic errors have been corrected (which were present in the original Riven Journals… I have no idea how I missed them for so long)
• The Prefetching code has been updated with more hints, which should make browsing around the Riven Journals super fast with very quick page load times

You should totally check them out!

And if that’s not tempting enough for you, in honour of Riven’s 20th anniversary I’m unveiling some exclusive, previously-unreleased, never-before-seen-in-digital-format Riven concept art of the schoolroom Wahrk counting number game:

(click to embiggen)

“Twenty years, Atrus… Twenty. Long. Years.” – Saavedro, Myst III: Exile

Now to wait for Riven’s 25th anniversary…..

Like this update?

Did you find this useful? Donate to my Ko-fi, comment below or drop me a line to say thanks! The more donations/encouragement I receive, the more likely I am to write more articles, guides & tools like this in the future.

The post New website, new Riven Journals upgrade appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.

Play the Riven Journals Restored

Wait, the Riven what-now?

Once upon a time, back in the early days of the web in 1996-1997, there was a website featuring a series of puzzles called the Riven Journals. They originally resided at http://journals.riven.com/. Basically, they served as a teaser and promotional material for the upcoming game Riven: The Sequel to Myst by Cyan, Inc, creators of the MYST series of video games. Fans were itching for information on a sequel to Myst, so Cyan’s then-publisher, Red Orb Entertainment, the non-edutainment gaming division of Brøderbund, contracted Organic Online to create both the Riven Journals and the www.riven.com website… Phew, that’s a lot of names!

(click to embiggen)

Okay, now that I know some backstory, what were they exactly?

The Riven Journals were designed to provide an insight into Cyan’s next masterpiece without giving away any hints about the story or ending. None of the content in the Riven Journals will assist you in completing Riven, however they do enhance the gameplay by providing additional backstory and extra details about the game. However, officially speaking nothing in the Riven Journals is considered canon. Some of its contents have been flat-out ret-conned by later games or from emails & forum posts by the official D’ni Historian, RAWA, while some has simply never been mentioned again. But hey, it’s still some interesting stories, and of course some fun puzzles too!

Oooh, there’s Puzzles involved?

Of course there’s puzzles, this is a website for a Myst game, isn’t it? 😉 The Riven Journals are split into 5 books that were originally released one at a time. This makes their ordering, 5-3-1-2-4, a little wonky today now that they’re all available. Each book contains some information or a short story plus a puzzle. Upon completing a puzzle you’re rewarded with what was back then an exclusive never-before-seen-at-the-time screenshot of Riven and, if you were among the first to solve a book, your name was added to that book’s Honorary Guildmembers page. The site also hosted a mailing list that announced when the new books were available. And before anyone asks, no I’m not going to resurrect the email list, because that would be just silly.

So what happened to them, why were they taken down?

Some time after Riven’s release, the Riven Journals were taken down as they were considered to be obsolete now that the actual game was out. Copies of the Riven Journals weren’t kept by Cyan, Brøderbund, Red Orb Entertainment, or Organic. I know because I reached out to as many people from there as I could find. Sadly the Internet Archives captured almost none of the Journals too.

But if they’re long gone, how are they here?

That’s why this section of my website is called the Riven Journals Restored – Reviving them has been an ongoing restoration effort spanning twenty years now. In the initial version I went scouring through the deepest reaches of the web in search of ALL the information I could find about the Riven Journals on any search engine, as well as the Internet Archives for earlier versions of those pages, as well as any other sites that are related to/link to that page and their history. This amounted to over 30,000 individual pages (yes you read that right). Collating this all together was the basis for the first major version of the Riven Journals Restored, released on the 22nd of September 2002. Later on I added a menu system for jumping between files, as it was regrettably necessary given the numerous gaps in the content at the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t find much at all. After all that scrounging I still had very little substance. Only the first book’s puzzle was playable, but it wasn’t exactly finish-able and the book itself had many missing images (including a lot of whole pages). The other four books were practically skeletons.

