Nightly Open Thread
Apparently, under the right conditions, the house from Pixar’s Up! can actually work as depicted in the movie:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=654GSOXMnkU?hd=1&w=480&h=300]
Grumpy old man and plucky young Boy Scout not included...
Know your rights and limitations when traveling by air.
Of course, this only applies to those of you unfortunate enough to by flying to or from places where the United States TSA has jurisdiction.
Sorry for flogging the Charlie Sheen horse one last time…
…but c’mon, just click that link, and please don’t consume any liquids for the next six or seven minutes.
Tonight’s post brought to you by paper:
Lizard beats paper, but rock crushes lizard. No, it is not commutative.
Just thought I’d mention I’ve started posting some images of Fawn. I’ve only had a couple of hours to work on the mod this week, so not a lot of progress has been made, but each hour means at least one new NPC created, or one new house, etc.
Good to know! I have news for tomorrow now!
The Sword & Shield link at the bottom is still broken btw.
Since there shouldn’t BE a Sword & Shield link there anymore (forgot about that one), I’ll have that corrected shortly.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Rock destroyed both the Sword and the Shield.
Still waiting on SF to fix my key perms so I can CVS the new TFL stuff. Still working on it. Bits and pieces. A house here, an NPC here.
It would be a lot faster, though, if Exult wasn’t so bloody buggy on FC14. :
But anyways, I probably should update the TFL site at some point huh? 😛
Instead of doing something productive with my Spring Break, I’ve been diving into the Fallout: New Vegas GECK (the mod tools). I have to say, it is more nifty than I had it pegged for.
I still hate script driven modding, though. Then again I’ve been able to do some kind of neat monkeying around without having to invest much time, which I suppose is the strength of scripting after all. Now if only I could find a good way to pump debug information to the screen (yet another weakness of scripting being the inability to tell if a script is doing what I want it to do/whether the thing even compiled correctly). I want to know when my random encounter script is firing!
“It would be a lot faster, though, if Exult wasn’t so bloody buggy on FC14. :”
It’s buggy on Ubuntu 10.10 too. F’ the skull of bugs… If Mythic really was the bee’s knees they’d open source the whole damn lot of the old Ultima games. Are they not aware of Aiera and associated projects? Are they just laughing at us wondering what would happen if we had access to their archive of code and reference docs?
I guess they are simply oblivious to the idea, or are so out of touch with reality that they think somehow their IP would be jeopardized by such a move. More than likely open sourcing anything is simply an alien concept to their ideologies.
Damn I’m in a mood tonight.
Well, they are aware of Aiera. I’ve spoken with Paul Barnett personally, in fact. And Paul’s ultimate dream is the Ultima games, released working and DRM free…and possibly free as well.
He might get two out of three.
Open source will never happen…mostly because Origin didn’t save the source code for most of the games in the series. If any source exists, it’ll be for post-EA buyout titles, and even then I wouldn’t expect to find much.
Hmm, I guess that means either released and working or released and DRM-free (patched exe’s). The good news is that they are released under bittorrent, so their decision is irrelevant. The bad news would be that the source code is lost, which is akin to losing the Holy Grail in these parts.
I thought I was a complete ass for letting my hard drive crash without making a backup, thus loosing all my old programming projects and musical compositions. It appears that Origin essentially did the same thing, which is a damn shame and doesn’t make me feel much better about my own mistakes.
At least Mythic is in the clear other than not making them all freeware for those who aren’t aware of how to obtain them sans floppies.
My apologies to Mythic for my snarky comments. As I said, I’m in a mood. But they should still be released as freeware, dammit. Maybe they’re saving the binaries for emulation as minigames or an easter egg for a future Ultima project.
I’ve no doubt that Mythic would release them for free if EA approved the suggestion. Will THAT ever happen? I’m less than certain.
As to Origin’s not saving the source…it was mostly due to the cost of storage space & media back then. Megabytes are cheap NOW…but in 1989? Not so much.
