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[GROAN]

Kyle: Ready? "Lack of speed..."

Rand: That's the biggest pain.

Kyle: "Near impossibility of creating realistic interactive humans..."

Robyn: Well that's the most concise way of putting it we've heard.

Kyle: You can design around that, which you have very well.

Rand: We continue to try... to push that.

Robyn: I think we've done it...kind of ok. We've just touched on it. I think a lot can be done without talking to your computer and having the character respond back to you.

Rand: That would really be cool if you could do that.

Kyle: I guess that's the next level.

Robyn: I think a lot can be done though to make those characters much more realistic and that is where this whole medium becomes exciting. Without that kind of character involvement and realism of character, believability in the character is not ever going to reach the sophistication of say, movies.

Kyle: In Myst, the only time it happened was when you solve it.

Rand: Yeah, it's true. We've overcome the technology by putting our characters in little square books.

Kyle: Okay, "Limitations of Quicktime off of cd rom..."

Rand: That goes directly to speed, directly to speed. We're dealing with the pain right now.

Robyn: A lot of pain, a lot of pain.

Rand: Although these magicians in the back room keep cranking more stuff into quick time. It's like the same machine, the same equipment, but you can do double the window size now. How do they do this?

Kyle: "The fact that it is a static medium..."

Robyn: Oh, you are talking about future stuff now...

Rand: You mean, you cut it, you print it, you ship it and it's gone and you can't change it?

Robyn: But there is something nice about that as well, because you cut it, you print it, you ship it and it's gone. Except for bug fixes.

Rand: Oh, we don't have any of thoooose.

Robyn: But it is also a whole different medium if it is dynamic and changeable... there is a whole different set of advantages and disadvantages to that.

Rand: Yeah, your design would have to start, once again, from the beginning realizing that this is a dynamic world and it changes on the fly. Obvious with the online stuff.

Kyle: "No texture..."

Robyn: You mean real texture.

Kyle: Yeah, not texture maps.

[GENERAL LAUGHTER]

Rand: We do our best to overcome that one with the fake texture, you know, with 2D texture. And it is the same thing with anybody making anything for a flat screen, they have to deal with 2D, the movies or that kind of thing.

Robyn: But we can at least achieve the same level of realism or sophistication as movies. I don't think there is any reason we can't. We have very high resolution on the monitors now. But, it's just not...it isn't real.

Kyle: Finally, "The fact that there is a hardware requirement..."

Rand: That is a limiting constraint, although, if your stuff is good enough.... There is a balance on that one. I'm not extremely concerned about it because as long as we do our job right and aim for middle ground or maybe push things a bit, if it is good enough people will get the hardware to play it. It is unfortunate that it is not like movies, where anybody can pay their seven bucks and go see it. That's not so much a concern, because there are a lot of people out there who have the hardware...

Robyn: At least enough to support us and our little hobby.

Rand: At this point, the number of Mysts that have sold is a small percentage of the number of people that have cd rom drives out there and can play it.

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