pu6e - Ultima 6 world editor

[jim3e8]

Hello,

I just released test binaries for Windows of pu6e, the python rewrite of my Ultima 6 editor, u6edit. You can download the zip file on my u6edit page.

pu6e is written in wxPython and C and uses OpenGL, so it should be fairly portable. I develop it on Linux and it took less than a day to get working on Windows. I chose OpenGL because the goal is to allow editing and simulation of the U6 engine in very high resolutions (I run at 1280x1024 fullscreen) and framebuffer access is just not fast enough. However, I wrote three other renderers while speed testing and there's nothing that restricts pu6e to OpenGL in the future.

pu6e is very alpha and lacks most of the editing features (the whole point) of u6edit, but I would like feedback from win32 users to make sure it works. That's why I released binaries now.

Also, I've discovered a lot about the U6 renderer, which I'll be adding to my u6notes.txt file soon. It's not as straightforward as I thought! My drawing is now almost perfect and I think the disparity is only in implementation, not understanding.

Hope I'm not too off-topic posting about U6 on the Exult board!

Jim

[ordoc]

works like a charm on win2k

[Dominus]

I posted an answer to your thread in the dragons newsgroup the night before. And yes it works for me in Windows XP. Only fullscreen didn't work at all and going back from that windowed didn't work as well. But that'S probably because of the glide drivers for my hopelessly outdated Vooodoo5.
(Glide drivers are used for OpenGl on 3dfx boards and the glide drivers I use are coded by Colourless )

[jim3e8]

Thanks Dominus, I did see your post yesterday and I was going to ask what your system specs were. For the record, I tested on win2k and got some unreproducable corruption once. But I think this is a Matrox issue, on Linux I get (different) artifacts sometimes that resemble too-high overclocking. The G550 is not by any means a gaming card so I figure anyone with a reasonable card should be okay.

ordoc, thanks!

[sslaxx]

An Ultima VI editor? Neat! Hope this helps the Nuvie project out too.

[Soul Harvester]

Dominous: May I suggest you try the 3DHQ drivers. By far they are the most stable and most advanced drivers for the Voodoo 5 under Win2k/XP. I own two voodoo 5 5500 AGPs and I love them to death.

www.tdhq.com

[Moorkh]

Wow - finally I could take a firsthand look at it, and I must say it looks even more appealing than ultimatrix since your tiles are animated.
I'm really looking forward to see all the editing tools being implemented, as well as getting to edit around the game myself.
Some bugs I noticed (Win32 version on Win2k P4/2.4 SB Live2.0 GF4200 DX9.0):
- You can't quit the editor from the menu or the editor window - gotta manually close the background program to exit
- Zooming out works, in doesn't
- editor crashes in full screen with all options on when moving around for a while, when I'm not getting even near the edges of the map.

Some questions about your lans, too:
- Will users of the editor be restricted to the limits (# of npcs, tiles, objects, etc.) that are imposed on the original u6 or is there any way to circumvent them?
- Will it be possible to add new graphics to u6 (new portraits, new tiles, new objects)?
- Will it be possible to add new 'levels' (there are already several in u6: underworld, sewers)? Any chance of creating upper stories (likely not... ) for buildings?
- Will we be able to extend map size? Britannia is already quite crowded, you see, limiting possibilities of extending u6.

Anyway, keep up the great work, Jim (or is it Jean?)!

[jim3e8]

Moorkh, thanks. For zooming in: are you using a non-English keyboard? I wonder if that's the problem. Also, you have to press the + or = key on the regular keyboard, not numeric keypad. Try setting zoom in pu6e.conf to 0.5 to make sure it's not a keyboard issue.

Re: the crashes, see if you can run the program from the command line, because when it crashes it should give some stack trace info useful to me. If you're getting "illegal operation" though it may not.

I don't know about extending U6. I wrote the editor to edit worlds / savegames that are still playable by the original game. I'd have to break compatibility (and you'd have to play through my or a compatible engine). Unfortunately, many things (weapon stats, "usecode") are also hardcoded in the game executable and this presents a further limitation. So we'll see.

