Redemption development diary; U5 for TI screenshots; Lost Sosaria module release pending
Well, isn’t this just a banner week for news posting? Two updates in the span of three days. I should be careful, lest I set some manner of record.
Anyhow, the first two updates come to us courtesy of Petrell, who is guest-posting news at Dino’s Ultima Page.
Ultima IX: Redemption
In addition to the previously mentioned updates, there is also a new development diary to be found at the website of this remake of Ultima 9. This one is by Sage, one of the dialogue writers.
As usual, you must be registered at the Redemption forums to check the diary out.
Ultima V for TI Calculators
Ranman has uploaded new screenshots demonstrating Lord Blackthorn and the results of the entire party dying in his port of Ultima 5 to the Texas Instruments calculator. I don’t have a current percentage-completeness for his project, but a later post in the forum indicates that he’s finished the final cutscene with Lord British, which sounds promising!
Update: In the comments below, Ranman lets us know that:
Ultima V for TI calcs is 96% complete.
I was reaching critical mass again — the 64Kb barrier. I had to work in some more size optimizations. I managed to knock off another 2.3Kb.
The light is getting brighter at the end of the tunnel.
Worlds of Ultima: Lost Sosaria
Over at the website for Lost Sosaria, I’ve posted news that within the next week, I hope to have uploaded the work-in-progress module for the project, along with hak files. Pace Project Britannia, it is my hope that updates to the project can be tracked in a very transparent way, giving interested parties a chance to download the “latest and greatest” in the module’s development, and to give feedback and report problems.
[tags]Ultima IX: Redemption, Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls, Neverwinter Nights[/tags]
Ultima V for TI calcs is 96% complete.
I was reaching critical mass again — the 64Kb barrier. I had to work in some more size optimizations. I managed to knock off another 2.3Kb.
The light is getting brighter at the end of the tunnel.
Good work! We’re looking forward to the finished product!
Re: Lost Sosaria downloads
Good luck with that!! We’ve found consistent releases very beneficial, and not necessarily for the reasons you may think. We get some feedback, and this is definitely very helpful, but what’s also helpful is that it gets the whole team in the mindset to release more often. It forces us to think about things in smaller chunks in order to have different areas playable earlier so they can be tested, rather than waiting for testing at the very end.
That’s good to hear. One of the issues I’ve been mulling over in my head is that, as a small team producing what could turn out to be a fairly substantial narrative, we need to find creative ways to integrate bug-checking and play-testing into the development process, as opposed to simply relegating those things to the end stages of development.
So I find what you say encouraging, Frilly. Thanks for the feedback!
We ran into those issues quite a bit when we started; especially when we started having more than 2 or 3 people contributing. One thing that we’ve done to really help out with that is utilize a source code control system. We spent some time looking around and settled on CVSDude to host our subversion repository. There are some costs to it, but it has saved our skin quite a few times. Everyone can commit their code/art/etc changes to the SVN repository, as well as refresh their local copies from it. The other thing it provides is a BugZilla instance which helps us track our bugs, a mailing list for communication, and commit emails so everyone is notified when someone uploads a change.
I’m not sure how much control you have of your server, but all of these products are open source, so you could set them up on your own web server if you didn’t want to pay for a dedicated hosting solution.
Thanks for the added info, Frilly!
I have pretty wide control over the server here, and might look at setting up a repository. First, though, I have to make sure that the NWN file architecture can work with a repository, which I suppose will take some experimentation. If it can’t, I can make the necessary synchronizations manually (one advantage of a small team). The email notification would be a handy thing, I have to admit.
Ultima V for TI calcs update:
The special ability for each of the Crown Jewels has been implemented.
Posted some news at Dino’s Ultima page.
Thanks, Petrell. I’ll add it to the update for today.