xu4: Minor Updates
Petrell actually brought this to my attention first; Darren from the xu4 project team sent me an email a day later confirming many of the things Petrell had speculated about. As evidenced by recent code commits to the project, xu4‘s next release will feature:
– Improv[ed] graphics set flexibility
– [A] graphics file reader for FMTOWNS Ultima IV graphics
– A few new hires tiles; to augment to the ‘mystery hires tileset’ and take advantage of the recent addition of drawing stacks of tiles with transparency support
– Under the hood, improvements to core xu4 code to prevent timer abuses and ensure a smooth and responsive experience on both desktop and mobile device.
Darren also posted a handful of screenshots, showing off the enhanced graphics support and a newer, better font face:
This is from the FM Towns port!
That moongate just looks cool...
As the reader can infer, there is no new snapshot or official release yet (at least not as of this writing). However, we we should expect to see all of this in an upcoming release in the near future.
CAN’T WAIT FOR THIS!!!
Really,?all the fm^towns ports of the Ultima games were pretty neat, and they all included graphics more advanced than the PC version.
Any luck getting someone who can translate the extra Japanese-only FMTOWNS intros?
Oooh, right…gotta put up a note about that.
Thanks for the remind.
Well, my girlfriend is a professional Japanese language instructor, so she could help, but RC Capowski has done a lot of this in the past I think.
The FM Towns Ultima games are indeed very need. Ultima Trilogy has a interesting tileset… and Ultima IV is rather unique since it uses the Ultima V tileset!
There are some nice gems in term of Japanese Ultima games – gotta love the Sharp X68000 version.
In any case I like that they put hte FM Town intro in there, though I’m still hoping we’ll get the Amiga/Atari ST one too since I don’t think it’s been done. (eck ST file can actually be read on a PC so perhaps they could easily be edited to get the intro pictures…)
I love that new tileset too! Guess I’ll have to replay UIV again in teh foreseeable future
Congrats on getting the graphics extracted Darren!
RACapowski is going to translate them; http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/User_talk:Blu3vib3#FM_Towns_Intro_translations
I’ll give you a heads up when they are done.
Apropos of this…I take it there’s no longer a need for me to put up a “translators wanted” notice?
Other sweet aspects to the FMTOWNS U4:
A couple of CD tracks — the Towne music associated with the menu screen, and a version of Stones that goes along with the special additional Japanese-only introduction.
I’d love to include this stuff in xu4 — but I’m not sure how valid it is to add to the release of xu4. At Dominus’s advice, I’m thinking of removing the FM towns intro graphics for legal safety. I’d love you guys to debate this so I can rationalize keeping it in 😉 .
The u5 graphics set for xu4 is neat. Sadly it gets a few things wrong, like the tops and bottoms of bridges. Adds a few new character tiles not in U5 – like shepherd etc. It seems to be ‘higher res’ 16 colour graphics, but sadly they’re just point-upscaled.
I am VERY interested in including a reader for the Amiga stuff as well. On our xu4 forum, I heard that someone had already written an extractor. The tileset is nice too — it’s like the EGA but with a better colour palette. Aren’t there two amiga versions? Simultaneously though, I had similar legal concerns.
In the meantime, I’m working toward making my own tileset. So far I’ve made some land & water tiles, the moongate and the wisp. The other tiles in the screenshot are from a “mystery” “hires” tileset that Dominus pointed out in our respository & website directory. Still trying to find out who made that.
The nice part about the new tiles is that they’re PNG, and I’ve made a GIMP template to make it easier for people to add their own. I still need to update the graphics configuration XML files to make them a little more flexible and easier for people to create and package their own tilesets. Perhaps even custom content for the xu4 engine… But that’s another story.
I could check but I’m 99% sure the Amiga/Atari ST versions (they were identical) uses the exact same tileset as the EGA PC version. The differences were elsewhere :
* logo in different color
* intro/endgame with better graphics
* textures dungeons walls (which have already been added to xu4)
Regarding the legality of it well… I would the Mac version of UIII offers a ton of different tileset even from the Nes version and Ultima V. Granted they have a license with EA to sell this game though.
That being said I doubt EA would care about offering alternate tilsets and stuff from other versions as long as the game isnt distributed.
Another would to make this doable but people would nees to extract graphics or copy the original graphic files on the pc themselves. For instance Nuvie is compatible with the FM Towns speech but you need to copy them manually from the FM towns cd. So this might be a way to so it (though id point that while itd be easy with an Atari ST disk…. Not so much with the Amiga)
Sweet.
Thanks for the input everyone!
I wrote an extractor for all the amiga images in Python to pngs. Is there interest in supporting the Amiga files in xu4 directly? It shouldn’t be too hard to port the extractor to C, but I wasn’t sure there was interest.
The tile set is essentially the same, but with a different palette.
From what I’ve seen I’d say the PC intro images and tile set are auto-converted versions of the Amiga/ST images with a more restricted palette.
Yes Jason, I’m interested in the Amiga extractor and-or the PNGs.
I suppose once we have the PNGs, there isn’t much need to include the extractor.
It may also be valuable to have the palette information as well — Are there 16 colours or more?
Related news:
Dungy shared an earlier EGA tileset by Joshua Steele (of the VGA tileset upgrade fame), which is rather awesome.
That tileset will be hitting the site this evening!
I’m pretty sure the Amiga version was 16 colors. While the Amiga could offer 32 colors, very few games did back then. It used the exact same palette as the Atari ST version as I recall – the ports were done by the same guy.
As I mentionned though, it’s very much identical to the regular EGA tilesets… perhaps a couple of difference in palette (town looking grey instead of white), but that’s about it.
The Amiga images have 16 colors per-image, so each image can have it’s own palette (for the most part, since some images have share palettes to display along side each other).
What I was referring to was porting the extraction code into xu4 itself so if you had the original data files you could dump them somewhere and xu4 would display the images. But if you want a set of PNGs I think I have them all extracted already. Should I attach them as a patch to the tracker?
PNG may be more pragmatic. Academically, it would be neat to see the code. I’ll send you an email.
Thanks!
These new Tilesets are well, not engaging my imagination like the original Apple ][ ones did. Is anyone interested in adding them?
I am currently working on improved sound effects (one does not convert sound effects into .ogg, my friends).
I can get in touch with the developers and see if they can include the old tiles. And, for that matter, if they’d be interested in improved sound effects.