Jim

[Moorkh]

I get the following error message:

11:01:36: Debug: e:\projects\wx\src\msw\app.cpp(439): 'UnregisterClass(canvas)'
failed with error 0x00000584 (diese Klasse hat noch geöffnete Fenster.).

I have a German language Windows version, as you can see. Translated into English, it states: this class still has open windows.

About extending Ultima 6: I understand the problem of the game being no longer playable without your engine. This is certainly a drawback. However, even without changing anything to the engine it should be possible to add/edit dialogues. Is there any technical difficulty involved?
Finally, will your editor work with the Worlds of Ultima games, as well? (I tried it - at the moment it doesn't)

[Dominus]

Soul: I tried the 3dhq drivers (and to be precise for the glide/opengl part I only have to use Koolsmokeys glide drivers) and I found them quite unstable on my system for D3D apps/games. Some bluescreens and some rendering errors that are okay on the old "official" x3dfx drivers.
Also I really think 3dhq is a big rip-off. Especially when they offer site merchandise (I really was ROTFL when I read this).

Jim:
+/- are always problems when you have them mapped on the normal keyboard, at least for German users. generally I prefer the keypad then...

[jim3e8]

Moorkh: Ah, I'm an idiot! It's not crashing. It's stopping after 2000 frames (100 seconds). Forgot to remove that piece of code! )

I'll try to let you do whatever I can within the limits of the game. Editing books, tiles, whatever isn't hardcoded. No one's decoded the conversation files fully yet, so the flexibility there is unknown. Editing dialogues should be possible; don't know if there's room for more, but this is an area of interest for me. With u6edit 0.5 I concentrated on adding/editing objects; other things will come after I get pu6e up to u6edit's level of functionality.

Dominus: I'll make +/- on the keypad zoom as well.

[jim3e8]

Oh, I forgot, it doesn't work with Worlds of Ultima at the moment but I believe the necessary changes will be minimal.

[SB-X]

Jim and Moorkh,
I am working on the conversation script format at the moment, to assist Nuvie. I've got a lot of it figured out, so I'll probably try to make a u6c(ultima 6 conversation) decompiler. I don't make any promises on a time, but I'll release anything I've figured out or created to work with the scripts. U6edit will be able to make use of that, and make a built-in dialogue editor or something. It *is* possible to edit existing NPC's dialogue, but I havn't tried adding any new ones yet.

[Colourless]

Dominous: May I suggest you try the 3DHQ drivers. By far they are the most stable and most advanced drivers for the Voodoo 5 under Win2k/XP. I own two voodoo 5 5500 AGPs and I love them to death.

www.tdhq.com

You dare bring up tdhq in the forums administrated by one of the more outspoken anti-tdhq people?

And might I say that TDHQ drivers are anything but stable if you like to use Direct3D apps.

-Colourless Dragon

[jim3e8]

SB-X, that's great, I look forward to your results.

[Dominus]

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst/nuvielog.php is where you can read logs of the nuvie irc channel (#nuvie on irc.freenode.net). some of it is just fooling around but other parts are about the program and stuff like conversation decoding and similar.

[RazorBlade]

I recently got Ultima 6(with all the trinkets, like the stone and the cloth map:D ) at EBay, I never played or owned it much (except on a C64 emu.)

Please tell me, should I wait for an early alpha of Nuvie or better start out with moslo or something? Exult was even in early alpha very playable, I wouldn't mind waiting some more, now that Nuvie has been announced. I wanted to play U6 since the first time I read about it in the german mag C64'er ...

[Dominus]

Wait!

[Beni]

Hehe, I can play all Ultimas on my system without having to use emus or game engines, though, the VII's are running much better in Exult than without.

I have a Compaq Presario 1.0GHz Laptop with a Win98Se / XP Dualboot config. Runs fine. The only drawback is that Dos sound can only be played in a Windows DosBox because there is no realmode Dos driver for that AC'97 compilant whatever soundchip. But with sound drivers using the WDM Driver architecture, Windows emulates a SB16 and MPU401 when running Dos programs in windows, which works pretty well... (Win98Se and newer versions only)

But anyway, this has nothing to do with anything, I just can't sleep... heh...

[Moorkh]

Jim, I just noticed the update on your page. Any idea when the new pu6e version will be available for dl?