This Nuvie Screenshot Is All Kinds of Awesome
Eric Fry, the main man behind the Nuvie project, sent me the following screenshot by email this afternoon:
LOOK AT THAT DITHERING!
There is just so much awesome contained in this image. I mean, yes, the key point is how it shows off the new conversation system that is presently available in the development snapshot of Nuvie, which is portrait-based and keyword-based. Eric informs me that the list of keywords displayed by the Avatar’s portrait increases as keywords (which would have been highlighted in red in the original version of the game) are unlocked in conversations. The background colour is configurable with a variable in Nuvie’s settings, and Eric is contemplating adding another variable which would disable the need to unlock the keywords in conversation entirely (meaning, I suppose, that all available keywords for an NPC would be presented at the start of the conversation).
And of course, Daniel — the Nuvie project’s resident artist — is the one to thank for the portrait windows and the gorgeous font. He’s also the one to thank for the glorious, gorgeous background dithering.
It’s the dithering, really, that just jumps out from the image. Daniel has absolutely nailed the low-resolution feel that Ultima 6 rightly should have, and his solution for applying a fade-like effect to the background of a conversation is, to my eyes, nothing short of brilliant. It looks like it’s meant to be there, like this is how Ultima 6 should have done things all along.
Wow, that looks beautiful!
That brings to mind what may be an interesting debate, which is how does the introduction of “modern” effects into old game remakes/engines stir the senses? I’m reminded of principles such as keeping a steady frame rate and never allowing textures to appear too close or too far, as these things can jar you out of your suspension of disbelief due to perceived discontinuity of quality.
The use of dithering does keep disbelief suspended, which begs the question what would it look like with an 8-bit alpha channel, soft shadows and translucent menu backgrounds? Trading the depth of your engagement for eye-candy is a double-edged sword for some.
I like the dithering, as it adds modern flair with what appears to be visually native rendering features (analogous to encroaching darkness in vanilla Ultima VI). Awesome job on the portraits and dialogue as well. Serious, spirited work.
What happened to the Thees and Thous? `They’re not remaking the game in modern English, I hope?
This isn’t a complete game remake, this is an engine remake. Nuvie still uses the original Ultima VI data files. In fact, it can’t even be played without an original copy of Ultima VI.
Therefore, the conversations and map layout will be identical in Nuvie as it was on the original Ultima VI. It just looks better!
Say if any of our talented NUVIE guys comes around I Was wondering : There’s been highly impressive progress on the new UI ins the last few month and this looks awesome but I was wondering :
What’s the status of the game itself, in term of playability, gameplay and all that ? Are all features coded in ? Is there still a lot to do ? I’m wondering because the status update of the website hasn’t been updated in a long time so…
Hi Sergon,
That’s a good question. I believe most game features are in Nuvie now. The main areas that are still outstanding are the end sequence and mouse input handling (it’s a bit flaky)
There are lots of little things things like npc’s not avoiding dangerous tiles like swamp when they are pathfinding etc but they shouldn’t stop you finishing the game.
At some point I was going to ask if people could try doing a play through of the main quest (speed run). To see if there are any plot stoppers. I was holding back though due to the flaky moue system.
Regards,
Eric
Here’s my todo list which gives a good indication of progress.
http://pastebin.com/3xi6u9T5
There are a few more things in the bug tracker on source forge too.
I’d totally do a speed run attempt at the main plot. With or without pirate map sidequest.
I’m down to run through u6 again. Anytime, it’d be my pleasure.
I’ve been playing around with the latest snapshot. It’s definitely smoother, A LOT smoother. I thought when you said the mouse was wonky, I wasn’t expecting it to be so much better than the original.
I’ve been looking around, and I don’t see how to change the interface to your nice new slick one.
Any suggestions?
I think it’s something you have to manually define in the config file still. Maybe have a look in there?
That was my basic problem. I guess I needed to turn off some file settings or whatever.
This is very slick!
I’m gunna have to run through this baby today!
That’s awesome news! I had no idea NUVIE was so advanced!
I’d be happy to do a U6 playthrough, once you get the new UI and the fullscreen all done :O I’m sure Aiera will be happy to report to the need for testers when you feel the need to have a big scale testing of Nuvie 🙂
BTW, I gotta be my usual WoU fanboy, but do you still plan support for Savage Empire and Martian Dreams once U6 is done ?
The progress on Nuvie has been rather intriguing. I am pretty much a tail end of the Ultima series fan, who idolizes Ultima 7’s world interactivity and story telling, but didn’t get into the earlier series on PC do to the claustrophobic views, complicated keyboard interfaces, and choppy per square movement.
