Uru Live Again!

As you may or may not know, Uru Live opened to the public again on February 11 for the very high price of $0. It felt weird playing Uru again (not that I played Uru Live in the first place, except for a little bit :P). The cleft, and the main for ages of Uru were pretty much the same as the original. A lot came back to me as I played through them.

However, the Path of the Shell ages (Er'cana and Ahnonay for those keeping score) were a bit different. I ran through Ahnonay the same way as I did in the original... only to find myself not being able to rotate pods with the handle in the "hole in the wall." Turns out, they changed the way it's played to require two people...

A fellow ScummVM dev and myself set forth to help each other through the Path of the Shell here. We beat Ahnonay together and then helped each other yet again to find the way to K'veer Island (the island that Atrus is trapped in in Myst/Riven) and by extension, Myst. Here's Scott's and my avatars in Myst:


For what it's worth, my KI# is 590130 and my nick is, of course, clone2727.

Also, for those still keeping tabs on Riven progress, you can now go free Catherine (not that it's possible to get to the 233rd age yet anyway). Interested in trying? Use these console commands to plant you in Gehn's bedroom.

var agehn 4
changeStack ospit 81

Of course, you still have to make your way to Prison Island afterwards ;)

Snow Leopard Woes

Today I took out the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD that I've had for several months and installed it. I figured it was time for an upgrade.

Positives, positives... It didn't crash when installing... It probably is faster in some way. Ok, now for the negatives:

First thing I noticed: Had to recompile all the libraries. There was libSDL and libMAD present, but broken; or at least compiled for the wrong processor. Not to mention libFLAC and libMAD didn't recognize the host, so I had to force it to "x86_64-darwin". Other than that, the 4.2.1 gcc seems to be an improvement over 4.0.1 from the XCode that comes with 10.5.

Second thing: The definition of KB/MB/GB. I hate the 1000 bytes = 1 KB definition and the 1024 bytes = 1 KiB definition. I'm quite disappointed 10.6 now uses this definition.

And finally, the biggest problem: QuickTime X. To put it plainly, QuickTime X is complete crap. I can't believe Apple would release something like this. It is total trash. As when testing any video in a video player, I like to start with Myst's (the original!) Cyan logo video. First off, QuickTime X has almost no codec support; it has to call upon QuickTime 7 to play the videos. This already took about 10 seconds to load the video. Next problem: The video played at some ridiculously high resolution and wouldn't let me play it at normal size. In addition, the whole interface was ugly.

So, I'm looking around, and alas! QuickTime 7 has been pushed back to the Utilities folder. Following some other guys' advice in this post (of people who agree with me), I switched all QuickTime related files to be played with QuickTime 7. That's much better...

On a completely unrelated note: Background videos in Riven work now! Go watch the awesomeness that is the Tay linking book videos! So epic!