ONE FOR THE AGES.(Software Review)(Evaluation)

Though beautifully textured 3D images and 360-degree panning, the newest Myst game immerses players in a world that makes the surreal appear to be real

THE OTHERWORLDLY IMAGES in Myst III: Exile, the long-awaited continuation of the legendary Myst computer game series, are the kind that dreams are made of. In fact, Exile's mysterious worlds, with their strange flowering plants, hybrid animals, azure waters, and Camelot-like architecture were supposedly created from the thoughts and dreams of the game's main character. Yet the detailed texturing of the 3D imagery, the seamlessly composited video footage of live actors into scenes, and a new 360-degree panning technology blur the line between the surreal world of the game and the real world of the player. * Utilizing the technological advances that have occurred in 3D hardware and software over the past five years, the animators at Presto Studios have constructed five distinct universes, or "Ages," in Exile that transcend the realism of the previous Myst installments. * Tomahna sits like a garden oasis at the edge of an endless desert landscape. J'nanin, an elliptical-shaped island, is home to towering granite cliffs and strange, tusk-like formations that surround an azure caldera. Voltaic, a dusty world of sand and sky, water and wind, contains strange, man-made constructions that inhabit an otherwise dry and desolate landscape. Amateria, a mechanical wonderland in the middle of an endless black sea, consists of basalt columns and geyser-formed mud pots that poke through the landscape amid sophisticated mechanical inventions. And Edanna, possibly inspired by dreams of paradise lost, is contained in an inward-growing tree whose massive, hollow trunk creates the perfect environment for a variety of exotic plant and animal ecosystems.

Dawn of a New Age

Cyan raised the bar for graphics realism in gaming when it released Myst in 1993 and its sequel Riven in 1997. With Cyan committed to other projects, Presto Studios was chosen to continue the Myst tradition of artistic beauty and striking imagery, the likes of which have never been seen before.

The most challenging modeling task, according to lead animator Mike Brown, was creating the Ages, or islands, which are the focal point of the game. This is in contrast to most computer games, in which the characters and action--rather than the landscapes--are the main attraction. As a result, the imagery, which is all pre-rendered 3D, had to be especially compelling to capture and hold players' attention.

One of the most compelling Exile Ages is J'nanin, described by Brown as "a rock climber's paradise." To ensure that J'nanin, as well as the other Exile Ages, retained a unique graphical appearance, each was assigned its own designer and production team, while creative director Phil Saunders worked to maintain an aesthetic consistency among them. Conceptual artists decided how each island would look, and then 3D artists formed the various terrains using Discreet's 3D Studio Max. To create J'nanin's environment, Brown first built a simple representation of the entire Age by lofting shapes, a process of creating shapes or cross sections of a model and then letting the computer extrude those shapes to create 3D structures.

To smooth the terrain's surfaces and add the more detailed geometry, he subdivided the surfaces using 3D Studio Max's Meshsmooth. "Organic surfaces like wood and rock are extremely complex to build in 3D environments, and it would have been impossible to model all the subtle undulations, cracks, and crevices in J'nanin's landscape," he says. Instead, the animator painted. them into the surface using displacement maps. "For J'nanin, I created nearly 100 custom displacement maps just to build the terrain."