Nuvie's First Official Release
The penultimate news update was posted to the Nuvie project page at SourceForge three years, eight months and one day ago. And now, today, after such a lengthy hiatus, Eric Fry has posted another update to the site announcing the first official release of his cross-platform engine for Ultima 6.
It’s been awhile between posts which has led many to think that the nuvie project had died. But this isn’t the case. We’ve come along way since the last news post (280+ code commits) and I feel that we are finally ready for our first offical release. There are still missing features but compatibility with the original game has been greatly improved.
And indeed, much has been added to Nuvie since August, 2007. The combat system has been re-written, monsters can cast spells in combat (and have proper inventories), new spells have been added, the sound engine has been reworked, sound effect support has been expanded (and even includes partial support for the FM-Towns sound effects), various spells have been improved, many bugs have been squashed, and various bits of monster logic have been improved. Also, guards can actually arrest you now.
Oh, and Nuvie now creates a configuration file for itself automatically if it doesn’t detect one, which vastly simplifies the installation process.
You can download the v0.1 official release of Nuvie either from the project’s download page or the project entry here at Aiera. I’ve also updated the snapshot downloads, although I’d encourage everyone to try the official release out.
(Hat tips to Dominus and Eric Fry for alerting me to this!)
That is awesome. It’s good to see Nuvie and xu4 finally being worked on again.
This is great! I never finished this game and go back and play it every couple of years so my next play will be using this engine.
I need to compile it and make a deb for distribution. No binary for Linux was available on the download page. Almost as sad as waking up strapped to an altar about to be sacrificed by unknown daemons. Shit!
Curious how this differs from playing using dosbox?
For now, not much. Eric has been experimenting with some other features (e.g. fullscreen view), but those will have to wait for a later build.
@dungy: nuvie development never stopped. It just wasn’t as prominent, as Eric was mostly working in branches instead of the trunk.
@saxon: expect nuvie to be more buggy but with some excellent features, as the smooth darkness fog and the digital sfx and voice acting of the Fm towns version if you have it.
@saxon: Some other enhancements are multiple savegames, drag and drop inventory support and better handling of door keys.
@Sanctimonia: I’m happy to host linux binaries. I thought that most linux users were happy to compile from source. I’m also not sure which distros are popular these days.
These days a lot of Linux users are lazy and just want a .deb or .rpm. I actually do compile a lot of stuff, so I must have been feeling lazy at the time. 😉
Probably the most popular distros now are Ubuntu and Red Hat based, which use .debs and .rpms respectively for packages.
I just compiled it actually, but it complains with “No config file found!” 🙁 Looks like one needs to be at ~/.nuvierc. I created the file with the word “test” in it but it still wasn’t happy.
Unfortunately the Linux version doesn’t have automatic config generation. I’ll add it in soon.
“@saxon: Some other enhancements are multiple savegames, drag and drop inventory support and better handling of door keys.”
Wow its worth using right there, I think the most annoying part of U6 was the inventory management.