Revelator 7.1.4

by Ron Hayter
ron@rshayter.com

Revelator n: One who makes a revelation; a revealer.

Revelator is a free application that extracts sounds, movies, pictures, and subtitles from the data files of Myst IV: Revelation. Sounds, movies, and pictures can be extracted from the Myst IV demo, too. Revelator can also extract the player's in-game snapshots and journal entries from saved game files.

There are two versions of Revelator, one for Mac OS X and the other for Windows.

Download Revelator for Mac OS X.

Download Revelator for Windows.

Being a Java application, Revelator requires a Java SE 6 (or later) runtime. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) have Java 6 built in; OS X Lion (10.7), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), OS X Mavericks (10.9), and OS X Yosemite (10.10) will offer to install Java, if needed. For Windows, you may need to download and install Java, which you can get from http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp.

New in Revelator 7.1.4

• Mac only: Compatibility with OS X Mavericks and Yosemite.

Contents

• Introduction
• Running Revelator
• Notes
  • Sounds
  • Collector's Edition Soundtrack
  • Soundtrack CD
  • Other Music
  • Movies
  • Pictures
  • Subtitles
  • Journals
• Version History

Introduction

Revelator extracts sounds, movies, pictures, and subtitles from the data files of Myst IV: Revelation and from the demo version. It can also extract your in-game snapshots and journal entries from saved game files.

(If you want the sounds, movies, and pictures from other games in the Myst series, try Riveal, my other free extractor. It also extracts media from Myst IV and is more comprehensive than Revelator in what it extracts. Revelator is more selective, extracting only the most interesting sounds, movies, pictures, textures, subtitles, and journals from Myst IV.)

Running Revelator

Mac OS X version:

• Double-click Revelator.
• It will ask you to point to the folder where Myst IV is installed. Normally, this folder is "/Applications/Ubisoft/MystIV". Alternatively, you can choose one of the game DVDs. To get everything, you will need to extract files from the two DVDs individually.
• Then, it will ask you where to save the files.
• Next, you can choose whether to extract music, extract dialogue and other sounds, extract movies, extract pictures, or extract subtitles.
• Click the Extract Files button. After a lot of disk activity, you should have many ".ogg", ".wav", ".bik", ".png", ".jpeg", ".tga", and ".txt" files.
• When you click on the Extract Journal button, you will be asked to choose a saved game file. Revelator will extract your snapshots and journal entries, putting them into an HTML file in the extracted file location.

Windows version:

• Install Java if you do not already have it.
• Make sure that "Revelator.jar" is downloaded intact and not split apart. WinRAR seems especially keen to expand ".jar" files.
• Check that Windows knows that ".jar" files should be opened with the Java Runtime Environment. The Windows Explorer should describe "Revelator.jar" as an Executable Jar File. If not, shift-right-click on "Revelator.jar" and choose the Open With... command. Pick "Java(TM) Platform SE binary" from the list of programs. (You may need to use the Choose Program... command and the Browse... button to find "javaw.exe". It will probably be in "c:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\" or something close to that.) Be sure to check "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file", then press OK.
• If all goes well, double-clicking "Revelator.jar" will start Revelator.
• It will ask you to point to the folder where Myst IV is installed. Normally, this folder is "c:\Program Files\UBISOFT\Myst IV - Revelation". Alternatively, you can choose one of the game DVDs. To get everything, you will need to extract files from the two DVDs individually.
• Then, it will ask you where to save the files.
• Next, you can choose whether to extract music, extract dialogue and other sounds, extract movies, extract pictures, or extract subtitles.
• Click the Extract Files button. After a lot of disk activity, you should have many ".ogg", ".wav", ".bik", ".png", ".jpeg", ".tga", and ".txt" files.
• When you click on the Extract Journal button, you will be asked to choose a saved game file. Revelator will extract your snapshots and journal entries, putting them into an HTML file in the extracted file location.

Notes

Revelator can extract sounds, movies, and so on from the data files on your hard disk. Alternatively, if you do not have a full installation of Myst IV on your hard disk, you can extract from the game DVDs. Disc 1 has the music, dialogue, sound effects, nearly all pictures, and a very few movies. Disc 2 has almost all of the movies and a few pictures. You might also extract from the game DVDs if you want dialogue (disc 1), movies (disc 2), or pictures (disc 2) in a language other than the one installed on your hard disk. Subtitles can only be extracted from version 1.0.3 of Myst IV on your hard disk.

