News

September 4, 2011
Riven X 0.9.8 is now available. It addresses the missing sound effects and music issue in 0.9.7.

July 11, 2011
Riven X 0.9.7 is now available. See the release blog entry for more details.

May 8, 2010
Riven X 0.9 is now available. See the release blog entry for more details.

July 23, 2009
Riven X 0.8.3 is now available. It addresses an embarrassing bug where the fire marbles would be drawn even with the power waffle lowered.

July 22, 2009
Riven X 0.8.2 is now available. It addresses a few bugs affecting the village school numbers game and the power domes.

July 20, 2009
Riven X 0.8.1 is now available. It addresses transition and movie playback bugs.

July 12, 2009
Riven X 0.8 is now available. See the release blog entry for more details.

March 8, 2009
Riven X 0.7.3 is now available. It fixes an issue on Tiger where saved games would not be selectable in the open saved game dialog.

February 22, 2009
Riven X 0.7.2 is now available. It fixes a number of critical bugs that were causing crashes. It also addresses problems with the jungle elevator when using the original CD edition. Finally, the Save and Save As… menu items are once again functional.

February 16, 2009
Riven X 0.7.1 is now available to fix a crash-on-launch bug on Mac OS X Tiger. See the release blog entry for more details.

February 15, 2009
Riven X 0.7 is now available. See the release blog entry for more details.

November 30, 2008
Riven X 0.7d4 is now available. This release introduces preliminary fullscreen support, browsable journals and the journal inventory. See the release notes for more details.

August 17, 2008
Just a quick update to indicate I’ve updated the download link at the bottom of this page with Riven X 0.7d3. I’m still in the process of restoring the layout of my project pages and some of my build and testing infrastructure, as well as migrating the old Trac wiki to Launchpad. In any case, progress continues with Riven X, with recent additions to supported editions.

May 19, 2008
Riven X 0.6 is now available. This release brings a slew of engine features, include water animation, cursors and transitions. See this blog entry for all the details.

March 15, 2008
Riven X 0.5 is now available. The most important new feature is the edition manager, which will allow owners of the CD edition as well as owners of the various DVD editions to use Riven X. It should be noted that optical disc swapping is not supported yet, which means that CD edition owners should do a full install for the time being. Other changes include performance improvements and a large amount of bug fixes.

January 20, 2008
Riven X 0.4 is now available. See the blog announcement for all the details.

August 16, 2006
A new binary build is now available. Of particular interest, this build should function correctly on Intel Macs, as I was able to test Riven X on shiny new Mac Pros at last week’s WWDC.

I’ve also made it easier to go to a particular card. Just type card in the debug shell and off you go. And as always, bug reports are appreciated

April 24, 2006
First of all, I’d like to wave a hand at people coming from Ludomac and Mac4Ever. Ce projet est pour vous, les fans!

Secondly, I’d like to address BootCamp, because it obviously negates the necessity of Riven X for Intel Macs as one can easily reboot into Windows and play Riven natively there. Except not, because dual-booting sucks. It takes you away from Mac OS X and very few people in the usual MYST crowd will want to do that. Not to mention you need to buy Windows (if you care about your Karma-type thing), maintain it and deal with fun things like Windows losing to malware. Virtualization may be a more viable solution, and that saddens me in that Riven X isn’t as important as it used to be, however both these technologies were inevitable and so this project will continue on until completion.

Thirdly, I’ll be writing a guide in the near future on compiling, installing and running the Riven X tech demos /alphas / betas with a comprehensive list of limitations and known bugs. This should make it easier for testers and people interested in compiling the thing (for reason I cannot imagine, I guess it can be fun).

And finally, I haven’t released a binary build in a long time because I’ve hit a pretty serious issue with MPEG-2 Audio Layer II decompression. Technically, sound support (as well as a myriad of bug fixes from the last tech demo release) are available on Subversion, however as of now Layer II resources that are looped in-game (such as ambiance) will have a noticeable artifact every loop cycle.

March 19, 2006
As indicated on the main Trac wiki page, I have created two mailing lists to support the Riven X project. The first is your standard -devel mailing list, used for discussions pertaining to the development of Riven X, and the second is a read-only mailing list that receives Subversion commit messages and Trac notifications.

Just hop over to the development wiki for the appropriate links.

February 6, 2006
I have updated the Riven X tech demo to build r63. This build actually is universal, whereas the previous ones were in fact PowerPC only. In addition, I have fixed several major byte order bugs and corrected issues in picture rendering and Riven Script program execution. I think this build has bug-free picture rendering, within the limits of not having game state variables yet.

February 4, 2006
I have updated the Riven X tech demo to build r59. It contains major fixes to card record loading and byte order handling.

February 3, 2006
The Riven X tech demo is now available. THIS IS A HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL, HIGHLY INCOMPLETE, HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE BUILD. You’ve been warned.

More details in my Riven X tech demo entry.

January 20, 2006
I’d simply like to point out that the Classic environment does not work with Rosetta, Apple’s PowerPC translation technology for Intel Macs. Riven X is therefore the only way the coming generation will be able to enjoy this landmark video game.

October 30, 2005
Here begins the public story of my most ambitious project to date. Riven™, the sequel to MYST™ and the greatest adventure game of all times, is coming to Mac OS X™. Of course, you may not share my dedication or even dislike the adventure genre, but it remains unquestionable that Riven™ was a stunning game back in 1997 when it was released by now-famous Cyan Worlds, and to a large degree it still is. Of course, Riven™ uses old compression technology and small frame sizes, but the detail and realism that can be found in every single image still amaze me.

The project is in its infancy but I expect something barely playable in November.

“The ending can never truly be written”, indeed.

Summary

Riven X is the rebirth of the best episode in the MYST™ saga for Mac OS X. The same content, the same wonder, a brand-new engine. Although Riven™ was released in 1997 for both Mac OS and Windows, it was never updated to be a native Mac OS X application. With Intel Macs becoming dominant meaning the loss of the Classic environment, something had to be done in order for future generations of Mac users to enjoy Riven™. Thanks to the work of dedicated individuals, in particular Tito Dal Canton, the Riven™ data files were reversed engineered, thus paving the way for a new engine.

There is one other project striving to re-implement Riven that I am aware of, but their commitment to Mac OS X, let alone to their endeavor itself, was more than debatable when I started planning Riven X in June 2005. Therefore, I decided to move forward with Riven X and cooperate as much as possible with the Fissure project.

Legal

Riven X contains no copyrighted material from the original game with the exception of localized Extras.MHK archives (because extraction of that file from the original CD edition’s VISE installer is not possible). Reverse engineering was performed to decipher the Riven™ archive files and the Riven™ data files contained therein, but such reverse engineering was not performed with the intent of distributing copyrighted content or otherwise circumventing digital rights management technology. Riven X requires a legal copy of Riven™ to play.

Riven is Copyright © 1997 Cyan Worlds, Inc. All rights reserved. Riven, MYST, and Cyan are trademarks of Cyan Worlds, Inc.