

      Notes on Installation and Operation of the Riven Movie Player

                             Version 1.0

                             John Marvin
                            jsm@fc.hp.com

INSTALLATION
------------

    I currently don't provide any type of installation script, so you will
    have to do this manually.  Riven Movie Player is a Win32 program, and
    it has been tested under Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.  I have no
    idea whether or not it works under Windows NT 3.51, and I doubt it
    will work under Windows 3.1 with win32s installed (since Riven doesn't
    work on Window 3.1 this probably is not much of an issue).

    1) After you unpack the zip archive you will find two files.  This
    file (README.TXT) and the Riven Movie Player executable (RIVPLAY.EXE).

    2) If you did not unpack rivplay.exe to the place you want it to
    reside on your disk, then move it to your desired location.  You can
    just run it directly from here by finding it in Windows Explorer and
    double clicking on it.

    3) In Windows Explorer you can also left click and drag "RIVPLAY.EXE"
    to your desktop.  This will create a shortcut on your desktop that you
    can use to invoke Riven Movie Player.  You can right click on this
    shortcut to rename it.

    4) If you want a way of starting Riven Movie Player from the start
    button, one way is to right click on the start button and then click
    "Explore".  This will open Windows Explorer starting at your start
    menu.  Figure out where in the menu hierarchy you want to place the
    shortcut, and then drag "RIVPLAY.EXE" from to that location.  You can
    then right click on it and rename it.

OPERATION
---------

    1) File Menu
    ------------

        A) Open SubMenu
        ---------------

        Before you can look at any movies you must open a "Mohawk Archive"
        (I have no idea where that name came from).  These files have a
        .mhk suffix.  They can be found in the "Data" directory on each
        Riven CD.  They can also be found on your hard drive where Riven
        is installed, under the "data" subdirectory.  Some .mhk files do
        not contain any movies (most of the ones on the CD's do, most of
        the ones on the hard drive do not).  A dialog box will popup
        telling you if no movies were found once you have opened a .mhk
        file.

        If you have a Riven CD in a CD-ROM drive, Riven Movie Player
        should be able to find the drive and the File Open dialog box
        should start you automatically in the Data subdirectory.
        Otherwise it will start from the directory where Riven Movie
        Player is installed.

    2) Select Menu
    --------------

        A) Movies SubMenu
        -----------------

        This menu item will be grayed out until you open a mohawk archive
        file that contains movies (see above).  Once you have done this
        you will be able to select the movies submenu.  Clicking on the
        movies submenu will bring up a listbox containing a list of all
        the movies in the archive.  The names are fairly cryptic, although
        you can sometimes make sense out of some of them (these names are
        in the archive and were created by Cyan).

        You can either double click on a movie name to open it, or you can
        single click on it, and then click the OK button.  This will
        create a window with the QuickTime movie in it.  It will have the
        standard QuickTime for Windows controller bar attached at the
        bottom of the movie.  If the size of the movie is smaller than the
        smallest window size (default set by Windows) then the movie will
        be centered in the window (assuming you haven't enabled movie
        resizing (see below).

    3) Movie Menu
    -------------

        A) Resize Movie SubMenu
        -----------------------

        A checkmark next to this item will tell you whether or not this
        feature is enabled.  Clicking on this menu item will toggle
        between enabled/disabled.  This feature is disabled by default, so
        that you can always see what the standard size of the movie is (as
        it would appear in Riven).

        This feature will not have an immediate effect on any currently
        opened movies.  It has its effect under two circumstances:

            a) When you first open a movie, if the standard size of the
            movie is smaller than the smallest enclosing window, then if
            this feature is enabled, the movie will be resized to fill the
            window.

            b) If you resize the movie window the movie will expand to fit
            the new window size.  When this feature is disabled, the movie
            will be centered in the new window.

        B) Retain Aspect Ratio SubMenu
        ------------------------------

        This menu item will be grayed out if the Resize Movie feature is
        not enabled.  This feature controls how the movie will be resized
        when you resize a window.  If this feature is enabled the aspect
        ratio (ratio of height to width) of the standard movie size will
        be preserved.  This means that as you change one dimension of the
        window the program will compute the other dimension, and resize
        the window accordingly.

    4) Window Menu
    --------------

        A) Arrange Icons SubMenu
        ------------------------

        Riven Movie Player will allow you to have multiple movies open at
        once (although you probably should not attempt to play more than
        one at a time -- see below).  If you have a lot open at once it
        may be helpful to iconify some of them.  This menu item will cause
        all of the iconified windows to be arranged at the bottom of the
        application frame window.