I had however, played Ultima 6 on the Snes and remembered enjoying it unlike 7’s Snes version, which was amazingly bad. Are there any plans to implement some sort of optional smooth scroll feature in Nuvie? If so, it would essentially replace the Snes version as well, by offering the best of both worlds, having a version that isn’t dumbed down in world interactivity which would be palatable to modern gamers.
My suspicion is the number one thing thing that keeps the older Ultima series mostly ‘out of touch’ with modern audiences is the jerky grid movement. Even though I personally consider it one of the best games of all time and managed to overlook it, even Ultima 7 can be a bit of an eye sore and generally people who weren’t fans ‘back in the day’ have a lot of trouble giving it a chance. I can’t say I blame them, as I feel the same way about the entries ‘before my time.’
I was following this project on youtube, Britannia Online, which seems to have slowed down in progress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0k1TjIRdxc&feature=plcp which looked really promising as well.
Britannia Online was…probably never going to see the light of day. It was more of a thought experiment that someone at a gaming studio did to study the basics of online game design and architecture.
But I agree that it did offer some interesting innovation, or at least appeared to do.
Britannia Online looked promising. It’s kinda been done with u6o.
And let me tell you, Ultima 6 Online is a lot of fun. The game engine is ripe to take advantage of and use your imagination with. Like trapping vital npcs so they weren’t able to sleep and thus available 24/7.
I guess it wasn’t a big deal in single player u6, you get the miraculous time travel through sleeping. But you can’t do that in u6o.
‘Why am I standing here grinding up reagent after reagent; saying these words of power. I just want to slap him in the groin with my morning star. That should wake his ass up.’
Weird. A lot of things bother me about U6, but the “grid” isn’t one of them. After all, roguelikes are popular even today.
Excellent! Just a question for the Nuvie developers, how do you plan on working the New Magincia rune quest? I’ve come across that issue with my exult remake (quest was based on user input of the name of the ‘most humble’) but haven’t tackled it yet. I guess having the Avatar run around asking everyone who’s the most humble… but just going to Conor or whatever his name is with the keyword is what I’d like to avoid. Without user input, how did you work in that rune quest? I have also thought about the SNES U6 version of the quest based on the dialoge tree – the Avatar asks for the rune from the mayor… the mayor ‘gave it to someone else a week ago’, that person gave it to someone else, and so on… until you track it back to the mayor.
One point of note : while the new Nuvie UI allows to dialogue via keywords like Ultima VII, it ALSO features the text parser (ie. the small ankh on the screen) if you want to, so basically this would still allow to answer via the parser as in the original game.
That being I’d say having the “most humble” keyword pop up for every NCPs in Magincia once you get the Quest would work fine, and when you return to the Mayor you can choose from the list of people you asked the Question. This is how UVII would have do it in any cas eI think.
I asked this back on the old site but can’t find the posting. How do you get full screen going? What preference do you need to add to the nightly build preference file?
Thanks,
ZD
If you mean the new Full Screen UI, you need to edit Nuvie.cfg and add the following line under
yes
If you mean playing the game in full screen, this hasn’t been implemented yet unfortunately.
Gah!
I forgot you can’t use the inferior/superiors brackets here of wordpress things there are html coding.
So under [general] in Nuvie.cfg
Just add
[fullscreen_map]yes[/fullscreen_map]
Just replaces [] with the proper symbols.
Has anyone confirmed this working under OSX Lion 10.7.x ? Mine seems to crash on startup.
I know this probably is a lot to ask, but any chance on an updated OS X build to see these new features?
@zygon, you need to compile nuvie yourself and that worked “fine” for me on 10.7.
I had to point at some earlier SDK though, 10.6 or maybe even 10.5 or it would crash badly for me sooner or much sooner 😉
With that fixed it compiled fine and worked fine for me.
That said, I’m not at home since a week or so and didn’t have a chance to try the dithered conversations.
I just saw your reply. 🙂 I compiled with the standard SDK and it sooooo unstable 🙂 haha Ok I’ll try and figure out how to use 10.6 SDK with the compile.
Eric made a newsnapshot
I took over the OS X snapshot duties and am trying to make them more often. If my mac is turned on and receiving mails, it should make new snapshots as soon as new SVN commit messages arrive 🙂
Also Eric fixed some stuff that made Nuvie built against SDK 10.7 more stable and for making snapshots you can now use the autotools (autogen.sh+configure) to build nuvie on OS X.