Playing Fan Ages

Revision as of 20:14, 21 January 2009 by Theclam (Talk | contribs)

What are Fan Ages?

As you know, in D'ni culture an Age is a separate universe, described by and accessible through special books. And as you know, as D'ni culture is represented in the Myst and Uru series of computer games, an Age is essentially a level in one of these games.


This article deals with a certain kind of Age - those created by fans of Myst and Uru, that are playable using Uru's game engine, Plasma.


These Ages are comprised of data made with certain tools (Blender and PyPRP to create the Age, and Python and AlcScript to make it interactive). However, the game engine needs a push to recognize these Ages. Manager programs, Uru Library Manager (ULM) and Uru Age Manager (UAM), were written to make this push (installation).


While Fan Ages are not created by Cyan Worlds (and thus not commercial, not always cohesive, and in some cases a continual work in progress), it is important to note that these are the cornucopias of imagination of the person next to you on the bus, and you would be remiss to not enjoy them.

What do I need to play Fan Ages?


For online play, you'll need to find someone running an Alcugs shard, or set one up. Details are at [1]

What are Manager Programs?

There are two different methods of downloading/installing/playing Fan Ages: UAM and ULM. Historically, UAM(UruAgeManager) was written initially and used for Fan Ages. During the "Great Cyan Clampdown of 2006" projects that relied on the reverse-engineering of Plasma were driven underground for a while. In time, ULM(UruLibraryManager) was written to take its place. Later on, UruAgeManager was rewritten from scratch to become part of the Drizzle tool.

UAM Strengths

  • Uses the Java framework
  • Has every Age ever released, some 24+ more than ULM
  • No problems with corrupted Ages
  • Much faster downloads
  • Caches downloads, and lets you easily switch versions of an Age without redownloading

ULM Strengths

  • Uses the .NET framework
  • Allows you to customise which books are on your Relto shelf

Installing by hand

I don't actually know how this is done, but it would be nice to have a summary of how these programs get PotS to recognize Ages. The strengths are:

  • Uses whatever freaking framework you want
  • ????
  • Profit!