
25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer - DanAndersen
https://www.riumplus.com/25-hour-digital-myst-dni-clock-chronometer/
======
Uehreka
_RIVEN SPOILERS_

I actually didn't play Riven until about 5 years ago, when it came out on iOS
(I played Myst on CD as a kid). Learning the game's number system was a
fascinating exercise that I don't think I've ever had in any other game.

Basically, in your explorations you eventually happen upon a small empty one-
room building, which (if you look at the arrangement of desks) you can deduce
is some sort of schoolhouse. In that room you'll find a mechanical wooden-and-
string toy on a table. If you interact with it, the symbol on the base
changes, and the toy performs some sort of action (I think dropping a weight)
some number of times. From that you can deduce that the symbols are numbers,
and the toy is for teaching what number each of the symbols represents.

If you're playing correctly, you've got some scratch paper handy (I used a
drawing app) and you can write down each symbol and what number it corresponds
to. And you'd better do this, because you're going to see a lot of important
numbers in the game, and this is the only way they are written.

Towards the end of the game, you find a journal from one of the characters,
which is written in English. However, when referring to the Age (the game's
term for different worlds) that they've gone to, they use these numerals. If
you've done your homework, you'll know that they've named their new world "The
233rd Age".

~~~
djsumdog
Yea. I liked Myst, but Riven is where I gave up on the series. I did complete
it, but it was a long time ago and I remember giving up on puzzles and looking
up a lot of hints.

Also the font for the books in Riven were terrible. I could read all the Myst
books. They were relatively short and it was a neat device to learn the story.
In Riven, they were painful to read and there were so many books everywhere.

I even bought a copy of Exile used at a bookstore for like $5, but never
played more than 10 min of it. I would have liked to have finished the series,
but Riven kinda was an example of why the entire 90s/early-2000s adventure
game genre (Sierra, LucasArts, etc.) failed. LucasArts probably had the only
games that were not over challenging and that could be solved with just time
and persistence. Everyone else relied on sales of hint books (and no one wants
to use a hint book; you want to figure it out for yourself).

The new era of adventure games fixed a lot of this. Telltale and Quantic Dream
used their adventure games more to push story (not a lot of "puzzles" in the
traditional sense), but there are others with a decent mix of story and
puzzles.

A great example of the two game building attitudes in a single game is Broken
Age. The first half: amazing. The puzzles were fun but not over challenging,
the story drew you in, the graphics were beautiful and the characters were
relatable. Part two: stupid-insane-difficult-terrible puzzles, story went to
crap, didn't care what happened.

~~~
StillBored
Well by the time of riven you could look up the puzzle solutions on the
internet, which is what I did when I got stuck one of the problem that turned
out to be audio (and silly me I though they were just playing sound effects).

Anyway, I really view those games as the last of the nearly impossible games
that were everywhere in the 1980s. And not just adventure games, a lot of
arcade games were the same way, I played conan
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta)
for probably 4 months straight before I beat its 7 (?) lousy screens. 99% of
the difficulty was basically being able to play it perfectly for the ~15 mins
it takes to win. If you added a save game feature it would have probably only
taken a couple hours.

If you watch the playthroughs on youtube, the difficulty is completely not
evident. Another one like that was Dragons Liar.

On the plus side, the incredible rush one got when figuring out a puzzle after
spending days on it is maybe part of the reason a lot of modern games simply
aren't fun.

~~~
WorldMaker
Riven was among the last games in a category where I included its official
strategy guide in the base cost of the game. I had a bad habit of reading the
"novelization" part of the official strategy guides as a book in school before
I could actually play the game. The only game I recall that this sort of
spoiler "ruined" the experience was the original Myst when the problem solving
part of my brain untangled the dependency map of the game and arrived at the
"ten minute solution" speed run of the game, which was my first playthrough
because I couldn't believe it would work.

(It's possibly something that helped my love of Myst itself long term for me,
though, in that I really struggled with the tone puzzles in later
playthroughs, and it was good knowing they didn't keep me from the end of the
game. Relatedly, that a tone puzzle is the reason I recall having never yet
finished Myst IV.)

The official strategy guide as a book that a kid could read in school, with a
full first person retelling of the narrative, was such an interesting artifact
of a past age. I believe I've kept a bunch in a box somewhere as interesting
tokens.

------
mrweasel
Sort of side note, but some IT systems do in fact need to deal with 25 hour
days, due to daylight savings time. If your system deals with schedueling
electricity production, you may need to accept that one day a year may only
have 23 hours while another have 25.