(Also, please don’t advocate for piracy again…not here, at any rate. EA — including Mythic — do pop in from time to time, and I like to stay in their good books. You’d like me to, too. Ultima 4 is fair game to mention as a free download; the others are off limits.)
Point taken.
For the record however, when I said “they” I was referring to open source, freely-distributable Ubuntu distributions that are capable of emulating DOS programs via DOSbox such as the Ultima games, available for legal purchase here:
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=ultima+dos&_sacat=0&_odkw=ultima+game&_osacat=0&_trksid=p3286.c0.m270.l1313
I screwed up and forgot to start a new paragraph and mention I was talking about Ubuntu.
Crazy that I can’t find where EA sells Ultima though. Surely they’re worth the overhead of completing the sale, much like all products of value. All I could find was this:
http://www.ea.com/search?keyphrase=ultima
Perhaps deep in the Internet there is an appropriate purchase link, though at Bioware’s site I didn’t see much either:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ultima+site%3Awww.bioware.com&hl=en&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=off&tbs=
I do appreciate you and Aiera’s unprecedented standing with regard to the Ultima IP and associated copyright holders, but I strongly feel that the Ultima games have not been given their much deserved respect by any commercial entity since the acquisition of OSI by EA.
Out of respect for you, solely, I will not mention the unmentionables again on this site.
Thanks, Kevin.
And by the way, you’ll search in vain (for now) to find an Ultima box set for sale on any EA sales portal.
That may yet change, but…not just yet.
No prob. I sound like a dick half the time but I do have a reasonable side. I also really love this site despite my frustrations about other things. Were patience a virtue you’d not have lost an eighth, but gained one. I’d have lost a full one (1/8 * 8) for hubris.
As an aside, what do you think about starting an open discussion about how we play Ultima? Not just how we play it when we’re playing it, but technically how (or if) on modern systems we play it today.
I’ve used Ubuntu exclusively for the last few years, so I’ve played xu4 natively, an older, less buggy Exult (tried it recently) running Ultima VII, and Ultima V and VI in DOSBox.
Maybe there should be a codex for how people can play Ultima games that they own but are in old formats? I have the I-III collection, IV, V, VI and VII. I bought them from the store when they were sitting on shelves. I have a 5.25″ internal drive that works in my system and an external USB 3.5″ drive. These are some ways, but it’s getting harder to find the actual -hardware- to run these older games. Let them not be lost.
I have toyed in the past with the idea of putting together a “here’s how to run each Ultima” guide. Should really get on that.
I might sync up with you, Sergorn, and…I think Dominus is a Mac guy…to put such a list together. Because it’d be useful, for sure.
EA has the source to Ultima 7 and the Serpent Isle. In the latter case, this is how we know a lot of the parts that got caught, because those docs were leaked.
I can’t speak for others, but presumably they kept the source for Pagan and Ascension as well.
No.
EA doesn’t have the source to Ultima VII and Serpent Isle. As a matter of fact the source of these games has been lost for YEARS before Origin even closed down, and even before Ultima IX was released. This is actually the reason Origin never released a Win95 patch or equivalent for U7/SI… they didn’t had the source code anymore. They lost it.
As to the how, LOAF had written lengthly post about this subject at the WC CIC and has a recal the thing is that things are Origin always were hectic and this often lead to the same diks being used over and over again. They never had any real backup system in place, which is why a lof content was lost, most likely any copy of the Lost Vale with it.
There were some SI leaked design docs, but this has nothing to do with the actual source code of the games.
Perhaps the source code for U8 and U9 were backed up more carefully, but I have my doubts about this.
Also keep in mind Origin has been closed down since then, so even more stuff were lost then. There might some stuff on the data the CIC guys restored for EA and Mythic a few years ago, but I wouldn’t expect much in term of having actual games sourcecodes. But the, who know ?