New to the group

[john...@gmail.com]

I just stumbled across this group ... the things I'm interested in
are:

1) will the game project be cross platform (Java maybe?) ... I'm
primarily a Mac and Linux user, so the screen shots looking very
XP'ish don't give me a lot of hope on that front...

2) will it be extensible? could it be easily used to construct new
games upon the same engine? with new tiles, more tile types, new
creatures and creature tiles, etc.? I'm thinking about something like
an RPG version of the FreeCiv project.

3) All of that is just "off the top of my head interesting stuff", my
main reason for looking around and finding this is:

I'm working up a pen and paper RPG, and I want to use the Ultima 1 map
as my world. But I don't want to use the same graphics. I'm hoping
to find a raw data version of the map that could be used with FreeCiv
tiles (like the tolkien inspired jrr tiles, or some of the other
tiles) to use as the player-visible map (though, they would only see
parts of it at a time).

Have you got anything like that? spreadsheet, txt files, etc?
rendering editing tool?

I think, not just for my purposes, but for the two ideas I gave above,
it could be useful to leverage freeciv's tile and map data formats for
making an extensible game engine that is compatible with their game
engine and their map maker. Esp. since they have a random world
generator, and pre-made maps for things like the earth and such (which
could be used for something like a post apocolyptic RPG, or with some
creativity it could be used for an Ultima-II game).

Thoughts? has this type of thing been hashed over before?


John

[Dino]

Hi, welcome aboard.

Some answers:

1.) Yes, it's cross-platform. It's being developed natively on Linux
in C++. The previous version was in C and was being developed on
Windows but is still cross-platform.

2.) There are currently no plans for extensibility. It could be a
possibility in the in the distant future. More on this later.

3.) You could do that, but you'd have to extract the civ tilesets in
the same format U1 uses. It's not something I'm going to venture into.

Now a bit about the project... the project is really about learning
how U1 works. It's not about developing a U1 equivalent of Exult
Studio or anything of the sort. It's unlikely that it ever reaches
remake status. In fact it's currently on hold since I'm busy with
University. You can consider it more of a set of tools to look at the
innards of Ultima 1 and learn how a real game works, or at least how
it did back in the days before I was born.

A lot of Ultima remakes have been seen promising a lot of stuff and
then dying because they underestimated the task of creating a game.
This project never really had any plans; wherever it gets is always
better than nothing.

If anyone wants to make it extensible, or make it work in a
multiplayer world, etc, it's up to them. The project is open-source
and they can do what they want with it. What I myself do with the
project is purely dependent on the time I have available (which right
now is zero).

If you want the source, let me know and I'll send you the latest
version.

Daniel