Data formats

[Wizardry Dragon]

I have, for some time, wrestled and grappled with the idea of modularizing TFL. I want people to be able to play it, and for me to be able to distribute it, without the latent worry of someone at EA deciding that they don't like that, and putting a gun to my poor dear baby's head.

One of the problems that we came across in the past, about the question of developing Exult support for the iPhone, I believe I recall, is that the file formats used by Ultima VII are the property of Ultima and thus we couldn't really distribute them.

So this makes me ponder the possibility of developing or having developed file formats completely unique to Exult, or failing that, being able to use open standard file formats. Marzo's more likely to be able to do this than I - he's done a huge amount of work with Exults data handling such as with mods and the game strings. Nonetheless I think it could be a good thing - and probably important for mod developers like me if we ever did want the mod to be a "standalone" sort of thing (as I eventually would like to do, to let people without U7 experience TFL).

Any thoughts?

Wizardry Dragon

[Petrell]

Well to make 'legal' standalone TFL game, you'd have to make all the game assests your self (art, sound, code, writing etc.) and borrow nothing from U7/SI or other proprietary games. You could not use any modified assests either. Also as you said, all proprietary file formats would also have to be replaced. HUGE undertaking to say the least.

[Malignant Manor]

make all the game assests your self (art, sound, code, writing etc.)

With the writing being impossible since the Feudal Lands would be derivative work like all other fan fiction.

[Wizardry Dragon]

Not utterly impossible but not desirable. I'm not talking about avoiding being a derivative work though - im talking about the possibility of running without needing proprietary file formats. This was the issue with distributionon some platforms.

On a related thought I should add a command to the ucc interpreter to detect if SI is also installed.

Wizardry dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

Apologies for the double post, but again, can't edit.

This issue also a consideration for the "new game" capability. You could have someone making a more or less new game using the Exult engine (theres been a couple Ive heard tell of, I seem to remember someone doing something all cyberpunk-esque or something) - but it would still be in lukewarm legal waters because the file formats for the shapes and chunks are proprietary to EA.

But this isn't just a legal issue. Those file formats were made in older times with older programming techniques. Given the chance Im sure we could make something better, or use better "open" file formats.

A don't think I'd be able to make TFL standalone on good legal terms, but what I would like to do at the very least is make it work on the most installation configurations as possible, since theres BG, FOV, SI, and SS all to consider. I don't want the game allowing the player to make use of the rewritten parts of SI if you don't have SI, or BG if you just have SI, and so forth. That is a bit of concern, since I imagine Ill end up (eventually) rewriting and re-mapping most of SI. And segments of BG (the dungeons come to mind)

Wizardry dragon

[Malignant Manor]

The shape files are likely the only issue on a technical level. The flx files are simple containers for files and not really needed.

I don't really think there's a good way to enforce any requirements of having BG or SI with simple code, especially in an open source project. I think the best choice would be finding a way to actually import shapes from one game to another without extraction. I'm not sure how hard this would be to do. Likely, I would cheat to have Exult store all the relevant shape data into the main game and just tell it to overwrite the non-existent shape (or placeholder) with the appropriate shape.

Right now, you could have users use a batch or bash script to add the shapes with one of the utility programs, similar to how you prepackage it. Unfortunately, this adds another level of something that people need to do and limits people willing to try TFL a bit.

[Wizardry Dragon]

It would be fairly easy to "export" the same existance check Exult uses for the paperdolls to the UCC interpreter, I think. I say that not having looked at the code for that in a while though.

Hmm, I'll have to give it a look over. Theres a lot of changes I'd like to give to UCC and I could give that a look when I do.

Wizardry dragon