MOUL

In the past weeks there has been a lot of discussion on the status of the donations for Myst Online: Uru Live again and several actions have been taken to try and raise more funds and at the same time make explorers aware of the issue.

The Guild of Messengers organized a big party with the collaboration of all the major D'niJs and the most active guilds; Jaruku's Hood Group has organized a kind of lottery to win an appearance in one of their movies; and Chogon added the CAVCON information on the MystOnline Login and is updating the MOULa website.

All of these activities seem to have had a good impact on the current level of the donations: today Chogon told us via email that the donations have "greatly increased" since the announcement of the real conditions of the CAVCON. So there will be updates to Myst Online: Uru Live again with fixes and improvements coming from the fans (first thing on the list: Minkata Sparkly!) and if the donations stay at this level then updates may become a more "regular" thing.

So a big thumbsup for all the people who organized something and a thank you to all who made donations, we've reached our first goal!

We hope the donation flow will keep to a constant level (or increase!) for having an ever improving experience in MOULa.

EDIT: For major clarity, the Minkata Sparkly fix will come from Cyan and not from the Fans, but it is actually in the list of fixes.

Shorah Explorers,

With the recent news that the CAVCON index has been wrong almost since the beginning some of us have started wondering what could be done to increase again its level.

It was from a proposal by our fellow explorer Gahlen, that we had this idea: make a big party!

From the information we have, many of the regular explorers in the cavern have no idea of the current situation and some of them don't even know that MystOnline is funded solely by fan donations. So we think that there is a big part of our community that is not donating because they have no idea that they can.

From here we got the idea of a big "CAVCON awareness Party" and in the meantime we thought we could also increase explorer awareness of the various Guilds and other community groups. The Guild of Messengers is planning the party in collaboration with other Guilds and D'niJs.

We are trying to make this a 24 hour party which will take place on Friday October 21st, where the D'niJs will stream music and members of the Guilds and other indivisuals will distribute informations about the CAVCON and the many Guilds of D'ni.

We have already gotten collaboration from the major D'niJs of the community, like Donahoo, Lord Chaos and Dichromus, and also from the Guild the Writers, the Guild of Sleepers and the Guild of Healers.

The organization is still going on and everyone is welcome to help us in any way, posting their thoughts and ideas in our Party thread. We are still missing a location for the party, some hours of music streaming are not covered, and we would also like to organize some activities along with the dances and talks.Lees meer

Robyn Miller (tinselman.com) is known as the co-founder of Cyan, and he was both the composer and a key collaborator for the games Myst and Riven.  Robyn moved on to non-gaming projects after Riven was released and has never been involved in Uru.  Now, thanks to MOUL forum member Miranda2, Robyn has joined the Myst Online forums to discuss the Cyan logo animation that he created and his perspectives on the "Stranger" mythos that evolved from Myst and Riven's casting into the role of historical events in the greater context of Uru.

Genesis of the Cyan Logo Sequence:  http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25141

Who Really is The Stranger?:    http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25154

A recent post on the MOULa forums reveals that Cyan over the past couple days has discovered that the CAVCON meter has been inaccurate for some time. The cause is attributed to a miscommunication between accounting and the people updating CAVCON. This new information has shown that current donations are no longer covering expenses of server maintainance. Currently part of the reserves are being used to make up the difference. When MOULa was released CAVCON 4 was reached and as a result a good reserve was built. The accurate CAVCON level has been at 2 for most of the time MOULa has been live.

Using this new information it has been determined that cost reducing measures are needed on the MOULa servers. The first phase should not result in any degradation of service. Seperate servers will be combined to be more flexible. The second phase will be asking for fan volunteers to host file servers and spread the data transfer costs. A possible third phase would degrade the service but hopefully it will not come down to that.

The process of implementing the first phase has already started. The servers were shut down at 10:00 am PDT so that modifications to the server setup could begin. The process is expected to take two hours. Cyan will post on the forums to let everyone know when the servers are back up and running.

Source: http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25150

The meeting today was quite short but went well without Leo. As always, a chat log can be read here. It is the raw version as there was argubaly no reason to make a cleansed version (if somebody feels that it should be made as such then feel free to do so).

A brief synopsis:
From the GoMe:
- (Luna) Today the "Behind Open Source" special was released featuring interviews and important info you need to know about Open Source. Read more here.
- (Theremin) The third issue of Go! has been started and is expected to be released in July or August

From the Mysterium Committee:
- A recap of all of the details released so far in addition to the announcement of our logo, t-shirts, and free registration contest. Everything you need to know is at the Mysterium 2011 page.

From the GoW:
- PyPRP has been updated
- A fix has been made that reduces the lag that occurs when sending age invites
- The shard they announced has been been put on hold due to technical issues.