Exult: final goal?

[Dominus]

huh? what do you mean?

[Achile Dragon]

Well After the holocaust (you know when you kill batlin and the bane take the bodies of Shamino and al.) I cheat and I remove the egg of the people who suppose to be dead on moonshade, monitor and Fawn to have Iolo the mad, Shamino the Arnach and Dupré the Wantoness conversation but If i save them well it's seem to have the same conversation as before the holocaust

[Dominus]

then you don't remember the conversatons very much. And there is not much hidden conversation anyway...

[Achile dragon]

I love the conversation of Captain Hawk after the Holocaust. This should be implemeted.

After his conversation is over he give you his key to his room for the treasure map (the crown location). This scence is after the bane is release and when i delete his egg when he is between death and life. I check the usecode Ducio seem interesting too.

[wjp]

What do you mean, "should be implemented" ?

Both those conversations are required parts of the SI plot. If you don't get them in Exult for some reason, that's a bug. (Although I never had a problem with Hawk or Ducio in Exult.)

[Achile dragon]

Non after the holocaust (post-bane if you like, Hawk and ducio are dead)

[wjp]

Hm, ok, I misremembered about Hawk. (He is indeed dead after the banes)

But Ducio should definitely still be alive. (He makes the worm gems for you to capture the banes in.)

[Achile dragon]

ho sorry i talk about the guy you ask at moonshade for a dinner with the magelord

[Gradilla Dragon]

that's Flindo

[Gerry]

My goal for 1.2.5: waitresses etc. prepare food in tavern kitchens. Their doing so in the original U7 makes taverns feel more 'alive'.

Cheers,

Gerrt

[Encomium]

How difficult would it be to add 3d generated light sources (coloured too) around Britannia? Lit torches and shadows rendered off the 2d objects.

[Tristan de Inés]

It would be really cool if you could make a graphic overhaul of U7 by retouching all the graphics and making them more detailed by "really" increasing the resolution to 640x480 instead of using pixel-shading.

I realise that this would require EA making U7 freeware first...
Man, that sucks. Why can't they just make it free? They don't sell it anymore and the only way to get it is via Ebay.

But would it be possible for people who own U7 to make this themselves? Perhaps shapes would require an extra tag, so that shapes that are already updated to 640x480 are drawn directly on screen whereas still original shapes are streched as usual.

[Excessus]

Sorry to get a bit back in the thread but Ultima VII multiplayer has been done, has evolved through time, and is now a very profitable online game I play for years now on a daily basis. http://www.tibia.com

So give it a try! Exult is far more powerful.

[crazypete]

For all you multiplayer nuts out there, lemme describe the college semester I spent trying to play uo:

1. ooooh, I'm in the game oooh, this is exciting...SPLAT <- some dude kills me for no reason
2. Spend weeks slinking around building my skills and occasionally get killed
3. See some guy get killed by a dragon, looted his stuff and I have equiptment! Afraid to wear equiptment because I'll get killed and looted on.
4. Finally decide to wear the magic armor, guess what! SPLAT! Get PK'ed and looted
5. UO resets server so now the one thing I have worked so hard for: my skills. Thats gone too
6. Left to wandering around the "player owned house" packed wilderness (if you can call it that)
7. When I had spent 3 hours sewing, I finally realised the futility of it all and quit the game.

Online games always lack plot. Singleplayer games (hopefully) oooze with plot. This is why I still play ultima 7. No game yet has even come close to this in any respect. I am amazed that with such technology out there now (I'm a programmer), they cannot match the environmental complexity and open endedness of a 10 year old game thats a fraction of the size of the gigabyte games floating around now.

Bottom line: ultima7 should never have a multiplayer component.

[Zerothis]

I think a journel, with quest tracking would be an excelent addition.

[Warder]

Online games doesn't always lack plot.

*cough*Ultima Legacy*cough*

[Ezric]

Having a bad experience in UO doesn't mean that a multiplayer version of Exult wouldn't be enjoyable. I've played EverQuest since mid-1999 and I still play daily; a multiplayer game like that certainly isn't played in the same way as a one-player RPG typically is, but how many people have played Black Gate and once they were free of Trinsic spent a LONG time wandering the world and seeing the sights, pretty much ignoring the plot for awhile. I played Black Gate for a good year before I really dove into the plot, and what keeps me going back to it isn't the plot at all. It's the world, the dungeons, the monsters, the treasure, etc. Those aspects of Black Gate would be very much applicable in a multiplayer version of Exult. A multiplayer Black Gate would let me share the experience of U7 with some friends, or even just with my wife via LAN.

