Back to Roots: Dungeon Room Loading
To ring in the new year, Fearyourself posted a short update (with video, of course) of his latest progress in Back to Roots: handling dungeon rooms and transitions into dungeons.
I’ve moved forward in the last couple of days on the handling of a dungeon room. After a lot of tweaking, I can show a first video that pulls this off, you see the player go in the dungeon and go towards the first room that is on the third floor.
For the moment however, monsters and objects are not handled, and we can’t climb back out, but that’s for a next episode
As noted above, video:
Evidently a lot of sulfur in that rock!
As always, JC continues to impress with the seemingly casual ease with which he is able to make progress reconstructing features like this essentially from scratch.
This looks like the makings of a cross-platform, open source engine for Ultima IV and V of the likes of Exult in scope if not maturity: It reads the data files and interprets them generally as expected with respect to input and output. That is a hell of a goal (I hope it’s the goal, as I am just an observer), and so far the ass kicking has been incessant and seemingly inexorable.
Maybe it was my dormant fondness for Might & Magic and The Bard’s Tale, but I’m fascinated by the dungeons of Ultima, particularly those of IV and V.
Imagine modding (using) an open source Ultima engine to do a remake or re-envisioning. Ultima VI or VII could be done using a modified Ultima V engine, or vice-versa. We need more of this. Perhaps the code from Exult and the Back to Roots projects could be conjoined separately but cooperatively?
You are correct for the goals and how the system does it. I try to use the most of the original data files, even though certain elements are set in external configuration files that I’ll be later tweaking for difficulty balancing.
For the moment, I’ve kept the genericity of backtoroots for Ultimas IV and V. Later, I’ll try to attack III and move back that way. If I did all of them at once, advancement would be slower and motivation lower. That’s why I’ve kept myself only handling IV and V.
You could redo the dungeons with a real 3D envisionning, even with the Ultima VII kind of view. But you’d need to change certain things: in the older Ultimas there were different levels in the dungeons, something that disappeared (to my remembrance) in the later titles. So how would you do this ?
Same the other way around, bring a 3d or style back to a 2d world with tiles isn’t an easy task even if I’ve seen people trying that kind of thing.
I forgot to say: thanks all for the encouragement, it definitely helps one’s motivation up :-).
Motivation and drive are probably the most important things in any endeavor. They’re the lighter trying to ignite the corner of a cheap, shitty charcoal briquette that just won’t burn. They keep trying, and eventually it alights.
I’d keep the dungeon perspective the same as V and earlier but have movement like Underworld or Wolfenstein 3D. Even a turn/tile-based first person perspective like The Bard’s Tale or M&M would be awesome.
There would be two rendering procedures, one for overhead and one for first person. They’d both use the same set of data files, with a few extras as you mentioned for fine tuning. Eventually use of the same data files between the two rendering routines would force interoperability and perhaps the core data files could be rendered using either routine.
What I’m wondering is what a map from Ultima IV would look like (map data files as well as tile texture data files) directly extrapolated into a Wolfenstein 3D-style rendering engine. Black, blocky and awesome are my first thoughts.
Sanctimonia:
What do you think the Wolfenstein engine was? The editor for it was a tile-based, 2D overhead view akin to an early Ultima.
You might also want to check out the EUO project’s 3D client. Similar idea to yours, with an interesting execution.
Got a link to that WtF? Google’s showing shit results.
Amazingly, I can recall this one off the top of my head: http://swut.net/euo
…not usually lucky enough to recall such details.
I meant the link for the 3D client. Couldn’t find it on the main EUO site. A YouTube video or other media file will suffice to show what it looks like. A Might & Magic style rendering of an Ultima game would be good, overworld and all.