The Starry Expanse Project

We’re hard at work on the next big Starry Expanse announcement, but we wanted to take a moment to address a question that has come up a lot recently, the Oculus Rift. For those of you who are not aware, the Rift is an upcoming head-mounted virtual reality display, specifically built for video games. It blasted through its Kickstarter campaign, raising over 900% of its original goal (that’s over 2 million dollars!), and is now well on its way to becoming a reality. It is backed by a lot of really big names, like Valve and Epic games, and already natively supports Unity and the Unreal engine.

So naturally, everybody wants to know – will The Starry Expanse support the Rift?

Our answer to that is, unfortunately, a vague one. We here at 59 Volts all agree that the Oculus Rift looks pretty dang cool. Playing our game on a head-mounted display as great as the Rift promises to be sounds like a dream – Myst is all about immersion, and what better way to immerse oneself than through VR?

At the same time, as much as it pains me to say this, our game is far from being complete. Like, still a few years, at least. With that in mind, we’re unwilling at this time to commit ourselves to supporting anything beyond what we’ve already promised – that the game will play on a standard Windows computer, or on a standard Mac OS X computer.

To be clear: this is not to say that we will not support the Rift. In all likelihood, we will ultimately do what we can to support the Rift. But we’re not promising anything until the game is a lot more complete.

Thank you to everyone who has contacted us about the Oculus Rift, we hope that this is enough of a satisfactory answer. As always, stay tuned for more updates about the project soon!

Yesterday (December 22nd, because yes, it is totally still December 23rd) was The Starry Expanse’s fourth birthday! The project began around 6pm that night in 2008, with a rather optimistic conversation about the future of the official Plasma tools Cyan had recently promised to deliver. Our original plan, for the uninitiated, was to rebuild all of Riven within Uru, using Cyan’s official tools. We knew nothing about the tools (which were not actually released for another year), we did not own 3DS Max, and we had extremely limited knowledge of how Plasma worked.

What we did have was the combined power of two crazy fans, and a dream. An insane, ridiculously over-ambitious dream.

Well, four years later, we’re proud (kind of way too proud, probably) to finally be able to let you guys actually play something that we’ve made as a result of that conversation. It’s been a crazy ride so far, with multiple engine upgrades, an ever-expanding team of Very Talented People-, nearly $4000 in donations, and hey – official approval from Cyan Worlds. Not too shabby.

We’re sorry that we’ve been so quiet recently. We’re mostly all college students, and the fall semester is always a crazy time for us. Now that that’s over, however, we’re back to work, and things are moving forward. You can probably expect to hear more from us in the next few weeks.

SO: What do we have ready for you guys to play with today? Well, it’s pretty much what we showed off at Mysterium. It’s more polished, better-suited for public consumption, but everything you saw at Mysterium is there: you can explore Prison Island, open the firemarble dome, ride the elevator, birdwatch, even mess around with the environment. It’s all very pretty, and just a taste of everything that’s to come. Be sure to check the included readme file for an explanation of how to change the environment settings.

To be clear: we’re calling this a demo, not a beta. We’re showing off some of what we have done, sharing our baby with the public for the first time. We’re not specifically looking to find problems with it, we’re well aware of what’s still broken or missing. So you can relax, and simply enjoy the first public hands-on experience of our game. That said, if you encounter any major problems with the demo, feel free to contact us and explain the situation. We’ll do our best to help you out!

Well, I guess I can’t stall any more, so without further ado:

• Mac OS X – torrent or direct download
• Windows – torrent or direct download
• Windows 64-bit – torrent or direct download

Direct downloads are graciously provided by our friends over at Myst-Aventure, and we are very thankful for it. We [EDIT: NO LONGER] recommend μTorrent as a suitable client for downloading the files via BitTorrent. If you need help using it, feel free to contact us at our support address, or just ask in the comments.

We sincerely hope you enjoy this small demonstration as much as we love working on the project.

* Edited this post on August 7, 2016 – we no longer recommend uTorrent as a suitable bittorrent client. Please seek recommendations for better clients.

Our AMA on Reddit went over spectacularly! Not only did we get over 4000 upvotes and make the default front page (a feat in and of itself), but we also drew in over 13,000 unique visitors to this site, and received nearly $200 in donations. Best of all, we got more than 20 new volunteers! Don’t worry if you haven’t heard back from us yet, we’re just a bit snowed under with these emails. If you sent us an e-mail, we’re working on it, and we should get a reply back to you shortly.

Thank you so much to everybody who participated! And if you didn’t get a chance to ask your question, just leave it as a comment here, on an older post, or send us an email!

You guys know we’re always here if you want to talk. Just post in a comments section, or send us an e-mail, and we’ll reply as soon as we can. Other people, though, people who maybe don’t frequent this site, don’t know how accessible we are. In order to remedy this, we’ve decided to hold an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit, on Monday, August 20th, at 10AM EDT (14h00 UTC).

We hope you can come join the rest of the Internet in asking about our project!

Howdy all! This is your official invitation to join us for our presentation at Mysterium 2012 in Seattle! We’re presenting the last year’s worth of work and news today, Friday, August 3 right now!

Please note that while earlier today we were experiencing technical difficulties, those difficulties have been mitigated and we are continuing on with our presentation at this moment (now). Thank you for your patience!

If you’re not attending Mysterium in person, the event will be streamed live online here via LiveStream (or you can watch it embedded in this page below)! Hope to see you there!

Check out the LiveStream feed!

Not only are we going to be at Mysterium 2012 in Seattle later this year, but we’re also going to be doing a Q&A at Online Mysterium, in Uru, on May 19! You can submit questions for us here, and then come talk to us in the cavern at 4:00 PM EDT! See you there!

Just posting to let everyone know that we will indeed be at Mysterium 2012, during the first weekend of August, making our usual presentation. We will, of course, also be livestreaming the presentation, and it will be available for viewing after the fact. But for the fullest of effect, you really want to be there in person!

You can see past presentations here: 2010 and 2011.

If you want to experience the awesome first-hand, register soon!

You may have noticed that our lovely forum is gone. This is because Convore, the service that we picked for hosting the board, has been shut down, through decisions that had absolutely nothing to do with us.

We did, however, manage to make a backup of all of the conversations on the board, so that they can (eventually) be restored to a new (and better) forum. We’re working on making our network of sites fully integrated with one another, so that one login works here for commenting, on the forum, in our bug tracker, etc.

In other news, we’re ramping up asset production again, so expect more new images soon!

And no, none of the above is an April Fool’s joke. We decided that it would be too cruel after posting so little for months.

There is now a Starry Expanse Hood in MOULa. If you’d like to join, catch someone from 59 Volt Entertainment online (like Zib or ironmagma), or find someone who’s already a member. If nobody’s online, just send us an e-mail, and one of us will hop online to help you out. Spread the love!

Hey there – Just wanted to let you guys know that work is continuing, despite our silence. I’ve posted a couple of things to our forum in the last week, and I figured I’d repost them here. They depict (very preliminary) work on the new sky system, and some rigging work on Catherine:

We’re not dead! We haven’t given up! Thanks for continuing to believe in us!

That being said, we could really use another experienced programmer or two. We’d like help developing both the engine, and some backend tools for us to manage the project. If you’re interested in helping out (in this or any other way), just send us an e-mail, and we’ll let you know if we can use you.