Development direction for Exult Studio?

[Karlos]

Being able to replay BG and SI on a more modern cross-platform and enhanced U7 engine is great, but what I'm personally most excited about is Exult Studio, since I look worward to creating a new game using a U7-style engine. I'm curious about some of the future plans for ES, specifically:

* Will new games be limited to the same resulution and color depth as BG/SI (320x200 256 colors), or will people be able to create high-resolution, color-rich games?

* From the FAQ, I gather that ES is currently a Linux-only GTK+ app that communucates with Exult via TCP/IP. Is the long-range goal to have ES be available on all platforms that Exult supports? If so, will ES be rewritten for each platform by volunteers, or will development eventually switch to a more cross-platform approach (e.g. Python, Java, or using the game engine itself entirely).

* How about artwork? Is there enough free artwork out there that a non-artistically inclined person (such as myself) could make a game? Or are any of the Exult contributors artistically inclined themselves?

Thanks in advance for any answers to this rather lengthy post.


-Karl

[drcode]

1. I'm thinking about higher color (colour?) depth, but it will be more in the future.

2. There's very little in it that's Linux-only. It's C++, and uses the GTK toolkit, which has been ported to Windows.

3. This is my big question, two. I'm still wondering how the original U7 artwork was created so that all the little pieces fit together.

[drcode]

ER... should be "my big question, too."

[Jon Miller]

I'm really looking forward to Exult Studio, too.

Karl, regarding your third question, there'd be a wealth of shapes available if you were able to access both BG and SI. That is, if you don't mind reusing the Ultima artwork. Of course, probably everyone interested in writing their own game would have at least some new shapes in mind. Which you'd probably have to make yourself, cause it seems like most shapes floating around on the Internet are oriented vertically, and not diagonally. And I doubt there are any in the same exact style. (I have no connection to the project, by the way. Hope I didn't make it sound like I do.)

DrCode, regarding the way the art fits together, yeah they did do a pretty good job. Although sometimes, when you're messing around with the hack mover, you realize that the "seams" between shapes are apparent, now that you know where to look.

Just as a P.S., has anyone ever noticed that the pillars in Lord British's throne room stop halfway to the roof? You can stand so that the second story's visible, but they don't get any taller. I know that's being pretty picky, but it always looked kinda goofy to me.

[drcode]

Sure, we can use the U7 artwork for testing and playing around. But we can't use it in a real game that we distribute, since it's owned by Origin/EA.

Now if they'd give us permission, that would be great, but the chances of that happening don't seem all that high.

[Karlos]

I wonder if it would be enough legally to redraw all of the shapes in shapes.vga, but keep the shape of each shape the same so that they all still fit together?

I also wonder if it might be better to use a different image format, such as PNG files, and use transparency to define the boundaries of each shape? That would make it easier to create and edit images.


-Karl

[Armchair Avatar]

I think the best way to create new graphics for an isometric game engine is to use a raytracer. Povray, for example, can render scenes in isometric perspective.
You can always touch them up with a 2d paint program if they don't look good enough.

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

We can also have a converter from GIF or PNG to the native RLE format.