Recreating the home of Atrus
First, I added a proper contact page with a dedicated email, so someone can get a hold of me that way.
Next, added a new tools page to provide a quick list of any software I’m using.
Finally, decided to grab the domain TomahnaProject.com. I may switch that to being the primary domain for the site.
That’s all for now.
So a couple years ago I got a bit interesting in photogrammetry.
Here is my favorite video on a free way to do it.
At some point my brain realized that while this sort of thing wouldn’t work well for Myst/Riven, it might work for Exile/Revelation. So I started playing around and experimenting with running photogrammetry software on data from Exile. I’ll get into all that in another post.
One of the things I had a bit of trouble with when I first started working on this was getting the data from the original game.
Of course there is the old standby of Dragon Unpacker. DUP always worked fine for Exile. But since it just brute force detects the files (images/video) inside of the data files, they are all spit out sequentially. It requires having to wade through lots of stuff to find what you are looking for in Exile’s data.
Also, I wanted to take a good look at Revelations version of Tomahna (while they look similar, they are distinctly different). The trouble is that Ubisoft used nested .m4b files. DUP can open them, but bulk extraction never worked correctly. So you have to manually extract each nested file. It’s a pain.
On top of that, Revelation’s cube maps were broken into tiled grids of smaller images, and many of them were saved in a .zap format. These could not be read correctly by image software. So extracting full panoramas from Revelation wasn’t possible that way.
There was Revelator, but it’s not open source, and to my knowledge the author passed away.
Between my frustration and curiosity with the situation, one thing led to another, and I ended up writing my own program for extracting Exile & Revelation data.
Introducing the MYSTER Asset Explorer!
MYSTERAssetExplorer Github Page
I’ve released it under the MIT license. So have at it!
It’s still a bit rough, and there are some features I haven’t finished yet. I’ll revisit finishing this project at some point.
And if you have any pull requests, let me know!
The scope of this project (for now) is limited to Myst 3’s version of Tomahna.
I will be following Starry Expanse’s lead and using camera matching and UE4. It will be VR enabled (definitely for Vive).
Now, if I’m being honest I kinda hope this project could possibly one day turn into a sister project to Starry Expanse for purposes of a realtime recreation of Exile.
Trouble with that idea is of course the rights to the game. At the time I was involved with Starry Expanse we had no idea if Cyan would approve or not. It was problematic to spend time working on something knowing that with one email it could all be for not, and was a big factor in my leaving Starry Expanse.
Back then it was nearly impossible to communicate with Cyan.
It took forever for Starry Expanse to become legitimate. And Cyan owned Riven. Completely. To say nothing of the fact that they have NEVER had even the slightest interest in making realRIVEN themeselves (I have chat logs from RAWA saying so in 2003!)
So I’m fully aware of how complex a situation it must be when Presto (long defunct) and Ubisoft are involved. Sure Myst’s 25 anniversary kickstarter has the rights for rereleasing the original games, but it’s unlikely that would extend to allowing for a full 3d recreation. Honestly, I don’t know what is possible with any of that.
What I do know is I have been particularly interested in recreating Tomahna. Not sure why exactly, but I tried to once, a LONG time ago. And I thought it was time to dust it off, and try again with the newer, fancier tools and skills I have now. If this turns into something bigger, yay!
But until then, this will just be a showcase passion project.
The upcoming posts will be covering things I’ve already done up until now.
But here is a teaser of things to come:
This is the Tomahna Project.
A recreation of Tomahna.
Both the sunroom and the study from Myst 3.
So. For a while I’ve been playing around with Blender and UE4. And of course I can’t stay away from anything Myst related for long.
This project is in the same vein as Starry Expanse, and Aloy’s Myst VR project.
This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be making to catch up and cover what I’ve already done so far.
After that I’ll make posts as I make progress on the project.