A few years later, I managed to hunt down some more of the original creators of the Riven Journals at Organic, and one of them had a complete directory dump from the servers. I was thrilled at first – until I discovered that it didn’t run on today’s servers at all! Thus, it was time to learn some digital archaeology and adapt the older code to work on modern servers. This fully-complete version of the Riven Journals Restored was released on the 29th of July 2006 during Mysterium 2006. Another large update released on the 31st of October 2017 for Riven’s 20th anniversary, which replaced the Java with JavaScript thanks to Kroz. And most recently on the 31st of October 2023, I’ve added mobile/tablet touch support, image upscaling & dynamic zooming.

How much like the original Riven Journals are they?

The Riven Journals were originally coded to run on Internet Explorer 2 and Netscape Navigator 3, and because I’m a wild madman I’ve done my best to maintain backwards compatibility with those old browsers wherever possible. Where some features have been deprecated I’ve added substitutes to try to stay as true to the original as possible (for instance window.status has been long-since deprecated by all browsers so there’s a substitute box below that shows the hover text). If you’re super curious, sometimes I documented my changes in the code with [RJR EDIT]. Some examples are making the background sounds play in modern browsers, changing the linking panel mouse-overs so they work in more browsers, and fixing up the way they use frames. The original Riven Journals were quite complex for the time, utilizing a combination of dynamically page delivery through SSI, SQL for databases, Perl scripts for handling the more complicated cookie-related tasks, with vintage PHP 2/3 communicating with the Java-coded puzzles… That’s all been ripped out and replaced with modern HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and current-day PHP. I haven’t thoroughly tested its backward compatibility recently, but there’s a good chance that they’ll at least partly run on almost any web browser, operating system, or computer you can throw at it – potentially even Netscape Navigator 3 under IRIX on an old SGI mainframe, hot dang!

The latest version dynamically scales pages so they’re not the size of a postage stamp on modern high-resolution monitors. To go with this, upscaling has been performed so they don’t look like a blurry blob at 4k – by hand treating each image manually with the paramaters individually tuned one at a time with care, and definitely not some quick bulk export. Despite my best efforts, I’ll be the first to admit that the upscaled versions aren’t always better than a basic blurry bicubic resize of the originals, but I think they look better more than 95% of the time. Don’t fret, purists; there’s a button to view the originals on every page & every puzzle (though some puzzles only update to reflect the change after your next action, such as clicking on pieces). That button’s also useful for investigating situations where the upscaled versions look weird because the original images lack sufficient detail for proper extrapolation, or where the originals also look weird and the upscales are faithfully replicating that oddity, too. More info about this on the blog post about that specific Riven Journals Upgrade!

Upscaling example (this one’s actually a reddish transparent .gif floating above the tan-coloured parchment background) – original version above, 4x upscale below

Help I’m stuck! Can you give me some hints?

Just keep trying; it’s more satisfying for you when you finally get it on your own! If you’re completely stuck though, here’s some hints.

Journal One:

(the book in the middle about beetle ink)

• Hint 1: Three words. Each letter always produces the same tile in any position. Just gotta figure out what letters go where!
• Hint 2: No letters are repeated.
• Hint 3: The first word is
  each
• Hint 4: The full solution is
  each flows ink

Journal Two:

(the book to the right of middle about an aquatic creature)

• Hint 1: This one’s a game of careful trial-and-error to breed the correct animal. The final step involves breeding the animal with itself.
• Hint 2: The first match is
  the one that looks like a tadpole, with the one that looks like a stripey worm with four fins
• Hint 3: The second match is
  the one with baleen in its mouth
• Hint 4: Full solution image:
  full solution

Journal Three:

(the book to the left of middle about a transport system to replace longer bridges)

• Hint 1: As the page says, both left & right numbers must be equal, and you want seven units below fifty-five – aka 48 units.
• Hint 2: The top thruster just multiplies both sides by 2/4/6/8 equally. Set it low then focus on finding the right button pattern & side thruster positions for something that’s a multiple of 48.
• Hint 3: The correct left buttons, from the top, are
  on, off, on, on, off
• Hint 4: Full solution image:
  full solution

Journal Four:

(the book on the far right about a D’ni citizen that travels amongst the stars)

• Hint 1: Press five sections, in the correct order, followed by the green sea beast in the middle.
• Hint 2: The correct solution never involves clicking on a piece that’s already yellow.
• Hint 3: Sound helps a lot for this puzzle – certain sections sound different.
• Hint 4: The first piece is
  the second row from the bottom, middle column
• Hint 5: The second piece is
  the bottom row, second from the right
• Hint 6: Full solution image:
  full solution

Journal Five, Part one:

(the book on the far left that’s sliced in three)
This time the book itself is the puzzle. In fact, it’s two puzzles! Additionally, you need to solve all the other journals first before you’ll have the answers to solve this one because each journal subtly changes when you finish it.

