Exult Forum

I do not know if anyone mentioned it before but it would be a good idea to implement opengl in future exult releses.I do not know if implementing opengl would be easy or very difficult (so worthles in terms of rewritng all engine code). If you could add opengl in next releses i would be happy.
Keep up the good work.

Do you have any specific reasons for wanting opengl support?

There's already some experimental opengl rendering code in Exult, btw, but it's not very stable currently.

I also believe OpenGL is disabled in the latest release, or can you still enable it using the config file?

NB: I too would like to have OpenGL. It made rendering blisteringly fast on my laptop.

since the scalers are quite cool (especially the new scale2x!!), exult does
not look as "blocky" on larger screens as it did once. so maybe the opengl
texture filtering capabilities are not needed at all any more.
but it may offer a significant speed improvement on low end systems
with higher resolutions.
i think, speed is not an issue on actual systems, since i could run exult with
800x600x2 with any scaler "flawlessly" (if i wanted to) with my thunderbird
1400 mhz.

My experience with it is that it did speed up rendering quite a bit (on a k6/500), but didn't look as good as the software scalars. Also, it has a bug where you can see the 'seams' between the chunks. The real advantage would be if we used it to implement more realistic lighting or other 3D effects. I'm not sure if it's worth the effort.

These seams might be hardware-dependant. I tried it with an old Geforce-2, and it looked well. But then again, things even got slower than before, and the menus weren't really visible...

There's a problem with that. OpenGL is a different graphics library, meaning it would be a lot harder* to use than using different software renderers.

*although I'm not saying it's very hard to do software...

Surely you don't mean something like this...

Dude. That looks awesome! You should try to make something of it!

I work on it...uhm... a couple week per year ; ) But this time I should try to end it. Soon I will open the webpage for the project. Mind well: it's not Ultima VII in 3d... just a 3d rpg using Ultima VII shapes as textures, and reproducing some Ultima VII architectures in 3d.

Um, will there be an editor for making quests? I mean, do you have the quest planned out?

BTW, Ultima 7 Online is a bad idea, Ultima 7 3d is a bad idea too. Ultima 7 looks good BECAUSE it's 2d, although making another RPG using the shapes as textures isn't a bad idea at all. Besides that, you can't stop me from using an editor (provided you make one) to make another remake of Ultima IX...

No easy-to-use editor, but I will document the file formats (although they're SO obvious, most of them being pure text) - and with a huge amount of patience someone could create a brand new world from scratch...

@drcode: "Also, it has a bug where you can see the 'seams' between the chunks."

This is probably not a bug in your openGL implementation Rather it's most likely because you have the texture addressing mode set to "wrapping" rather than "clamp". When openGL does the bilinear filtering it'll look at the neighbour texels in the texture and with "wrapping" enabled it'll include some texels from for example the left edge of the texture when filtering those on the right edge. Unless the textures are specificly designed to allow such wrapping there will be visual artefacts at the seams between the tiles.

- Tele

I'll add that it's a glitch that would happen also if they use Glu's "GluBuild2dmipmaps" on a texture with an alpha channel (but it shouldn't be the case of chunks)

skutharth, this coming from you?
"Ultima 7 Online is a bad idea"
If I remember correct you were the one advocating for it so much around about 1 year ago. Times have changed.

Telemachos, doesn't really help. Using clamp will not entirely fix the problem. The reason is, you will still be getting lines because of a lack of filtering between the chunks.

Colourless:

Yeah you're right. Does the scalers you're using now take this into account? Ie. not filter the edges of the tiles... I guess they must do that.

Hmm.. I think it might help, althought not entirely fix the problem, to add an extra border around the tiles that is identical to the border of the tile. But of course, if it runs fine now without openGL then why go through all sorts of trouble to use it.

If it's just to be able to do better lighting then I guess you could still use your current scalers to produce the tiles you feed openGL and then use "nearest point" sampling when rendering them.

- Tele

Andrea, that looks really great! Keep up the good work.
Skutarth, I would never imagine hearing you say that U7 Online isn't a good idea!

Thank you very much: I will post a couple new screenshots soon, but I don't want to use the Exult forum to publicize this work! : ) So I am going to open a simple website for the project, expecially because I am struggling to find some help...

@Andrea B Previtera

Is there any chance you would ever work on importing those objects/tilesets to NWN? ^^

Looks really nice, very well done so far!

How I can use openGL support in U7, where I must switch it on?
With my Athlon 1GH and Geforce2Ti game runs slowly, hovewer in
320x200 with Point it runs well, I'dont know why higher resolutions and
other scaling methods make this game slow?
Explain!?

> How I can use openGL support in U7, where I must switch it on?

You need to recompile Exult with openGL enabled. As mentioned earlier, it's very experimental. Expect visual artifacts and crashes.

> I'dont know why higher resolutions and other scaling methods make this game slow?

Scaling requires a lot of extra data to be moved around, especially the complex scalers which read a lot of neighbouring pixels to determine the final pixel value.

Telemachos: The software scalars do the whole window all at once, so the seams between tiles aren't a problem.

Razor: uhm, I don't have any experience with NeverWinter nights and ... how is it named? Aurora tools? Actually, there's nothing special with the objects. All the opposite: the objects are my personal doom - I don't have a team around me, so I made up a few silly geometries in 3dstudio max 5... and that's what you see: some cylinders, some boxes... textured with Ultima VII's cartoonish shapes. : )

With this, I abandon this offtopic fragment - just a last couple of screenshots. Who know, they could lure someone to lend a 3d hand!

Andrea,

Might I suggest that you use sprites, or maybe even Voxels(if you can..) to render the trees. What you've created looks awesome. Totally has the look and feel of Ultima in my opinion but the trees look a bit.... I dunno, maybe "candyland"-ish haha

Cool work though, as a Half-Life and Serious Sam level designer, I can definitely appreciate the work you're doing on a very technical level. Should you some day open a project up with that I may just have to contribute some major works. We'll see though.

Right, I was thinking about trees made up of crossed quads: that would me help a lot too since I could use (as usual) modified Ultima VII shapes... thanks for the appreciation: as simple as the visual result is, the engine that's behind it is extremely complex... I am definitely going to open a project page, as I said: would you really contribute?