Nuvie - A new game engine for Ultima 6

[Jared]

i got it now - sound is still poor, though - like playing on an NES :-p but it's quaint.

[Dominus]

I don't see how the music can be poor. It plays quite fine. But the sfx of course are poor and never have been better. These are supposedto be played on your internal pc-speaker only dosbox emulates those too and therefore you hear it via your soundcard...

[dag]

'sfx' and music is all right here. even mt32. you'll have to experiment a bit
with the cpu-cycles parameter in DOSBox...

i play u6 and savage empire this way (though savage empire sucks...)

[jim3e8]

Eric,

Have you seen u6edit, at http://3e8.org/hacks/ultima6?

My latest version (not posted yet) offers Win32 compatibility, correct object ordering and dramatic rendering speedups. You can also zoom in and out to any degree. 1280x1024 fullscreen, zoomed out by a factor of 2 (so, displaying 160x128 tiles) and all animation/palette rotation enabled renders in realtime on my machine, using only 40% CPU.

I'm interesting in checking out your source to see how you solved the object ordering problem.

[jim3e8]

Heh, never mind, I see that you've already linked to my page

[Jared]

If I use CMS, the music is staticy like a radio. If I use MT-32, it's slooooow. If I use Adlib, it's play|pause|play ad nauseam...

[jim3e8]

I just added screenshots of the upcoming u6edit version at least, if anyone is interested.

[sjs191]

jim3e8, those screenshots look great! Any chance of producing a large image of the entire U6 worldmap like the ones produced for U7 by using exult's dumpmap option?

wjp had some 3072x3072 png's of the U7 map, one with roofs and one without.. it'd be cool to have a some similar large U6 maps (both with and without roofs.)

[jim3e8]

sjs191, possibly. Right now I have to take a screenshot to capture the map image, and it doesn't work for windows bigger than my screen. I could make a 1024x1024 map this way [1 pixel per tile]. I could also make a larger map by stitching several captures together, but that would be a manual process at this time. It wouldn't be too hard to automate it, though.

[SB-X]

A 1024x1024 map can already be found on the web. I remember some DOS program I used once that would make a higher resolution map in the way you explain, but it did it automatically. At least, I remember a program that ran game.exe and copied screens from it. That might have just been just to get the tile graphics.

[Moorkh]

Great work, Jean! I'm really looking forward to your Win32 release!
Make sure you hook up with Eric regularly - it would be a shame if the two of you wasted time working on solutions for a problem the other has already solved - which might well happen considering your projects overlap in many instances.

A questions for the both of you: will it be possible to play u6 mods changed/extanded with u6edit under nuvie?

[jim3e8]

Regarding mods: since Ultima 6 itself can play the mods saved by u6edit, so can Nuvie. I downloaded Nuvie, pointed it at my modded U6 files, and it worked fine.

As far as duplicated effort, that's the beauty of open source: we can steal as much as we want from each other's sources! Eric used my tech doc when making Nuvie, and I've looked at his code as well.