• Hint 1: Can’t figure out where to start? Look closer at the book’s spine.
• Hint 2: Got everything reconfigured? This puzzle looks & sounds familiar…
• Hint 3: There’s actually two ways to figure out the answer to this puzzle. One way involves piecing together the dot additions on the first page of each journal after you solved them, which may need to be rotated or flipped.
• Hint 4: The other way involves figuring out what page number you need in the charred fireplace combination book in Myst. What else have you got to go on in this book?
• Hint 5: The correct fireplace pattern page is
  the number of legs per animal on the book’s side, 248
• Hint 6: Full solution image:
  full solution

Journal Five, Part two:

(the book on the far left, after you’ve managed to open it)

• Hint 1: When you think you have a correct answer, press the round button below and to the right of the grey working area (it’s easy to miss) to try activating the stamp mechanism.
• Hint 2: Not all pieces are necessary. Some are there just to confuse you.
• Hint 3: To save you from having to position things to the nearest pixel, pieces snap to their correct position when you’re close enough. To not make things too easy, the extra pieces also snap to a fake position. Just because there’s a snap doesn’t mean it’s correct.
• Hint 4: Some puzzles have pieces that are very similar or even identical. If in doubt, look closely for differences between the pieces or try swapping them around.
• Hint 5: Don’t know what patterns you should be making? Where have you seen some patterns before that only appeared after you solved a journal? If you’re having trouble finding them,
  they’re blue.
• Hint 5: The stamping/book moving mechanism moves in an interesting way as it works. Maybe that’s important?
• Hint 6:
  You need to mirror the pattern in the way the mechanism stamps the next page so it turns out correct when the book is laid flat again. For instance, the second/top book stamp is mirrored vertically.
• Hint 7: Stamp 1 solution image:
  piece layout
• Hint 8: Stamp 2 solution image:
  piece layout
• Hint 9: Stamp 3 solution image:
  piece layout
• Hint 10: Stamp 4 solution image:
  piece layout

Easter eggs

No big clues for finding them, sorry 😉 All I’ll say is that you have to solve all the Journals first as part of unlocking them. But so you’re not left out in the cold, here’s a single image from them:

(click to embiggen)

I’ve got something to tell you!

Great! Drop me a line and I’ll reply when I can, if I can.

I want more Riven stuff!

Okay fine, just for you. Here’s a secret, as mentioned above – there’s an easter egg section hidden within the Riven Journals. It’s got a whole bunch of concept art from the original www.riven.com website, the Riven Journals and Riven itself, plus other shiny stuff like that. It’s hidden very well so you’ll have to look pretty hard to find it.

I want more more Riven stuff!

Geez, you’re rather demanding, aren’t you? Well alright, in honour of Riven’s 20th anniversary have some previously-unreleased-in-raw-form Riven concept art of the schoolroom Wahrk counting number game:

(click to embiggen)

I want more more more Riven stuff!

Still eager for more? Then check out Riven Elementary, a long-lost Shockwave game based on the Wahrk counting numbers toy in Riven that I also host. Much like the Riven Journals it’s also considered non-canon, but it’s also the only thing to ever feature mathematical operands, aka addition/subtraction/multiplication/division.

I want more more more more Riven stuff!

I think that’s enough for you for now. 😛

Play the Riven Journals Restored

Like this game?

Did you find this fun? Donate to my Ko-fi, comment below or drop me a line to say thanks! The more donations/encouragement I receive, the more likely I am to write more articles, guides, tools & games like this in the future.

The post The Riven Journals Restored appeared first on Realm of RIUM+.