light changes?

[Dunadan27]

I have a little question about the transition between for example day and night, is it possible to make it smoother, because i believe Ultima 7 has alot of different light settings like noon and dawn.
I first played Ultima 7 on a 386 16 Mhz so everything ran really slow.
but the transitions between rain and sunshine for example went really smooth and together with the cloudshadow moving on the ground it looked really realisic.

Just a little question if it is possible?
and if so do you intend to implement it?

another question about light is when lightning strikes the colour pallete changes, but when you d-click a NPC to talk with them right on that moment the colour pallete is still in change and you get a really strange screen with very bright colours.
I believe in the original during conversation that is diabled? or something i never had any problems with it.

Great work and i really enjoy re-playing the best game ever.

[drcode]

Yes, the transition could be made smoother. I can't remember how the original worked. Did it fade to the new palette over a few seconds?

Getting stuck with the lightning palette when you're talking to an NPC is a bug.

[dag]

i remember that at least si had some more palettes and was able to
render different grades of 'lighting environment'.
e.g. in exult, it simply gets dark when you switch off a light source, and
light, when you switch it on again. but in si (maybe in bg, too) you had
several palettes, beeing used depending on the number of visible light
sources. so it got lighter and lighter, when you turned on more lanterns
and torches.
this is a feature that i really miss in exult, because it added a lot to the
atmosphere...

[Andrea B Previtera]

In the past, I fruitfully used a simple yet extremely effective method.
You have some basic palettes like

Sunrise [05:00]
Morning [09:00]
Noon, [12:00]
Afternoon [16:00]
Dawning [18:00]
Evening [19:00]
Night [20:00]

When you are between one of the "known palette" hours and another, each 10 game minutes you set the current palette to a new one that's
the result of the interpolation between the two boundaries.

For example, at 13:30 I'll set a palette that's the interpolation
between Noon and Afternoon. Each RGB value is recalculated as the
linear interpolation between the RGB values of the two palettes...

[Dunadan27]

Yes, the transition could be made smoother. I can't remember how the original worked. Did it fade to the new palette over a few seconds?

That would be great..,.Yes transistion went really smooth after a nice rain fall it cleared up and everything looked all cleared as if the sun started shining again..but it went slowly mabey 3 seconds fading into a new palate transition but you did notice the transition.

[drcode]

Although I won't work on this right away, I've entered it as a bug so the idea won't get lost.

[dag]

> Although I won't work on this right away, I've entered it as a bug so the
idea won't get lost.

thanks, drdcode. i think i mentioned this issue in one or two threads before.
well, i should have submitted a bug report...

[Achenar]

I like this idea too... I just wanted to add, a while ago when I was trying (and failing to clone the U7 engine I had a day/night cycle of sorts happening. This included gradual fades between palettes... I had an 'orangey' palette that was faded to briefly at sunset or sunrise before proceeding to the overall day or night palette. It was supposed to simulate the red glow of sunset or sunrise and I thought it ended up looking pretty good,... perhaps this would be a feature to consider?

Thanks
Achenar

[drcode]

That sounds pretty nice. There's no reason why we can't distribute more palettes.

O.T: Seems a little funny to keep improving an old game like this. Makes me wonder if Origin couldn't have made a business out of making a long series of games using the U7 engine, perhaps with other main characters besides the Avatar.