Many of the extracted files have names that include letters and numbers like "w1_z02_n030". The "w", "z", and "n" mean "world", "zone", and "node", and each is numbered. Within each of the 5 five main worlds (or Ages), there are 4 to 8 zones, and each zone contains 10 to 30 nodes.

Sounds

The sounds in Myst IV can be roughly categorized as music, dialogue, and sound effects. The music files usually have names with the characters "MU_" at the start or in the middle. Revelator helpfully puts these files into a "music" subfolder of the "sound" folder. There are a couple of songs which are unique to the Myst IV demo.

Most sounds are put into the "sound" folder. All sounds that include dialogue are put into a "sound" subfolder of the "english" folder, if you chose English as your language when you installed the game. If you chose a different language, the "sound" subfolder will be inside the "dutch", "french", "german", "italian", or "spanish" folder instead.

The most interesting music is in Ogg Vorbis (".ogg") format, as is most dialogue. Sound effects are usually in WAVE (".wav") format.

Any audio application should be able to play the WAVE files.

To hear the Ogg Vorbis sounds, you will need to use a music player that understands that format. If you install the Xiph QuickTime Components available at http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/download.html, all applications that use QuickTime (iTunes, for instance) should be able to play these music files. To listen to the music on an iPod, you will need to use iTunes to convert the files to AAC or MP3. You might want to also convert the WAVE files to reduce their size.

Collector's Edition Soundtrack

The Collector's Edition of the game came with a half-hour soundtrack of 9 MP3 songs, only some of which were later included on the official soundtrack CD. These are the music files from the game that correspond to the Collector's Edition soundtrack:

Soundtrack CD

Here are those music files from the game that correspond to the soundtrack CD:

Thanks to Eric and realXCV for compiling this information!

If you can find it, I recommend buying the Myst IV soundtrack CD. Unfortunately, it appears to be unavailable from Ubisoft.

Other Music

Peter Gabriel's song Curtains is not on the soundtrack CD but it can be found in the file "MU_MENU_Credit.ogg". "PG_MU_SA_03_PG_edit.ogg" is a shortened version of the song, and there is also another version of the full song in "Instrumental_MU_SA_03_PG_Instrumental.ogg".

The remaining music files add up to almost 3 1/2 hours but most are short: a minute long or less. Here are some of the best songs that do not appear on the soundtrack CD (thanks to Aaron and Eric for some of the suggestions):

In the game, many of the short musical phrases are assembled dynamically into long sequences of background music. realXCV has written a free Myst IV music player that can do the same thing outside of the game. His music player works directly on the Myst IV data files — there is no need to use Revelator first.

The Myst IV linking sound is "SFX_GL_Travelling_Effect.ogg".

Movies

To play the Bink (".bik") movies, you will need a player. RAD Game Tools has players for Mac OS X and Windows at http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm.

Note that the movies are silent. Pairing each movie with its soundtrack is usually straightforward. The corresponding sound file almost always has the same name as the movie file but ending with ".ogg" or ".wav" instead of ".bik". Here are some of the pairs to get you started (thanks, again, to Eric):

Note the slight difference in the file names in the penultimate example.

Pictures

There are several kinds of pictures in Myst IV. A few are in TGA format and they are the fonts used in the game. Many others are in PNG format: textures, game interface elements, and thumbnails. The thumbnails are in the "zip" subfolder and are used for zip mode. It is interesting to compare the thumbnails in the Myst IV demo with the final versions; you can see some very early renders of Tomahna, Haven, Spire, and Serenia in the demo.

If you choose to extract cube pictures, you will have a huge number of JPEG images for the hundreds of nodes in the game. Each node is a cube and your eyes are at the center. The six faces of the cube (front, back, left, right, top, and bottom) are each made up of a grid of 6-by-6 images, a total of 216 images per cube. The Myst IV engine warps the faces of the cube mathematically into the interior of a sphere so that you can look around freely.

Subtitles

To extract subtitles, you must have installed the version 1.0.3 update of Myst IV (Mac, Windows). The subtitle file corresponding to some dialogue has the same name as the sound file but ends with "-subtitle.txt" rather than ".ogg" or ".wav". The subtitle files are extracted into the "patch" folder.

Journals

An extracted journal can be viewed and printed from any web browser. In the browser, all pages of the journal are displayed within one window but, when printed, each page is put on its own sheet of paper. Printing in landscape orientation produces the best results. For the full Myst IV experience, you will want to install a hand-written font. The official font of Myst IV is Revelation. For Mac OS X users, the built-in Sand font looks quite good.

Version History