Forgotten World's new screenshot, and what it means
Because it means something awesome.
Okay, the weekly screenshot itself is rather dark; there’s little more to be seen in it than a dock and Raven’s ship. Raven is barely visible in the background (actually, it looks like she’s floating in mid-air). So okay…it doesn’t look like that much of a picture. Here’s what’s significant about it:
I present to you in this week’s awesome screen: the Avatar after traveling by conversation with Raven at the Trinsic docks on a new map (a copy of map 9).
Now why is this awesome; Raven travel is a highly complex scripted event that involves many objects and triggers that must be at least partially understood to attempt even a simple map change like this. So what this screenshot actually shows is that we know enough now to have Raven take us to other maps, which greatly expands the available space to build Britannia.
In fact, due to the high degree of similarities amongst all of the docks, we can easily create a dock on a new map and have Raven take the Avatar to this map using one of the old destinations. Unfortunately, as you can see from the screenshot, there remains a few key bugs with the transition, but I’m confident that these can be corrected for with a little effort.
(Bold emphasis theirs, italic emphasis mine.)
A development that opens up all sorts of potential and possibilities for modifying the world of Ultima 9? That’s big news. Huge news, even. Being able to represent Britannia not as one map, but as a series of interconnected maps, would give the Forgotten World team the ability to expand Britannia’s scale by…well, I suppose there wouldn’t really be a hard limit, would there? Okay, I guess there is…255 maps (thanks for the update, Iceblade!).
In other news, the team would also like to welcome into their ranks one Rorschach by name, who is a software engineer who will fulfill their need for a C++ coder. Iceblade is confident that his skillset will “be of great assistance in [their] efforts to improve OS and graphical compatibility of the engine through dll patches.”
There actually appears to be a limit of 255 maps. A number of these are used, but there are tons of maps that are either incomplete or test maps that could be reused for our purposes.
I would be more than thrilled to take a look at those test maps. I mean I already heard that U9 was a single building site when you take a look behind the curtain but i never saw it myself.
Wow, you folks just keep bringing out the awesome, don’t you?
Wolfner: you can easily take a look at the test maps. There is bound to be some how to online. You basically just edit a text file…
I’ll find and post a link to a how-to tomorrow. I think Hacki Dragon had a write-up on how to do it.
Keep in mind that most of the maps will only result in the game crashing, though. Just FYI.
Here is the how-to.
http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/articles_orig_maps.htm
Thanks.
Now i just hope Ultima 9 still works on Win7s compatibility mode.
There is just one thing left: Yesterday i thought about that problem with the 255 maps. Obviously Origin chose a very small datatype for the map limit. Can’t you change that datatype directly in U9s code? (asking just out of interest – i’m pretty new to all that modding)
Iceblade: Thanks for the link!
Wolfner: I have Ultima 9 up and running under Windows 7 Professional (x64 version). I don’t believe I am running it in compatibility mode, though I believe I do have “run as administrator” enabled for it.
It works pretty good, actually…although it suffers from the runestone bug during shrine cleansings (easily mitigated by adding the fly cheat to the default.kmp file — Hacki Dragon explains how to do this at the link Iceblade provided).
Oh, and Moonglow is buggy as hell. Finish that area quickly; do not pause to admire the scenery.
Just reinstalled U9
Works well on Win7.
I never realized how easy it is to exploit this game. If you take your time you can already jump out of the map on earth (climb on the cave where all the goats are, from there you can easily get “under” the geometry)
It isn’t the most difficult to get outside the areas the game normally lets you play in; if you smash the crates behind the Avatar’s house, you can arrange the pieces to make you a stairwell that will let you climb over the front gate of the property, and this access the cheat teleporters hidden there.
Of course, once you use any of those, there are two (or potentially three) problems.
The first, if you haven’t seen the gypsy, is that the game will have no idea what stats or class to assign you when you start.
The second is that depending on WHICH teleporter you go through, you can upset the plot flags and break the game.
And the third is that if you don’t have the fly cheat enabled, there isn’t any way to actually start the game properly, since you need to get to the top of Stonegate to do it.
So just…be careful, is all.
Unfortunately, there is only one byte allocated to map number. Expanding the size of the map reference would be an annoying headache since we would to find in the exe references to the map byte, understand what the assembler is actually saying regarding that reference, and edit the size of the map reference.
It’s possible since it appears the map byte has a free byte following it, but it is not necessary. The game currently uses only 240 maps, leaving us about 15 map slots free for use in FW. There are also tons of unused maps that we can re-purpose. Also, we have every intention to reuse the maps the Devs originally planned to use for the various towns like Asylum and Valoria.
Has anybody ever encountered a bug where Vasagralem doesn’t show up to Raven’s Trail?
That SOUNDS familiar. I haven’t encountered that bug myself, but it seems to me that I’ve heard of it before.