Back to Roots: Dungeons for Ultima 4
Over at the Back to Roots project site, Fearyourself requests that everyone take a moment to take in this video:
Dungeons for U4
He then inquires:
As you can see, the start is from the dungeon graphics of Ultima V but actually is the dungeon Despise from Ultima 4. Interestingly enough, and as I expected, the dungeon implementation for U4 (by using the U5 graphics) only took a few hundred lines of code, the rest being shared by the core engine. I haven’t finished yet but it shouldn’t take long.
The biggest question I ask is actually, what do you think? Should I implement the original graphics of Ultima IV for the dungeons or should I leave the dungeons from Ultima V there since they had better graphics? Perhaps, in the end, the safest solution would be to do both: allow a user to have the graphics from Ultima V or the original as I did for the overall graphics (Original/VGA/VGA2) where you can switch between at runtime.
The biggest issue will be the fact that certain elements exist in the U4 dungeons and don’t in the U5: the power gems and the altars. I’d have to find someone to create the sprites for me.
This would, he goes on to note, be the first time he has seriously considered changing core aspects of one of the games he is trying to support with Back to Roots, and he’s very curious to hear what you Dragons and Dragonettes think about it. Should he make use of the Ultima 4 graphics, or simply use the higher-quality Ultima 5 graphics for all dungeons, adding sprites as necessary?
I would comment on his site but don’t have a WordPress account. As for the video, looks like it is coming along nicely. I don’t mind recycling the better graphics of U5, but I would like to see the fountain(?) animated in the video. As long as the PC’s infamous white-black-purple-cyan color scheme mode doesn’t rear its ugly head somehow, I’ll be happy. 🙂 Oh, and it would be great to have that C64/128 SID music or corresponding retro remake tracks! No silent game please (sorry if I missed that conversation).
Jc/Fearyourself had mentioned in an earlier post that the problem with animating the fountain was that it originally was done through color-cycling or some other archaic technique which was difficult to simulate in OpenGL. It seems there aren’t just a series of bitmaps representing the different animation frames of the fountain.
I just thought of something however: a screen recording could be done of the original and converted into a series of bitmaps to approximate the animation.
Also, while I agree the four-color palette you mentioned was terrible, the 16-color EGA palette was fantastic. From these videos it looks like something different is being used though.
Journey to the Center of the Banana.
Jc, count your blessings that Ultima VI and VII didn’t have FP dungeons or the additional number of assets requiring creation would be ridiculous.
I like the idea of being able to choose tilesets for the dungeons, and for the overworld for that matter. I don’t know how far you plan to take what is looking like a “universal Ultima engine”, but the more games it starts to cover the more difficult it’s going to be to equally apply a given set of assets to all the games the engine supports.
Ultima – Ultima V wouldn’t be too bad, but Ultima VI and VII really raise the bar on the quantity of landscape tiles and objects. Nevertheless, the idea of being able to play Ultima IV using Ultima VI graphics (or any other cool combinations one may dream of) is pretty exciting.
Also, what’s up with the palette? It doesn’t look like the standard EGA palette I’m used to.
Speaking of sharing tilesets, is anyone working (or have they worked on) a remake of Ultima II? Even in the old days it seemed that version was sold as original (rather than remade like Ultima I) for so long that it really became long in the tooth. More so than Ultima III that had nice graphics and music (on the C64). The FM-Towns version’s terrible bg music and sound effects (that bizarre “what!” noise when an invalid command is entered) put me off from the FMT Trilogy remake version. I’ve been hoping for a remake with the Ultima IV or V tileset for a while now. Does it exist?
Not that I can think of…Ultima 2 is the one that nobody really talks about or does much with. There are a few updates for it, but nothing so grand as what you’re asking about.
Yeah, there is no work on this yet. For the moment, I’m concentrating on Ultima 4/Ultima 5. However, for Ultima 2 with Ultima 4/5 graphics, you have the same tileset issues I was talking about.
Making the system work is relatively easy and I can already do it, i.e. make the 4 run in my engine with the 5’s graphics, but the major issue is: what to do with the tiles that don’t exist in the later game ?
The space machine in the second game comes to mind for example. Someone would have to create the missing tiles in the style you are looking for.
A shame about Ultima II. It is interesting–and the first time I’ve thought about it–that it is neglected. I suppose the scope and execution are still too grand to replicate without a huge amount of effort. It’s a joyride of a game whose vision was unencumbered, and the first Ultima I ever watched someone play.
Heh I thought the graphics/music of the FM Towns version was okay, but the game was actually ruined in term of gameplay because it doesn’t allow you to “Pass” time without consuming food like the original did.
Considering Ultima II is annoying to begin, that makes it even more of a chore to play so I stopped it and played the DOS version instead.
Voyager Dragon’s Ultima II updates are already pretty nice (yay, EGA instead of CGA !), though it’s a fair cry from the kind of graphical update you can find in even Ultima III or others. I think a lot of people just don’t care about Ultima II, hence why it never got that much of updates
Seems you have to have an account with the Backtoroots WordPress instance, so there won’t be many comments there. I’d go with Ultima V dungeons because they look better. In terms of music, I can only assume the legions of fans of the SID version simply aren’t aware of the Apple II Mockingboard sound, which is the best PSG version. I think most people prefer the MIDI these days though.
I like U4 dungeons in Ultima IV, and U5 dungeons in Ultima V personally.
And in any case after trying the FM Towns version of Ultima IV I can safely say that for me, playing Ultima IV with U5 graphics just feels…. unatural and wrong 😛
Ok, I’ll fix the comment issue on gamengine.net, sorry about that. I haven’t had it long 🙂
Anyway, in relative order:
– Sanctimonia is right, the fountain not being animated comes from the fact that there must be something in the code that animates it. I don’t have the frames for them so I have to render them in software
– Music is still not there but it is on my todo list to have a sound system
– I am getting the feeling that I should do something similar to the graphic system where you can choose your graphic system, whether on the normal view or dungeon view. That should let people decide.
I figure then that I’ll put it on the todo as well 🙂
@Sanctimonia: I know and I agree. The point is not to allow you to play U1 with U5’s graphics. It just so happens you can do it for the dungeons. But I could spend time doing that as I go. For the moment, I’ve left that untouched because of exactly what you say: if an object exists in U4 but not in U5, I have no way to render it correctly. It would look weird.
Finally, what palette issue ? Perhaps it comes from my video capture software…
Any other comments on what you are seeing? 🙂
Jc
Which dungeon graphics set are you using? Is it the Apple II set? I searched for a dungeon tileset but couldn’t find one, so I think it must be parsed from the data files. The IBM and Apple versions, to me, are the main canonical ones.
I assume the IV dungeon tileset is dynamically rendered based on the original game’s graphics, but V uses bitmaps, pre- or post-scaled. It would be interesting to see bitmaps of the missing elements in V present in IV. I couldn’t find images online of altars or gems in the dungeon view for IV. I think V uses some kind of one bit alpha channel for dungeon bitmaps as well, as enemies within them don’t have square black backgrounds. IV knows no alpha.
If you knew how to dump (and subsequently released) the dungeon graphics from Ultima V (walls and objects, Apple or IBM), it would probably be unprecedented. Modifying these images and the engine could lead to “dual-scale” maps where you could choose the FPS dungeon graphics for walking around the mainland, or choose the mainland graphics for walking around the dungeon. That would be nice. M&M vs. U.
Actually, we do know how to dump them since WTF released them a while back and the code is available in the sourceforge entry of backtoroots.
I think U4 actually uses the tiles for gems/altars and just renders them in the dungeon view.
Jc