Lucasfilm's Habitat Text and World Restoration news
For the past year now, you might have seen a lot of work happening with regards to archiving and documenting the history of Lucasfilm's Habitat on this website and our Discord server.
All of the groundwork that was laid has finally come to fruition and I'm here to share that with you today.
This is a lengthy blog post so grab a hot, cold or lukewarm beverage of your choice and put your feet up.
Setting the scene
In December 2023, I wrote about the discovery of four hours of new unseen footage from the original 1988 Lucasfilm's Habitat Pilot Test.
In April 2024, I was able to get the footage transferred from almost 40 year old VHS tapes so we could preserve it digitally forever. A 20 year old low quality transfer existed, but I was certain we could squeeze more juice out of them and boy did we.
Once those tapes had been been transferred, it had become apparent to me that there was so much information here that could be digitized and added to NeoHabitat, the modern day Habitat service.
Not only did we have two hours of the end of beta party, with avatars socializing in an area specially set up for this party, featuring many Habi-celebrities and a speech from one of the key moderators of the time, but we also had two hours of the avatar Wil1 going through his belongings, showing us full copies of the inworld newspaper called The Rant and other miscellaneous documents.
Imagine if we could recreate the text from these and put these documents back into NeoHabitat? Turns out, we could.
Developer tools make things possible
Going back in time again briefly, in January 2024, an amazing person named Jeremy Penner showed up and sparked an instant passion for NeoHabitat. This passion led to him designing a bunch of amazing tools that would let us view the original Habitat artwork and regions in the browser. This gave me the idea of asking Jeremy if he'd be willing to create more tooling for us. Imagine what we could do with that.
This led to the creation of the Region Editor and the Text Editor.
With some back and forth over feature requests to make both editors really suitable for restoration work, Jeremy had achieved an amazing feat. It was now possible to recreate the content from Wil1's Habitat tapes in a reasonable amount of time and effort and it was then I got to work.
Jeremy had made it so I could screenshot each page from the original footage, overlay the original page over the text editor window so I could make sure everything lined up perfectly and then move on to the next batch of images.
This was such a huge win for us. Not only could I transcribe all of the text from Wil1's tape, but I could transcribe text from any of the other Habitat or Club Caribe footage floating around too, meaning even bigger wins for preservation.
In total we had over 400+ unique pages of content rescued from a nearly 40 year old VHS tape. It's mind boggling.
The content itself is the real gem here though.
We were able to save the following:
- 13 full issues of The Rant newspaper (some totalling over 50 pages of content)
- 2 incomplete editions of The Rant (both of them are title pages and indexes)
- 3 Rant Fliers
- Various other maps and quest documents
- Some player created content
You can read the vast majority of these by logging into NeoHabitat today and heading over to the Populopolis Library.
Randy Farmer went one step further and wrote code that would process the text we saved and make it so you can read all of these documents in your browser in a simulated Habitat window with text.
If you've ever read The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, a paper by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, you're likely familiar with some of the stories in there such as the "D'nalsi Island Adventure" where a meticulously planned and detailed quest designed by Randy that was expected to take days to solve was figured out in less than 8 hours; or the incident with the Dungeon of Death quest where an avatar managed to kill a Quantum Link employee who was meant to be invulnerable and they stole their 1 shot kill gun.
There is information in these copies of The Rant that not only corroborates the events detailed in that paper, but there's information that fleshes those stories out too. We can see what Habitat players would've seen at the time. We know more about what happened now than we ever did. It's a goldmine of Habitat related content and it's helped us to confirm and debunk a bunch of stuff already which leads me to...
Entrprys Street
NeoHabitat's world was recreated using a mixture of original archived files for each region that were created during Habitat's original development, and exported regions taken from a mostly complete backup that was taken at the end of the pilot test.
Some of the layout of Habitat and some of the region design differed in the 1988 backup versus the original region files and whilst we've had copies of both for a while, it was a lot of work to import the 1988 backup files and compare against the original regions. That is until the Region Editor became a thing and we were able to load up regions within seconds and perform direct comparisons.
This map of Populopolis is from 1987 once testing opened up to more people and matched up to the original region files we had.
Once we had the ability to export regions from the 1988 backup, we were able to compare the region numbers you see in this image to the regions from the backup and found out we were missing two unique streets that don't appear in the above map.
One of them was Commerce Ave on the west side of town and one of them was Enterprys Street on the east side of town.
We'd restored Commerce Ave a long time ago because all of the data from the backup was intact and we hooked it up into NeoHabitat, but Entrprys Street was an enigma as we only had partial data for it. Specifically, we knew that there was a street of regions connected from Machuta's Magic, all the way to the Populopolis Library, but we didn't have any info on what objects made up each region, meaning we didn't know how they looked. We just knew how they connected to one another.
Fast forward to September 2024 after finishing the Text restoration project and after submitting that to the NeoHabitat GitHub repository, I knew the main NeoHabitat server would be reset so all of that work would be live on production. I figured it'd be my last chance to submit any more changes for a while because typically speaking, we don't ever want to wipe production as users create their own content inworld and we don't want to lose that.
The missing street from before popped into my brain and armed with the information from the archived Rant issues and the Region Editor. I went investigating.
I was able to date the opening of a new street in Habitat to February 1988. Given how we already had Commerce Ave restored and knowing there were no other such streets that could've existed, this had to be the right street. Until this archived Rant issue was found, we didn't even have the name "Entrprys Street", so that was a huge win.
As you can see from the above image, we were also able to confirm this was it because it mentions it connected to the Populopolis Library which matches the data from the backup.
It was in these back issues I also discovered that the Avatar's Court belonged on this street. This was an area we'd found during our initial excavations from the 1988 backup, but we didn't have an idea of where it went in the world. To top it all off, we knew the region existed but no object data existed for it so we couldn't recreate it.
After some more digging, an archived region export of the exterior and interior of the Courthouse was found in a folder containing a bunch of content for a planned but never finished expansion city for Habitat named Quantumgrad.
Using Region Editor meant those region exports could be transcribed and turned into something usable in NeoHabitat in minutes and you see the results of that above.
The Jury Room was found intact in the 1988 backup and you can read about the court case it was used in by taking a peek at the March 2nd, 1988 edition of The Rant newspaper.
You would think that would be it after all those crazy finds, but I figured I should at least comb through the Downtown area one last time before making my changes final and I discovered that we had a couple of regions in the wrong place and we were missing the Populopolis BBS area entirely which had been referenced in The Rant. Those regions have now been hooked up and you can visit NeoHabitat today to go explore them for yourselves.
Special Thanks
Shoutout to Wil1 for filming all of the Habitat content, this stuff is priceless and his foresight was amazing.
Shoutout to Nick Serra for transferring the footage, as well as the Club Caribe footage from before. Nick normally transfers footage of Live Music from bands such as Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and such, so to do me a favor by transferring some old video game footage was really kind of him and he did me a solid.
Shoutout to Jeremy Penner who made this even possible, because it would've been 1000's of hours of work vs a couple of weeks work. This project simply wouldn't have been able to happen without him.
Shoutout to Randy Farmer for listening to my ramblings in real time whilst I'm figuring this stuff out and for accepting my changes to the NeoHabitat world.
Shoutout to Kate Lawson for covering the cost of shipping for the tapes, as well as creating the export tooling we used to extract data from the 1988 backup.