Video: Ultima 4 on iOS (natively!)
In which a long-standing challenge is responded to:
Runs pretty smoothly, too!
What you are seeing, Dragons and Dragonettes, is actually an offshoot of the xu4 project, which implements the underlying game model from Ultima 4 in iOS. Map display and traversal have been implemented, and later in the video you can also see that NPC behaviour has been implemented as well. A rudimentary control set is also seen.
Some of you may (spoiler?) have noticed that the game crashed at the end. This is apparently due to the fact that transition to combat screens has not yet been implemented. Still, this is an impressive display of progress from Darren and xu4.
Speaking of that project, by the way, they have released a new snapshot build, which they are calling “beta4”. This version sees some visual, animation, and sound improvements made. Darren has also been working on separating SDL-specific code from the rest of the framework, which is apparently a necessary step to enable xu4 to work directly with equivalent calls under iOS. I’m told this is not an easy task by any means, but it will have the long-term effect of cleaning up the xu4 codebase and making it easier to port to other platforms in the future.
All in all, an impressive set of developments from this project. Very cool. Now watch that video again. (The music in the video, by the way, comes from this guy).
It’s going to be fun coming up with intuitive interfaces that allow the user to retain the classic experience without having easy access to a keyboard. Conversations, remembering key words, learning and mixing spells, reading the History of Britannia (Really, you’ll be able to read the History of Britannia).
I can remember playing the original Ultima IV at the age of 8 on a commodore 64, and now wanting to get better at programming on mobile platforms, I couldn’t resist your challenge: The Quest of The Quest of the Avatar on iOS. Maybe if I do a good job, they’ll let me into the UDIC and I’ll get a dragon name.
In the meantime, I’m giving xU4 a lot of attention, so please check it out and enjoy. https://sourceforge.net/projects/xu4/
Just be careful about [g]etting chests until the next release.
You hardly need to do something so drastic as that to get into the UDIC. But please…don’t stop!
As far as keyboard-less UI for Ultima IV goes, I would suggest giving a look a the Sega Master System port of the game which did a great job of it.
But is that interface portable to something like iOS? That is, would it work in a mobile context?
http://www.youtube.com/user/Darrenor64#grid/user/22904E651D2A7565
In spirit, perhaps. I’m going to have to go into the library code and create calls like “Get all available commands in this context”, group them for the user to see, and create special controls for sub-commands. I imagine the SEGA has some nice categotizations (or simplifications) of the commands vs using every letter of the alphabet.
Yeah it was simplified to a few commands and it worked: http://www.emuparadise.org/Sega%20Master%20System/Snaps/Ultima%20IV%20-%20Quest%20of%20the%20Avatar%20(E).png
There was also some things simplified: for instance no need to “Enter” a city or a lader, just moving on it made your party used it.
Since the game only used a four directional pad and two buttons, it most definitly had to be simplified. I could picture something similar working on a Touch device, though it would have to be adapted somehow.