Possibility of Crusader support for Pentagram tools?

[zerker]

I know this seems like an odd topic, given the fact that Ultima and Crusader aren't very similar, but it would be nice if someone were to do a quick modification of the Pentagram tools to work with Crusader. A while ago, I read that the Crusader games were based off the Ultima 8 engine... now if I'm totally off the ball, then ignore this an go on your merry way If not, it should be a reasonably simply task, no? Would it not be simply be a matter of reading from different files with a different palette, but otherwise similar?

[Dominus]

I tried in the beginning and even then all the shapes and globs were distorted. And the map stuff was of course not working at all.
AFAIK the others of the team don't even have Crusader and so I wouldn't hold my breath...

[Valliant Dragon]

Built off an engine dont neccesarily mean that the enigne's entirely intact/umodified.

Great example: Half-Life is off Q(2?) engine.

Thanks,
Valliant Dragon

[Ryan Armstrong]

Yes, I realise this, but the archetecture would be quite similar. And the Half-Life -> Quake connection is still painfully clear, btw. The Half-Life editor, worldcraft, was originally a Quake editor, and they both use similar resources for most parts of the game. My point was that the modified engine was close enough that minimal modification of the viewer code would be required to add in support for the next game up. Obviously, from Dominus' post, there have been significant changes to the code from U8 to Crusader, so a fix would take more work, which is not what I was asking for. Thanks for the reply, Dominus.

[Ryan Armstrong]

Oh yeah, and great job on the Pentagram tools so far, they're wonderful! Aside from Ultima 9, Ultima 8 was essentially the only ultima lacking a map viewer

Makes me want to go play it again...

[SimCon]

I've got both the PC Crusader games boxed. I played some of the first one and realised how good it was and bought the second for the future

I'm a software developer and would be interested in creating a Linux game engine for this. If there are any Exult developers reading this, can you tell me if you had to debug the original Ultima game under windoz to create the Exult engine? I'd be interested to know how you did this and with which debugger.

[wjp]

We didn't use any debuggers. Everything was done through plain ol' hard work, and a lot of guessing


As for Crusader: from what I figured out from several usenet posts, emails and the like:

The graphics format is (nearly?) identical to U8's
The map format is not the same as U8's
The usecode format should be very similar.

I don't know enough about the other files to make any statements about those.

If you're planning to work on Crusader, I suggest you look through the file format docs we assembled/wrote for Pentagram, and see if any match the Crusader file formats. This might give a good starting point.

[Dominus]

yeah and the source is on our download section as well, so you might get an idea what to do for Crusader (I would very much like you to keep us posted if you figured out how to show the Crusader stuff as well with the Pentagram tools).

Btw, in the beginning of Pentagram I also jokingly said, once we announce the map/shapes viewer someone is bound to ask for Crusader support

[Colourless]

/me laughs at Dominus' comment because it's true

I pretty much say the same as wjp. We can not add Crusader support simply because we don't have Crusader.

[Clock Nova]

As a long time mac user, I missed out on most of Origin's titles throughout the 90's. Understandably, then, I have never heard of Crusader. However, I have since checked both titles on Gamespot, and have found a few copies for sale on eBay. My question, then, is this: are these games worth buying now?

I have had quite a bit of success getting PC games like Fallout 2, Ultima 8, and Planescape: Torment to run on my G4 using VirtualPC, so the Crusader games should pose no technical obstacle. What I really want to know is whether or not the Crusader games will offer anything interesting for me. What do you people think?

Plus, if I buy them, then I will be able to play them natively if some people decide to write an open source engine for them.

[gruck]

The Crusader series are good games. Basicallys its a fun isometric style game similar to Ultima 8, but instead of focusing on RPG elements the game concentrates on making blowing stuff up as fast paced and as fun as possible. The graphics are SVGA and are actually excellent. Its a good solid action orientated game with a few RPG elements and a decent story thrown in.

www.theunderdogs.org for a pretty good review...

Don't look at me, I own them!

[SB-X]

> ... similar to Ultima 8, but instead of focusing on RPG elements ...

No, Ultima 8 never focused on RPG elements either.

[RazorBlade]

Have to add it has great Music, funny actors(the Weazel..lol;)), play a bit like "Last Ninja"(C64) and I cannot play it anymore on my PIII , so a exultstyle engine would be nice..

[Dominus]

RazorBlade: if you are using Windows, you could try bugging the author of U8WIN9X (the link is on our links page U8 in Windows or something) to either tell you what he looked for in the U8 exec so you can patch the crusader exec or ask him to patch it himself. Though I doubt bugging him will accomplish anything...

[Fiammy]

I've seen in your discussion that you tried to read in some crusader files, but everything came out distorted. Please note that Crusader:No Regret supports 16-bit color. Is it possible they changed the graphics to use 16-bit color in the files? Just a thought.

[Darke]

The usecode format for U8 and the two crusader games is almost identical, both
disasm (the disassembler) and fold (the decompiler) in the pentagram cvs will
work for the usecode files of all the versions and languages of u8 (8
combinations in all), and the versions of remorse and regret (*eartwitch* each
of the two versions of each game? I can't remember...).

In actuality, the decompiler works 100% for the crusader, but still doesn't work perfectly with u8, since there's a couple of nasty opcodes I don't properly handle yet that are only used in u8. *grin*

IIRC, the shape formats are almost identical, and I believe they're still
stored as 256 palleted shapes, they were only rendered in 16bit so they didn't
have to worry about pallete conflicts and such, BICBW.

Details of pentagram, including the cvs repository are here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentagram/

The cvs module 'pentagram' currently only contains the documents, and the
'old' directory contains most of the tools and such we've created so far.

Darke
(Repository of useless information. *grin*)