New website, new Riven Journals upgrade

It’s been so long since I updated my personal website, I decided to just start from scratch with a whole new one. Something that’s not, well, entirely coded by hand in Notepad so maybe I’ll be more likely to update it as updates will be easier. I’ll re-add more old content whenever I get around to it.

This website isn’t the only thing that’s new though, I’ve just finished another round of modernising the Riven Journals – just in time for Riven’s 20th anniversary!

What’s new:

• The background music now plays on more modern browsers (including on most smartphones)
• There’s a new compatibility shim to display the mouse hover text, which replaces window.status which has been deprecated for quite some time
• All Perl code has been modified to work with newer versions of the language, which means the cookie handling parts work properly again. This means all .cgi pages work, there’s no more script errors, and Journal 5 is actually completeable now
• All PHP code has been modified to work with version 7 of the language
• Personally checked that the Easter Eggs are actually accessible, since no one’s found them yet (they’re pretty hard to find!)
• A couple logic errors have been corrected (which were present in the original Riven Journals… I have no idea how I missed them for so long)
• The Prefetching code has been updated with more hints, which should make browsing around the Riven Journals super fast with very quick page load times
• Checked to make extra sure the Easter Egg content is accessible

You should totally check them out!

And if that’s not tempting enough for you, in honour of Riven’s 20th anniversary I’m unveiling some exclusive, previously-unreleased, never-before-seen Riven concept art of the schoolroom Wahrk counting number game:

(click to embiggen)

“Twenty years, Atrus… Twenty. Long. Years.” – Saavedro, Myst III: Exile

Now to wait for Riven’s 25th anniversary…..