Even ignoring the two pre-existing U7 games, Exult Studio could certainly be used to craft worlds that were designed from the ground up for multiple players. Once Exult supports multiple maps, more shapes, and all those other goodies that are in the pipe right now, it'll be well suited for large game worlds and multiple players.

[SB-X]

I don't know why people always think about something like UO when people bring up multiplayer Exult. I don't think about a single large persistant world with hundreds of players, but a small party-based LAN game, with groups of players hosting their own games for their friends. For the experience of the former, I point to the numerous MMORPGs available. The latter may be more likely to give you the Ultima experience.

[roman_]

it wouldn't necessarily need to be an MMORPG, but maybe like typical multiplayer games and allow like up to 16 people or something along those lines.

[William]

Personally, I'm more anxious to see the authoring tools evolve. I have a cool game idea (well two or three actually) that I'd love to try to implement, but there are still a few show-stoppers for me with the current toolset.

But in terms of multiplayer (since that's what everyone's talking about), I'd like a system that allowed a group of people to play the single Avatar character but in a group fashion. I have a friend who really likes combat; that's not my strongest interest though. He could observe over LAN while I did the running around in town (giving his opinion to me about clues or avenues to follow up in a chat window perhaps?). When battle comes I can turn control over to him. Certainly the same thing could be done by sharing one computer, but this would let us play the game over a lan (so we don't have to physically share the computer) or over the internet (you'd just be sending position info between machines; graphics would be rendered locally for speed). That's a useful type of multiplayer that would integrate well into the spirit of the original games. If people make additional games that change the spirit, it might make sense to expand the multiplayer capabilities of the framework. But to let the network geeks scrath their itch, a cooperative lan-enabled, single-player version of the current game would be a good start. Most of the initial problems addressed would have to be solved for just about any other type of multiplayer so it wouldn't be wasted effort.

Then people can get back to the developer tools

[artaxerxes]

now, could you give a list of tools you would like to see for developing new games?

Artaxerxes

[Dominus]

(I want to see Artaxerxes tools in Exult CVS...)
--
nagging Dom

[artaxerxes]

yeah, I have to add them. I really should take time to refine them though.

To date, the tools I have regard mapmaking:
* mockup:
this tool converts an image into a u7map, converting each pixel into a "chunk" (see exult's doc/ directory for info on "chunks"). The mapping is found in a plain text file, so that for instance, any pixel having a hex colour of #00FF00 is converted to a chunk number 153. This way, you can make a 192x192 image, an convert it to a 192x192 u7map very easily. The only issue is it may take time to create 192x192 perfectly. For instance, making a road, you want the appropriate chunks to be used when the road turns around. That means you must track down each and every pixel forming the road and pick the appropriate one when the road turns around. This is way too much work and I've made another tool to automate the process. That's the second tool:
* smooth:
this tool converts an image into another image, applying some changes pre-defined in a configuration file. This way, the resulting image is an altered version of the originating image. You might for instance, define a colour 00FF00 to be the colour used for your roads. In smooth's config file you would then say that whenever it sees colour 00FF00, it must look around to guess whether the road is turning or not and consequently alter automatically the colour if it is.
Another use is the making of random areas. You can define a certain colour, say FF4422 to be altered and replaced by a list of other colour you pre-defined. This way, every place you had FF4422, you might get now FF4413, FF4442, F9413C and E5F1C3. Then all left to do is to use "mockup" to convert FF4413, FF4442, F9413C and E5F1C3 to similar but yet different chunks, to make up a forest for instance.
A third use is the altering of "borders". What I call a border is the junction between sea and land for instance. You would like to have a coast chunk between the 2. With smooth, you can define one colour for a border and another for another border and a list of colours you will assign to a chunk in "mockup" and you automatically have a coast making the transition between sea and land.
All those effects for smooth are based on plugins. So far, I've made and described the 3 plugins that exist. If you have ideas of other plugins, either suggest them or make them and they could get included.

Artaxerxes

[drcode]

I'd like to know what's missing or not working in EStudio. Sometimes big problems are caused by relatively small bugs.