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!

Now you can “Ask Us Anything” on Reddit! Come join us for a grand old time with your questions and comments about the project!

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!

Mysterium is still ongoing, but we thought we’d post a brief outline of what we announced during our presentation just a few minutes ago.

First, we showed the gameplay as it stands now. You can watch a condensed walkthrough of that, including our brand-new sky, here (it had to be re-run since the video didn’t go through the first time), or by watching the video below.

You can also watch (or rather, listen to) the first attempt at showing the game (actual presentation starts at 4:07), which didn’t go so well because of streaming issues.

Then, we announced the exciting news that Cyan Worlds, Inc. has agreed to allow us to proceed with our project! We also showed a short video of Boiler Island as it stands now (shown in the video linked to above), and we have just recently added a new post to our dev blog for your enjoyment.

At the time of writing this dev blog post, the project of creating a dynamic sky has been ongoing for more than ten months. We’re proud to say that now the sky is reaching its completion.

The project started with our group’s dissatisfaction with our older skies. They all had big problems which couldn’t be overlooked. For example, our oldest sky was a basic, static skybox. At that point in time, we weren’t even considering having dynamic time or weather, so it served its purpose reasonably well. Eventually though, we grew more ambitious and wanted to bring a full day/night cycle with realistic weather changes to Riven. We brought in a third-party sky shader called UniSky for last year’s Mysterium demo, but we weren’t satisfied with certain limitations it had. For example, the sky tended to use flat colors for the clouds, all the way across the sky. There was no backlighting or shading from the sun or moon. It just didn’t meet our standards.

The original static sky texture used both in Riven and later in Uru’s “Cleft” scene

So we went to work designing a new way for a sky system to operate. The original idea we had was for a static skybox to use multiple textures (cloud alpha, cloud normals, cloud edges, etc.) to change its lighting and composition with the time of day. It was then realized that simply by animating this static system with pre-rendered dynamic clouds, we could have a skybox that looked natural, was lit realistically, and could have clouds that moved as the player worked in the game.

The first iteration of this idea was flawed. Our static system was based on a set of pre-rendered image textures, being brought separately into the shader. We naively extended this same system to animated clouds, without realizing that having 400 to 800 frames each for 8 texture sets would eat up a lot of storage space and system memory.

Eventually, after several revisions of this flawed system, we agreed that the texture sets needed to be overhauled to save space and be more efficient for the shader to compute. The system we decided on was to have one basic animated texture. This texture would be a grayscale animation of soft cloud formations, which could then be modified in real time to produce sharper cloud textures that could also morph on cue to cover more or less of the sky, making the transition from a clear blue sky to a gray overcast sky much smoother than in previous iterations.

The whole sky architecture was also designed so that it could be controlled using very few final variables. At this stage, there are three main properties that control the sky: time of day, cloud speed, and cloudiness. That isn’t to mention the complexities that depend on time, however, such as determining the correct position of the sun and moon as well as the proper colors of different parts of the sky. Weather effects like rain have not yet been integrated, so there will likely be a fourth variable (not in the sky shader itself, but in the related systems) for raininess, to transition from a light shower to a thunderstorm. We’ll likely end up limiting any extreme weather to be quite rare and quick, so as not to interfere with puzzle solving too much.

The lighting for the sky is all texture-based at this time. Most of the sun and moon’s influence on the sky is driven by simple black-to-white gradients, modified by the cloudiness of the sky and the appropriate color of the the sky, and these gradients move with the location of the sun. The cloud layer’s transparency blocks the sunlight, naturally, as well as part of the sun’s glow. When overcast, this creates a natural brightness in the sun’s half of the sky, while maintaining the flat haziness that defines a cloudy sky.

An animation showing all 27 frames of the lunar cycle.

The moon is animated as well, with 27 frames of animation representing each daily phase. The phases fade between each other to produce a cohesive lunar cycle. Moonlight, though it hasn’t yet been made dynamic, will be directly affected by the phase of the moon. A full moon will illuminate the night scenes greatly, but a new moon will leave the scenes very dark. We’ve planned ahead though, and have added night-time activated lights in certain areas to make it easy to navigate Riven and solve the puzzles even in the extreme dark.

The last major change made to the sky, made during its second build in Unity, was the addition of a backlighting effect, which harshly darkens the centers of clouds which are blocking the sun, and softly darkens the centers of cloud all across the sky.

One of the problems we ran into, writing the software behind the sky, was that we often ran out of registers (or memory slots). None of us had ever written a shader of this size before, so we were not aware of the way in which writing a shader is so different from writing most programs. The main difference is that the entire program (and all its memory) is confined to the space available in the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit, a chip on the computer specifically for doing graphics operations).

So, we had to write the shader to be unusually lightweight and efficient with the memory it used. That meant storing variables for as short a time as possible, finding the least memory-consumptive way to do certain color-mixing operations, and finding new ways to cram data into otherwise unused channels of our textures. It was more than a few times that we were informed that we had “run out of constant registers” or had “exceeded the maximum number of instruction units” and had to rework everything from a blank slate. The final sky shader ended up being 557 standard lines of code.

The final version of the sky is flexible, determining cloud size and sky colors all in real time. It could be adapted for use in Tay and The 233rd Age, for example, and changed to match those Ages’ color schemes. The sky is the product of much of the last year’s development, and we think that it’s a robust addition to Starry Expanse.

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!

Online Mysterium has come and gone, and I’d say it was pretty successful. The full log of the event can be read here! Any follow-up questions can be posted as comments here, and I (or another member of the team) will do my best to answer them.