Uru

Revision as of 12:38, 2 March 2012 by Diafero (Talk | contribs) (→‎New Uru versions: fix links)

There is a whole lot of different Uru versions out there, and if you are new to this, you will probably be confused. Here you found a good starting point to get some order into the mess of abbreviations. The variety of Uru versions can be separated into two main categories: "Old" and "New".

Note that in the following, when I mean "Uru version", I am always referring to the client engine actually running on your PC, unless I explicitly say that I mean a server.

New Uru versions

This is still quite simple: The latest version of Uru is called Myst Online: Uru Live (MOUL). However, to keep things at least a bit confusing, when Cyan released the MOUL engine as open-source, they called it CyanWorlds.com Engine (CWE). The CWE and MOUL client is essentially the same, the only difference is that MOUL is compiled by Cyan, while you can download CWE as source-code and compile it yourself, if you want. However, developers are working on the GoW fork of the CWE, and it is expected that more and more differences will show up.

MOUL can only be used online, in combination with a server. There are three different servers:

To create an age for MOUL, you need to use the Max Plugin. Many of the old tools can not deal with MOUL, however PlasmaShop 3 is actually quite good at displaying the internals of all the files it uses.

Old Uru versions

This is where it gets really messy: In this group of engines, we have Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (ABM), Until Uru (UU) and Uru: Complete Chronicles (CC). To confuse you even more, CC will often be called TPOTS, which is actually the abbreviation of The Path of the Shell, an expansion pack that is part of CC. However, CC and TPOTS actually mean the same.

These versions of Uru are technically very similar, and it is easy to convert an age from UU to CC or vice versa. The only exception are features which are available only in CC, for example, swimming regions. To create an age for one of these Uru versions, you can use PyPRP. Almost all fan-ages released so far are targeted for CC, and the same holds for many of the tools and extensions, like Drizzle or the Offline KI.

All of these Uru versions can be used both offline in a stand-alone manner, and online, communicating with a server. For CC, this is probably an accident (after all, it was only ever released as an offline game), but it proofed very useful! There are three different servers that can speak the old Uru networking protocol:

  • The server used by Cyan in the original Uru Live back in 2003 and 2004. It only worked with ABM.
  • Alcugs, an open-source server based on reverse engineering the Uru Live protocol. The latest version works both with UU and CC clients.
  • Until Uru, a closed-source server for Linux released by Cyan which, naturally, only works with UU clients.

Even though these old Uru versions and MOUL (see above) look very similar, and even though they are internally quite close to each other, there are some fundamental differences which make it hard to cross the border. Currently, Drizzle can convert ages from the MOUL-format to CC, but we have no tool available going the other direction.