Nuvie — yes, Nuvie — Updated!
Nu-vie is not deeeeeead!
Eric Fry’s attempt to do for Ultima 6 what Exult did for Ultima 7 last saw an update to its website back in 2007. And to be fair, if you look at the Nuvie website today, you will see that the most recent news post is still from 2007.
If you look at the project’s downloads page, however, you’ll notice a rather different date next to the Windows snapshot: January 3, 2011, 3:41 am.
From this, we can conclude two things: Mr. Fry works some really, really late hours, and Nuvie is still being worked on. This is awesome news. As to changes that have been made since his last update, there is no changelog to speak of on the site, so we can’t be certain what new features have been implemented Dominus points out below that you can visit this page to see just what Eric has been up to. And indeed, it would seem he has been up to a lot; his most recent update mentioned getting guard logic underway (the party can now be arrested and sent to jail). However, this forum post would suggest that it is at least now possible to smash various breakable items in the game again. These changes aren’t what made it into this build, however; what was corrected this time around was a bug in SDL. (See Dominus’ first comment, below.)
I have, of course, updated the Windows download for the project entry here.
Well…this is a good post to end the day’s news on, I think! I’ve been super excited for this project to reach a good beta state (if not completion proper) since I first added it to the site. Ultima 6 is, as I keep saying, my favourite Ultima title, after all.
Oh, and if you don’t get the joke in the image caption, go here.
Two things:
– to see the changes to nuvie code read the svn log at http://nuvie.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nuvie/nuvie/?view=log
– the snapshot does not have these changes as the development is going on not in trunk of nuvie but a sppecial branch – see http://log.usecode.org/nuvielog.php?log=4Jan2011 when Kirben (the great guy who makes the windows snapsots for several projects (including exult, xu4, I think scummvm…)) asks whether to make a snapshot of this branch…
What changed in the snapshot is that SDL has a bug which triggers the windows (possibly fedora, too) system beep on any ALT+key combination. Kirben made a SDL build without this bug and needed to update all his snapshots. Discussion on this in the #exult irc log http://log.usecode.org/exultlog.php?log=2Jan2011 (around 1:29)
Dominus: sent you an email. Please reply when you get a chance.
Why is my comment awaiting moderation? A spam measure when links are in the post?
More than 2 links, yes. It seems to be the optimal threshold for blocking spam, but it does occasionally mean a valid comment gets held for moderation.
Anyhow, thanks for the update; I’ve corrected the article to reflect.
Glad to be of service 😉
This reminds me that if you need an idea for an editorial, you could write about the network of Ultima projects and other projects (like Dosbox) where you find a lot of the same persons… And the interesting thing that there is a small rift between the remake teams and the open source engine recreation teams, as between those almost no interchange of team members exist 😉
That would be an interesting topic for an article, though I’d probably need you to give me a bit of a primer on who the big names are on the open source/DOSbox side.
Like, for example, I didn’t know there was one guy who handled periodic builds for a handful of the different engine projects.
I’m a little more familiar with the sharing of work and talent between the remake projects, which I suppose goes to illustrate this rift you speak of. 😉
Hope it will get sorta of HD-look like Ultima 6 online. And will have both 2D and 3D remakes (I mean Archon) like Final Fantasy 4 for PSP(upcoming) and DS 😉