Exult Forum

Check this site!

http://tdr.fr.tc

I am a fan of ultima 7 and I 'm making a cross-platform 2d game engine.
You can downloads small demos of an rpg and a platform game.
My purpose is to make an online version of the game...
I have already done a client/server version for local network and I hope to be able to make real online one in a few months...


Congratulations for your work on exult, I have replayed u7 and this is so great!

I am waiting for your reply on it, and advices...
About the web site too!

See you

punknad

don't hesitate to test the demos and tell me what can be improved...

thanks

Try to make an english version. (it seems as though you can speak english rather well)

ok I'll do one!

Cool, I checked the screens out and they look fine.
One problem though, I looked at your inventory screen and the dialog on one of them. They resemble Ultima greatly, but they should be a tad less realistic. Try to make them like you have the items drawn. Don't worry about paperdolls for now...

thank you for your advices...

If I have really understood, you are talking about digitalized pictures
which don't fit whith traditionals drawn items?

Unless you and Artaxerxes merge projects and use his digitized character graphics too.

I actually used a picture of a Kernel Developer and I resized and reoriented it! Very amateurish method but since then I've been using ShapeMaker.

Artaxerxes

yes because you are a lazy man like me

I have asked a friend of mine who have a webcam to be the model

Is there any U7 like graphists here?

punknad wrote:
>
> yes because you are a lazy man like me

gotta be a french thing!

btw, I don't think graphics should be identical in style to U7. If the scanned picture looks good, well, USE it!

Artaxerxes

he he you're right it's the famous french laziness

I am doing change in my code now for moving object in the inventory.
It is quite difficult because of online characteristic of my game:
objects beeing moved have to be hidden for the other user...

It works but I don't like the way I have coded it...
I want something easier...

Good night

Ok, I'm curious. I've started playing around with Sphere ( http://sphere.sourceforge.net/ )to write a Wasteland-a-like and was finding decent image editing/creating software hard to find.

On the old Amiga days I'd fire up Deluxe Paint. It was perfect for this kind of work, as it had decent pixel control with easy to edit palettes.

What do people here use to do graphics?

Also was wondering what ShapeMaker is/does. A quick Google seemed to suggest it's a plugin to Quark or something to help make artificial limbs

Cheers!

Cheshire

For palettized images, DPaint was perfect, and as far as I know, nothing has come close to it since. Even well into the 90's games (such as Quake) were still developed with DPaint (PC version not the Amiga version). Once true colour started to be used with 3d Acceleration Photoshop began to be used more and more. Photoshop however is not suited at all to palettized image editing.

DeluxePaint works quite well in dosbox, btw.

I use paint shop pro and it works fine.
Just zoom a little to draw pixel by pixel...

I have made bitmap of my game like this (http://tdr.fr.tc)

easier like this:




You can see that bitmap are really "deluxe paint" looking
256 colors is no more used and it's a good thing!!!

U7 was using 256 colors and has to change palette a lot and with some old graphics cards like trident, changing too much palette causes some artefact...

Because with slow video cards you should change palette only during vertical refresh. If you use INT10 it does it for you, but if you write directly into the VGA registers it flickers.

ShapeMaker is a tool I am developing. It has nothing to do with Quark.
Basically, it is an exulstudio shape (or item) maker. You add points on a 2d surface (6 surfaces offered for the 6 views) and it automatically create the appropriate pseudo-3d shape used by Exult. The algorithm is actually simple, so you could just make shapes without it.

The prog is not finished yet and I have not release it anywhere, so there is no point using Google yet. But promised, when it's useable enough, I'll release it.

Artaxerxes

exact nadir!

Does someone know about graphists able to do U7 like bitmaps?

I have found why SDL was so slow on my pc :
I have used instead the SDL_ANYFORMAT tag to create my surface and now there are no more conversions to do between formats


How do you make change of format without restarting the game with SDL?
In Exult you can switch to full screen or to any format you want while playing...

Will the exult teams do a SDL_OPENGL port of exult engine?

tdr.fr.tc

Exult 1.1 already has a SDL_OPENGL port

It's very experimental, though.

...and it sometimes completely crashes my Linux machine, something that no other program ever does:-)

But when it works, it's really fast, since most of the graphics are stored in the video card's texture memory. And I think it would be fun to add more realistic lighting. It >should< be relatively easy.

If you want to see how Exult changes screen formats, look at the code in the 'imagewin' directory. I think we just allocate a new surface in the new format and then free the old one.

thank you doc code!


I'll look in the imagewin directory...
Where is the code for your opengl stuff?
I'll try it too...

Yes realistic lighting would be fun!!!
With more realistic explosion of black powder too YES!