More Savage Empire Remake Graphics
Petrell brought this to my attention as well (actually, he basically snapped me out of a bit of a post-Internet-avalanche news-posting slump, good guy that he is): Scythifuge has posted more sample graphics from his Exult-based remake of Savage Empire, and has given some details about changes he plans to make in the game’s story.
This in the Exult Forums, of course. First up, there’s this sample of his graphics for Jimmy the Reporter and a Yolaru warrior:
Inspired by Zulus!
There is also this screenshot of some Jukari warriors and Scythifuge’s work-in-progress lava and stone-to-lava transition tiles.
Looks fantastic!
Scythifuge also discusses, in the forum thread, how he plans to re-write the Jukari a little bit, to make them a bit more “Conan-esque” (his term for it) and not quite so abysmally stupid.
Oh, and by the way: Scythifuge also makes mention of the fact that he really has no coding knowledge to work from. He obviously intends to learn, but if any of you have any experience scripting events and plot points in the Exult framework, you might want to announce yourself here.
COOL!
I played The Savage Empire as much as Ultima VII and while it was a bit disappointing by my standards it was actually pretty damn cool overall. Definitely a pickup after Ultima VI.
I think it’s interesting that amongst 2D tile-driven game devs no one’s taken up the scepter of using larger textures with interconnective alpha-only tiles. The screenshot showing the intermediary tile between lava and stone is a good example of where this would be useful.
The basic requirements are that instead of the map being a single array of tiles (512×512 or whatever) that it be several maps (layers) of the same dimensions. Each layer represents a tile type. So you’d have a map of 512×512 tiles of lava (0 = no lava, 1 = lava), 512×512 tiles of stone (0 = no stone, 1 = stone), etc.
First you’d render stone everywhere (on it’s own buffer), then you’d render lava only where there was lava (also on it’s own buffer). Next you’d analyze where the lava borders other lava tiles on the same layer and copy the appropriate alpha tile to make it less blocky. Finally you’d composite the lava layer on top of the stone layer to the final buffer and have a nice seamless landscape. The stone and lava textures could be larger than an individual tile by using MOD to determine which part of the larger texture should be used by the tile.
Using Exult Studio, I have to work within the confines of the engine rules. The stone-to-lave tiles you see are an early version that I pulled up to give some background on the Jukari environment. The newer tiles are properly shaded with a smooth transition.
It would be cool if E.S. had more capabilities, such as per-pixel collision detection, as opposed to the 8×8 pixel limitation that the original Ultima VII uses.