Exult Forum

Hacking Pentagram? uhh what is Pentagram. and how are you 'hacking' it. this is probably a dumb question. i appologize in advance but i'v been wondering this for a while...later

--crypt

http://exult.info/faq.php#pentagram...

So many people not reading the faq.

You know, there was this wwwboard I was on a while back, where the
guy would preprogram in keywords to search in the post, and if it found
them, it would instead of posting their message, redirect them to a page
with:

YOU DID NOT READ THE FAQ LIKE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO.

YOU ARE A MORON, OR LAZY AS HELL. GO READ THE FAQ. NOW.

I gotta say, the paragraph on Pentagram is not the most descriptive paragraph in the world

Well, seriously, that could be because there isn't much to say about Pentagram. It really doesn't do anything at the moment. It's just a bunch of U8 tools (map viewer, animation viewer, shape viewer, glob viewer, usecode disassembler)

-Colourless Dragon

Nice! A new U8 would be a cool thing indeed

So how much of the usecode for u8 have you figured out (or is it almost similar to u7?)

I guess alot of help could be found for an u8 remake by talking to this guy (I forgot his name) who runs an online game with the u5 tileset. He is one of the programmers from the original u8 team.

- Telemachos

PS. Any (public) CVS project set up for Pentagram yet ?

Pentagram is in Exult's cvs. Module name is 'pentagram'

Usecode: we're quite far along, but we don't have the details yet on how the concurrency of the usecode interpreter is done. (Multiple usecode processes can be run at the same time in U8)

Yes, we might ask Jason Ely (you mean www.dransik.com, probably). He's posted quite a lot of various newsgroups about U8's internals already.

CVS: Thanks, I'll check it out

Concurrency: I guess the big question here is - do they "just" run concurrent - but separated from each other (like different processes) or do they share data (more like threads).

In Ultima1 I also have support for concurrent scripts but currently they never share data. This way concurrency is easy - for each frame simply decide how much time to spend on scripts, check how many scripts are running and assign time slices to each (round robin for a simple approach might work). Then handle each running script one at a time.

If they share data the time slicing is still needed but in addition to this a locking scheme is probably needed for all shared data. As I understand it usecode isn't object oriented right? So you could simply throw in a mutex in every function and data structure.

- Tele

Heh, U8 usecode IS object orientated actually. Really it has very little in common to U7 other then they are both stack based.

-Colourless Dragon