The Book Press Is Not Dead!

As it has been known for some time, the book press from Book Assembly Island in Riven was removed from the game after the beta version. It was also known that two videos (previously visible with Riven Movie Snoop) . (See here and here).

If you use Ron Hayter's excellent Riveal program, you can extract the movies, sounds, and pictures of Riven (both CD and DVD). I did that a while ago, and I look at the images (whose names start with the card they are used in) to help debug the code from time to time. Today, I was working on Gehn's journal in his lab on Book Assembly Island and I looked how many images there are in his journal. Anyway, I saw two images that caught my eye (304_bislandcrater.2010 and 304_bislandcraterprsdn.2010):


I also checked out the card (using my engine's code) 304 on that island. The machine is functional! Unfortunately, since the videos aren't functional in the engine yet, it doesn't look as cool as it would if they worked. Once they are working, I'll post a video of how it works (or you could just use Riveal and extract the movies as well).

For those interested in seeing this in the original game, you could always try out the debug console and switch to bspit card 304.

(Images Copyright © Cyan)