        B) Close All Windows SubMenu
        ----------------------------

        The close all windows menu item will do just what it says.  It
        will close all of the QuickTime movie windows that you currently
        have open.  You should always close all windows of movies on a CD
        that you are about to remove, before you remove the CD.  Otherwise
        windows may put up a big blue screen asking you to reinsert the CD
        if it needs to get some data from it to draw the movie.  This is
        not fatal, and you can always hit the escape key, but it is
        annoying.

        I didn't make this behaviour automatic because I may not be aware
        of all possible configurations out there.  You may have more than
        one CD-ROM drive, you may have a .mhk file on your hard drive,
        etc.  I may add a selection so that you can choose to automate
        this in the future.

        Note that it is perfectly OK to open another .MHK file on the same
        CD without closing movies from the previous .MHK file.  CD #3 and
        CD #5 have more than one .MHK file with movies in them.

        C) <Movie Windows>

        Each time you open a movie, a new submenu item is added to the the
        window menu which contains the title of the window.  This gives
        you another way of making a particular window the currently
        selected window.  This may be useful if you "lost" a window under
        a pile of other windows.

    5) Help Menu
    ------------

        A) About SubMenu
        ----------------

        This puts up a simple dialog box with information about Riven
        Movie Player.  In particular, the version number is displayed in
        this dialog box.

DISTRIBUTION INFO
-----------------

I claim the copyright to this software.  I give anyone the right to
distribute this software as long as no profit is made from that
distribution.

    John Marvin
    jsm@fc.hp.com

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
-------------------

1) I don't have a lot of free time to keep supporting this software.  I
will probably produce a newer version eventually, but I won't guarantee
anything.  If you have suggestions, you can email them to me, but please
don't expect a response from me.  I will try to answer questions, but
again, I may not have the time to respond to all questions.  If time
permits, I will fix bugs that are found.  Again, please email them to me,
but don't expect a response.

2) I have intentionally not added a feature to extract Quick Time movies
and store them on the hard disk.  I respect the effort that Cyan put into
making Riven, and I don't want to become a channel for abuse of their
assets.  I will only add such a feature with Cyan's permission, which I
doubt they will give.  Please don't ask for such a feature.

3) Although Riven Movie Player will run in 256 color mode, the movies were
meant to be viewed in 65536 (16 bit color) or better mode.  You may run
into color palette problems running in 256 color mode.  I don't think that
I will be making any effort to improve this program's operation in 256
color mode.

4) Riven Movie Player allows you to open more than one movie at a time.
This can be useful for comparing two similar movies frame by frame to see
what the differences actually are (you will gain a new appreciation for
Cyan's attention to detail when you find many versions of a movie that you
may have thought there was only one version of in the game).  However,
having more than one movie open can lead to situations where it looks like
Riven Movie Player has hung.  If you run into this, check the access light
on your CD-ROM drive.  If it is on, i.e. the program is currently
accessing the drive, then you should just wait until QuickTime for Windows
has finished retrieving whatever data it is trying to get.  Here are some
situations which will lead to this condition:

    A) Trying to play more than one movie at once.  CD-ROM drives have
    much slower seek times than hard drives.  They are much better suited
    to sequential access than random access.  If you try to play two
    movies from the same CD-ROM, the CD-ROM will have to shuttle back and
    forth between both movies, and it will most likely not be able to keep
    up.  This may work for really short movies, and you may also get away
    with it if you have already played one of the movies before, and the
    entire movie is cached.

    B) When you finish playing a movie, the position of the movie
    controller is at the end of the movie.  If part of the window becomes
    obscured, and then you pop that window back up to the top, QuickTime
    for Windows will have to redraw the part of the movie that was
    covered.  This may not be a problem if the data is still in cache, or
    the movie is very short.  However, if the data is not in cache, and
    the movie is very long, QuickTime will have to search from the
    beginning of the movie to the end to get the data to redraw the
    screen.  I believe the reason it can't just directly go to the end is
    due to the compression scheme used for the Riven movies.  Each movie
    frame is stored as a change from the previous frame, so in order to
    display the last frame you have to construct it from the start (this
    may not be entirely true, but I don't know the details).  Some of the
    Riven movies are more than 70 megabytes in size, so it can take quite
    a while to read through the entire movie.  One way of avoiding this
    problem is to always return the controller position to the beginning
    of the movie after you have finished playing it.  You can do this by
    simply clicking at the left end of the position controller.  I may
    investigate the possibility of doing this automatically in the future.
    Note that the same type of problems can occur if you iconify Riven
    Movie Player, or it becomes covered by another application.  In this
    case QuickTime for Windows may need to redraw all of the visible
    movies, which will really put a load on your CD-ROM!

