Ships in Redemption, Pentagram news, Ashes art
There were a few updates that were worth reporting on today.
Ultima IX: Redemption
Corv of the Titans of Ether brings news that Redemption will, thanks to the efforts of new team member Spyder, feature ships and sailing, and offers a video on YouTube as proof. Of course, the ship model looks so pretty that there’s really no point in making you click a link to get the video:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNKgNmm-6B4]
Pentagram
The Pentagram team bring us a small news update, just to keep us informed on progress: improvements have been made to pathfinding, and to Avatar movement as well. Enhancements to item manipulation and missile trajectories have also taken place.
Ashes
Over in the Ashes forum, there are several new artwork samples of the game’s character creation process.
🙂 WtFD
Mmmm, that is quite a nicely modelled boat. So they’ve managed to get sailing in Morrowind, eh? I’m wondering how it’s done.
Well, I can only speculate, but basically they’d have to script a way to make the boat move on/through coordinate positions occupied the water object in the engine. I imagine that the scripting API in Morrowind allows for this in some capacity, as it does in both Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights (to a lesser degree in the latter).
I suppose the real issue is making the boat “sit” in the water (done by adjusting its z-position, although they may also have to compensate for clipping issues) and making its motion seem realistic…which would probably require some form of calculated limitation in the algorithms that it uses to calculate change in position.
I wonder if they can do/have attempted water displacement around the hull of the boat?
http://woodward.sourceforge.net/ – an Ultima VII-inspired RPG game/system written in Java. Screens look promising!
Unfortunately, it’s also dead – there appears to have been no activity since 2003, so it’d probably be worth adding to the Cemetery – I’d say the Orphanage, but there appears to be no actual code in it’s CVS. I’d hazard a guess that the screen shots on the website are mock-ups and no actual work on this has been done beyond mouse testing code.
Thanks — I’ll have an entry drawn up within the next 24 hours.
No probs. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for more Ultima related projects – hopefully, ones that are active.
One always dreams of finding such things.
The other think I’ve been thinking of adding to the site is a list of resources for would-be Ultima remakers and modders, things like recommended NWN/Dungeon Siege*/Morrowind resources, or some of the home-brew engines that have appeared over the years.
That plus links to Ultima histories, item lists, explanations of the virtues. A sort of catch-all guide for remaking/spin-offing.
Except for the fact that I haven’t got a huge amount of time to throw at such a project, it’s something I think more than a few people would benefit from.
🙂
* of course, this section might be little more than a link to Project Britannia, but whatever.
You could stick the BritanniaMOD for Morrowind in the resources section, too.
Yeah, that’s true. It hasn’t been developed in a while, mind, but I suppose someone could pick it up and run with it.
In all honesty, it’s a disappointment nobody has. Ah well, hopefully someone will pick it up.