Ultima Online Remade for 2009!

[HellRazor]

It really depends on each individual too though. I mean, sometimes I am more motivated to work on my shard when I am working on things I find interesting. So yeah, you do need to concentrate on the stuff that will actually make the client functional, but if playing around with new graphics features can help get you excited to work, then I say knock yourself out. Just keep in mind that the other stuff HAS to come sooner or later, otherwise all you have is a graphics demo and not a client.

 

[Jeff]

Something i find very very intersting is that none of these screenshots are from actual parts of the map in UO. Now, with this said, this is one of the hardest parts in making a client. Reading the map in real time as the client moves and still displaying at above 15+ fps. Anyone can take a few tiles and tile them in memory, but to actually read the mul's on the fly and display it takes quite a bit of optimization and technique... just soemthing I was thinking about....

 

[Ravenal]

If they are so good... Should we say? Display a demo video of your work, in a REAL UO map place!

 

[SiENcE]

@Jeff: This is true, also add dynamics and multis (also serverside multis) to it .

 

[Jeff]

@Jeff: This is true, also add dynamics and multis (also serverside multis) to it .

Ya my guess is everything he has done now, is just creating tile patterns on his end for just the screen cap and rendering it, without the calculations from the mul files... to bad really.

 

[Fenn]

the basic, 1st UO took a team of close to 60 people over 2 years to do, plus then beta testing and fixing and they are still trying to fix it today

I've often wondered if code was recycled from Ultima 8 when making the UO client. Aside from some artwork for backpacks and gumps, the mouse interface always reminded me of Ultima 8... like how it detects single and double clicks with a little bit of a delay, and such.

Not that there's anything wrong with recycling code... if it works, why not implement it as many places as you can right? But I always thought it was interesting that U8 could be related to UO.

 

[SiENcE]

It's interesting to talk about this. I found our that the U7 maps where build mostly the same style as the UO maps but with a nice little difference. The map is painted with chunks, each chunk has a size of 16*16tiles.
The map is devided into 12superchunks and 16*16 chunks.

Month ago I wrote a little maprenderer for the U7map, thinking of a converter from U7 to UO map . Most work will be the mapping tables from U7 -> UO.

No colormapping to yet.

 

[UltimaOnline2009]

Now it might sound cheesy, but we create lots of engines each featuring a different thing and then merge them if necessary (so we can debug and benchmark every engine) and then merge them all in to a 'main' engine, controlling it with a lot of 'switched' (e.g. WeavingWater=false; ) so we can debug every engine separately after merging it with the game.

 

[Jeff]

Now it might sound cheesy, but we create lots of engines each featuring a different thing and then merge them if necessary (so we can debug and benchmark every engine) and then merge them all in to a 'main' engine, controlling it with a lot of 'switched' (e.g. WeavingWater=false; ) so we can debug every engine separately after merging it with the game.

The problem is, you are making some pretty advanced rendering techniques for the engine yet the rendering technique for UO has not been applied. The issue with this is that technique eats your CPU time per frame, and the way you generally need to apply the technique will mess up your others.... you should really look into starting from the basics rather than all this fancy shit...

 

[Norealskill]

I'm still interested in a website/forums or something in which I can watch your client or graphics demo or whatever it is progress. That goes double for anyone else creating a C# UO client with the potential to be open sourced.

 

[SiENcE]

Jeff is right, if you use modern gfx-accelerators it's a little bit complicated to create a seamless worldmap out of many many many many small tiles. You have to use Texture Atlas for all gfx to reduce batches. You have to think of howto do animations. You have to think of how do you manage the vram because of people having less than 256mb.
You have to deal with the walking uo mechanism wich is very tricky.
Also you have deal with the osi style of unlogic coding (for example. serverside multis, some network packages aso.).

So lots todo that is more important than playing around with all know gfx effects.

 

[HellRazor]

You have to think of how do you manage the vram because of people having less than 256mb.

I didn't know they ported UO over to the Commodore 64!

 

[SiENcE]

:-P. I just mentioned it, because streaming data into vram is necessary, you can't load the whole data into it. Loading textures into vram takes bandwidth and old cards with less than 256bit bandwidth become problems.

 

[Jeff]

Nah fuck it, you should only be able to play Ultima Online 2009 if your video card was made in 2009!

 

[Hammerhand]

I didn't know they ported UO over to the Commodore 64!

I used to play the original (pre internet) Ultima on an old C64! I had the 1st 3 games in a box set with maps, tokens and everything. I loved the Geomancer spells. Took forever to get to those levels tho.

 

[Norealskill]

I still don't get what's so wrong about designing a UO client that requires something with more power than the Voodoo 3 series graphics cards.

You can't play the new Asteroids games on a Tandy 1000, even though I remember playing one of them on my Tandy 1000. At some point, someone has to step in and say "Hey, this technology is ridiculously old. We've basically reached the limitation of what can be done in this engine. It's time to create a new engine, with better graphics, more pixel shader magic, and new technology boundaries."

I sincerely doubt a group of people who can create these nice effects would ever expect to run a client utilizing any of this on the same POS computers that were top of the line when UO launched.

Frankly all I ever wanted was an open source UO client, written in C#. I wanted to add new effects myself, but keep them in check. These guys are going a little overboard from what I would be doing, but it's their project. I'm only a hobbyist programmer and couldn't create anything like this in several years, that's assuming I had no other responsibilities in my life. So I'm really hoping this project at least comes to fruition. And if not this one, someone elses.

 

[UltimaOnline2009]

Yes, me and my team begun programming the client, the movement already works (the movement is really smooth and can be at any speed) and what does GameDev got to do with the client? It's like "Ohh somebody helped you get the idea of how to do soft shadow? He must have programmed the whole game for you." if GameDev helped me do soft shadow (and they are not even half finished) doesn't mean i get all my ideas from there site.

 

[Jeff]

Yes, me and my team begun programming the client, the movement already works (the movement is really smooth and can be at any speed) and what does GameDev got to do with the client? It's like "Ohh somebody helped you get the idea of how to do soft shadow? He must have programmed the whole game for you." if GameDev helped me do soft shadow (and they are not even half finished) doesn't mean i get all my ideas from there site.

Those arent softshadows... additionally they will look weird... Convex Hull shadowing works perfect for top-down games, but not much else.

 

[UltimaOnline2009]

Those arent softshadows... additionally they will look weird... Convex Hull shadowing works perfect for top-down games, but not much else.

That's why ill draw them top-down so they won't have any z axis.

 

[Jeff]

That's why ill draw them top-down so they won't have any z axis.

That doesn't make any sense.