5) A similar problem, due once again to the compression mechanism, is that
it may take a lot of time for QuickTime for Windows to step backwards one
frame in the movie.  Stepping one frame at a time in the forward direction
is just fine, but it may take a lot of time to step backwards a frame when
you are near the end of a large movie.

6) Some movies are so small that QuickTime won't even have room to display
a play button underneath them.  You will have to enable the "Resize Movie"
feature and enlarge the movie before you can play these movies.  I didn't
do this automatically because I wanted you to be able to see the original
size.  Once you have expanded the movie there is no way to restore the
movie to its original size (you can always disable the "Resize Movie"
feature and reopen the movie).  I may try to address this problem in a
future version (if I ever do a future version) by detaching the controller
from the movie so that I can make the controller larger without changing
the size of the movie.

7) The only .mhk file on your hard drive that contains a movie is
a_Data.MHK in the data subdirectory wherever Riven was installed.  It
contains only one movie: a movie of the opened prison book.  It made sense
to have that movie on the hard drive, since you can potentially open the
prison book on any island.

8) Here is a list of the .MHK files found on the 5 Riven CD's, along with
the names of some of the "Easter Egg" movies (ones that you almost
definitely have not seen in the game, although a Cyan employee says it is
possible, but he is not telling how), and all of the ending scenario
movies (some of the text below contains ending scenario spoilers, you
really shouldn't be using this program if you haven't finished Riven
yet!).

    NOTE: All .mhk files are in the Data subdirectory on the CD:

    CD #1 (Bookmaking Island or Crater Island)
    ------------------------------------------

        b_Data.MHK (195 movies)
        -----------------------

        80) 304_bpress.mov
        81) 304_bpressup.mov

            These short movies are of a book press that Cyan decided to
            remove from the game.

        185) 494_blmbrb2j.mov
        189) 499_blmbrb2j.mov

            These are two copies of the return trip to Jungle Island on
            the mine cart.  These are huge movies.  But I cannot spot the
            difference between the two of them.  There appear to be lots
            of hidden things in the frames of these movies, so this is one
            you may want to step through a frame at a time.


        b2_data.MHK (0 movies)
        ----------------------

        This file does not contain any movies

    CD #2 (Temple Island)
    ---------------------

        t_data.MHK (213 movies)
        -----------------------

        4) 137_t1.2.mov

            All four of the ending scenarios on this CD start with the
            opening of the star fissure.  This one is what I call the "Big
            Lose" ending scenario.  Note that all of the ending scenarios
            also contain music to go along with the credits, so the video
            will go to total white while the music is playing.  Riven
            rolls the credits at this point (the credits are not a Quick
            Time movie).

        5) 137_t1.3.mov

            This ending scenario is considered a "partial win".  But I am
            still amazed that Atrus calls you "my friend".

        6) 137_t1.4.mov

            The winning scenario.  Hopefully you have already seen this
            one!

        7) 137_t1.x.mov

            This is the most ambiguous losing scenario.  You start to hear
            the linking sound, i.e.  Atrus is about to appear, and then
            you fall into the fissure.

    CD #3 (Jungle Island)
    ---------------------

        j_Data1.MHK (197 movies)
        j_Data2.MHK (159 movies)

    CD #4 (Survey Island or Plateau Island)
    ----------------------------------------

        g_Data.MHK (151 movies)
        -----------------------

        138) 266_gptty.mov

            This is a movie that you probably have not seen.  Supposedly
            there is some way to see this one through the viewer in Gehn's
            survey room (the room where you can summon the whark).  This
            is definitely an Easter Egg.

    CD #5 (Gehn's Office, Rebel Age, & Prison Island)
    -------------------------------------------------

        o_Data.MHK (65 movies, Gehn's Office)
        -------------------------------------

        1) 10_ogo.mov

            Bet you didn't know how good a singer Gehn is!

        9) 2_ogr_b.mov

            Gehn runs out of patience. A losing ending scenario.

        63) 9_o6.15x.mov

            "Cho" pays the price for your stupidity. A losing
            ending scenario.

        64) 9_o6.16x.mov

            Once again "Cho" pays the price. A losing ending
            scenario.

        65) 9_o6.19.mov

            Another losing ending scenario.

        r_Data.MHK (28 movies, The Rebel Age)
        -------------------------------------

        20) 2_r3.6.mov

            A losing ending scenario. I think this one is kind of
            humorous.

        21) 2_r6.18.mov

            The rebels pay for your stupidity. A losing ending
            scenario. Noone will ever reach this one by mistake!

        p_Data.MHK (46 movies, Prison Island)

< End of README.TXT >
