The Dark Unknown: Fields, Palace of the Skies Puzzle, and Melee Variables
Goldenflame Dragon has been hard at work on The Dark Unknown over the last couple of weeks. Longer, even; I’ve been horribly lax in reporting on the latest developments he has made. For example, late last month, he made some changes to the code for the game’s NPCs:
I should probably have gone to bed, but instead I did some minor updates. Added a new field to NPCs (meleeChance, to determine how often a caster or archer takes its turn to approach or melee), and fixed a bug in the map editor’s handling of map enter/exit scripts. Now, to bed.
And earlier this month, he finished the map for — and coded the puzzle that must be solved to finish — the Palace of the Skies:
Finished the map for the Palace of the Skies, then got distracted by the realization that I needed to revamp how I was handling player death, and I think I have a handle on that now too.
The puzzle, such as it is, to finish the Palace of the Skies works, and so the player can get one of the M_____. Fixed a number of additional display bugs caused by my being overly clever.
Also, today I took some important steps towards what will be a fairly major announcement, but I am going to wait on the actual announcing until all my ducks are in a row.
I don’t think he has yet made the announcement in question (I could be wrong, but I don’t think he has), but his most recent update to The Dark Unknown’s Facebook page was nevertheless fairly significant:
Coded the Fields. The player doesn’t get spells to create any of them except Fire, but they can exist in dungeons/etc. In the process of coding the fields I coded poison and sleep as status effects, since they didn’t exist yet. Sleep is properly broken by taking damage. I’ll decide later if I need to have poison make you immune to sleep or if the fact that poison will automatically break the sleep on its own is sufficient.
Because really…what’s an Ultima homage without fields?
Maybe I missed it, but were their fields in Ultimas VI and up? I remember finding them one of the more fascinating aspects of V. That and being able to lock doors…
I can’t recall if there were fields in Ultima 8, and the fields in Ultima 9 were somewhat different as well (although there were, at minimum, both energy fields and fire fields to be found in that game). Ultima 6, as you can see, was flat-out bonkers with the fields.
Awesome… Love how you just come through with appropriate screenshots like you snapped your fingers and it was so. 🙂 It’s interesting how the fields in later games (though it’s hard to tell from IX’s screenshot) were graphically localized to a single tile. In V (and I believe IV) they were solid tiles, which probably by accident of design caused me to immediately think, “Hey, I could make an entire wall out of these.” I always fantasized about a field creation spell that would expand horizontally or vertically until it hit walls at both ends, allowing you to seal a corridor with a single casting. It would have looked right impressive as well.
In U9, fields are scalable 3D objects; they can be of arbitrary size.
In U6 and U7, they are single tiles. And not all are impassible, either; fire, sleep, and poison fields are walkable, but will damage or apply an effect to you as appropriate. (Energy fields in both games are impassible. And in both, rows of energy fields are used to create temporary walls.)
Apparently I need a refresher course. I didn’t get too far in VII, so other than YouTube videos I don’t think I ever saw any. Cool that in IX they apparently hit their maximum potential. I can’t think of any other RPGs where you could cast essentially a force field to block areas. I wonder if there is a Star Trek connection between Garriott and fields. I don’t know if they were in TOS, but they certainly were in TNG and later.
I can’t remember if fields in U9 were castable; I actually don’t think they were…at least maybe not by the Avatar. I think LB uses a fire field at one point though.
Fields were present as obstacles in the game though.
They were castable in U6/7/SI though. Albeit I rarely use those spells.
I think you could cast crystals to block passage to monsters in Ultima IX, but no fields.