~~~
mjevans
It's usually easy to relegate yourself to the issue of various periodic
measures being some crazy human duration long and just writing the software to
use a common date/time library and live with it.

Harder are the moments when you actually care if one time has longer seconds
than another due to leap seconds or smearing over the day to spread out a leap
second.

It's really just easiest if you take nothing for granted, and even assume that
clock-cycles aren't of a fixed duration but of a given quanta of work.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
> It's really just easiest if you take nothing for granted, and even assume
> that clock-cycles aren't of a fixed duration but of a given quanta of work.

Thanks to spread-spectrum clocking, this really ought to be the default
assumption for most computers. It's a small variance, but it's there.

------
Waterluvian
That is absolutely beautiful and one of the kinds of things I'd love to have
for my Shelf of Interesting Items.

I have two older brothers so growing up I was exposed to a ton of stuff way
outside my age range (but I credit a lot of my success to this). I played
countless hours of Riven when I was 9 or 10. I really didn't get far at all.
But I am still wildly proud of figuring out their numerical system using the
fish game. Watching your clock flooded back deep memories about that.

I continue to crave games that make me feel that way. Outer Wilds (not Outer
Worlds) is the closest since.

~~~
jf
What do you have on your Shelf Of Interesting items? I’m slowly building up
mine, with an eye to “things that will spark creative thoughts”

~~~
Waterluvian
Every item has a story attached. Like a badge from when I spent two weeks at a
certain factory in Fremont or a calculator from the 1970s when my parents met
in math class in university.

Dozens more.

~~~
Darkphibre
I have some carbon fiber rope used by a space elevator startup I kickstarted,
prototype devices in the development of the Kinect or 360 Camera (mounted in a
Tupperware box with the camera poking through a carved out hole, no less), a
Benham's Wheel and Euler's disk, and lots of Halo ephemera collected over the
years (like an extremely rare Halo-3 branded gum handed out at PAX early in
Bungie's life), a Dragon Illusion by James Dean, and Xbox 360 processor chip,
a copy of and a lot of knick nacks with personal stories. :)

Then people started gifting me things like a cherished slide rules and the
like. I love my wunderkammer!

~~~
cbanek
I absolutely love HN, what a small world. I worked on the 360 software and
thru the Kinect days! I'd love to hear more about this space elevator, feel
free to email me.

------
AceJohnny2
> _Oh and before I forget – don’t ever give up on your electronics projects
> just because they seem too hard. I started trying to build this clock_
> nineteen years ago [...]

Wow. That's motivating!

------
maest
As an aside, this is the best explanation I've seen for what numbering systems
are:

> First up, a little primer – the digits used in the Myst games, aka D’ni
> digits, are a base-25 numbering system. This means they count up using
> symbols like [1], [2], [3], [4] … [22], [23], [24], [1][0]. That is, what
> they call “10”, we call “25”

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Mathnerd314
Hackaday did a "Tell Time Contest" that ended today, featuring this and other
devices: [https://hackaday.io/contest/168639-tell-time-
contest](https://hackaday.io/contest/168639-tell-time-contest)

~~~
cialowicz
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Somewhat related, I've always found the
"wandering hours" watch complication to be incredibly interesting:
[https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2007/07/watchismo-
times_20.ht...](https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2007/07/watchismo-
times_20.html)

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jedberg
Sort of related question. I have an old clock with a 3 inch clock face that I
want to change to be digital.

Does anyone know where to get a 3 inch round led/lcd display (ideally that can
be attached to a Raspberry Pi)? I've looked online and they are either crazy
expensive, a round display on a square back, or I have to buy 1000 of them.

I assume I'm just not googling right.

~~~
derekja
hmm, you're right 3" is hard. I find a number of relatively expensive 3.4"
ones on aliexpress, but nothing 3". All sorts of cheap 1-2" ones.

~~~
jedberg
So Aliexpress is the right place to look then?

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brailsafe
This might be the nerdiest thing I've seen all day and I love it.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Were you considering radio before you decided on NTP?

~~~
annoyingnoob
In my experience, the WWVB signal can be hard to get, especially inside of
buildings. Its going to depend on where you live though. However, if you have
Internet access then NTP is going to be very reliable. I'd go with NTP over
WWVB for reliability.

