A mod

[mjohnston]

I've mentioned in a few posts (or maybe in just about all my posts here) that I've been working on something for the last couple months... it's no where near complete, but I thought it was time to put what I have as of last night on so people can check it out and see what I've been working on if they want to... I don't have any screen shots or anything like that yet... I've been working on map editing area by area rather than making a rough map and flushing it out later. There will be at least one subteranian map for caverns, tunnels, sewers, etc... maybe a deeper map as well.

I hope to also scan my roughly drawn map and put up information/outlines of what some of the areas in the map are, and maybe something about the plot (though currently I have very little idea of what the plot will be... I just happen to like maps, and like ultima). The plot is somehow going to be related to relationships between displaced people and cultures..

anyways, here's a link to where it can be downloaded:

http://mailmaker.tripod.com/u7mod/m-johnston-mod.rar
[edit by Marzo: fixed the url]

feedback on anything would be very welcome. I hope I got all thats needed packed into that rar file correctly. I tried it and it seemed to work.
-matthew

[Guru Dragon]

Check your URL, I got a 404-like page.

[Paulon]

The correct URL is http://mailmaker.tripod.com/u7mod/m-johnston-mod.
I can't speak for what the mod is like because I haven't got a recent version of Exult installed at the moment.

[marzo]

A few words of advice:
(1) I'd recommend that you download the newest version of Exult Studio and re-do your shapes.vga and gumps.vga. Doing that, the download size will be drastically cut as you won't be needlessly distributing loads of copyrighted art (older versions of ES saved all the shapes in the original vga file as well as the shapes you added/modified, instead of only saving the latter).

(2) If you tell ES to save your map, you don't have to distribute the gamedat dir (and it is best to do so, as otherwise the data which is in gamedat but was not saved will be lost when the player creates a new game).

(3) Given your mod.cfg, you also don't need to distribute the 'data' dir, as it won't get used.

With that out of the way: Great work! I like the attention to detail you have been putting in the map; the city in the lower left is quite good in this regard. The only "complaints" I have about it are:
(1) the architecture varies too much between buildings -- and, in some cases, within one building itself.
(2) The buildings also seem overly large (though still well done).

[mjohnston]

thanks for taking a look Marzo. I'm not really sure how to re-do my shapes and gumps vga files - when I started the map/mod I was just importing things into Black Gate's vga files, but I also imported some serpent isle shapes as new frames for existing black gate shapes.

I also edited quite a few weapon and armor properties and stuff like that...

I tried to look at the keyring and feudal lands mods to see what files were needed and sort of copied my modded black gate files around until I got something that worked without actually distributing the whole black gate game with my map.... so its really not so much a black gate mod - it's really supposed to be (eventually) a game on it's own made from U7 graphics that runs through Exult. I do want to streamline it down eventually to what the game uses - but I'm really really more of an 'old school' artist (painter, printmaker, sculptor) and not a game designer or someone who works well with computers - this is just something I'm doing because I enjoyed the ultima series (mostly played U7 and underworld) and wished more was done with it, and I like cartography and RPGs..

crap, I gotta catch a bus...

[marzo]

I'm not really sure how to re-do my shapes and gumps vga files - when I started the map/mod I was just importing things into Black Gate's vga files, but I also imported some serpent isle shapes as new frames for existing black gate shapes.

There is the answer right there: just do again what you did; due to some recent changes in ES, only the new shapes will be saved.

I also edited quite a few weapon and armor properties and stuff like that...

The weapon and armor properties will not be lost if you keep the same shape numbers; they are stored in different files. In fact, you could even delete your vga files and create brand new ones without affecting the weapon and armor data you edited.

Hm. Maybe it is time for a more comprehensive tutorial for making mods in Exult. I will consider doing that as time allows.

[mjohnston]

I'm about to get really busy with projects for school since I only have a few more weeks left in the semester so I won't likely have time to work much on any of this for a while but I tossed together a page with a few screenshots and such.

http://mailmaker.tripod.com/u7mod/index.html

[drcode]

Looks really nice.

[Skutarth]

Looks great, but it needs mountains.

[Tylius]

Hey looks great!

[mjohnston]

I've done quite a lot more work to the map now (need to reorganize my mess of initial maps from when I first started playing around with exult studio)...

the big city in the south west now has some fairly complete sewers and other secret tunnels.

the largely swampy continent in the north-east quad of the map is becoming very fleshed out, though the goblin infested mountains still need to be added, and a lot of details are still missing.

also got a lot done on an island south of there, which has my first couple of interactive NPCs, and a couple small villages.

[drcode]

This is an incredibly ambitious undertaking. I didn't realize before that you were creating an entire new map. I think 'mod' is a bit of an understatement.

[Petrell]

Total Conversion is more accurate

[William]

May I ask how to get this to work so I can take a look at your work? I think I can figure out where to put your folders and files, but I'm not sure how to adjust the config file to get it to work. Thanks in advance!

[sslaxx]

Is there any documentation available regarding installing this project?

[mjohnston]

it was started using blackgate as sort of a base that it was built from... so what I found works on my computer (windows) is to make a directory called "mods" in my blackgate folder and place the. I just noticed I need to slim down how many folders are in that archive... the one that is needed is just called "mod" (and I should rename it to make this less confusing).

put the the mod folder from the archive into the new "mod" folder in blackgate.

move the file mod.cfg to one directory higher so it is in the same new "mod" folder under blackgate (ie, at the same level in the directory tree as the folder it came out of)

run exult, and for blackgate choose "show all mods". there should be a new one called "new game/map" or something like that (I haven't really given it a name yet). choose that one, and it should bring up the normal blackgate menu screen.

I found that clicking journey onward starts the game in a rather odd state that seems to have a lot of things missing - so choose "start new game"

currently, as of when I type this, it should start you out by a muddy shoreline at the edge of some plains, holding a pitchfork, and having whatever equipment I thought looked interesting at the time... it's just the last place I saved it while working.

last night I tried running this "mod" (yeah, it's really ending up more like a whole new game) in a freshly installed U7 game, and found it seems to crash frequently, some times with no messages in the stder (or whatever the file is called... my online access is on a different computer than my games)
-when it does give an error its something like "can not find u7ifix08 for map4" or something like that... and it took a few times trying to start it to even get into the game. but it seemed that the more I tried it, and the more I wandered around in the game the less it would crash... I hope to have all these things fixed sometime, but will not have time in the next few weeks because of real life sorts of things... but I hope people enjoy wandering around the map anyways.

please let me know if there are any more questions about anything, and critique of my work is something I often find helpful.

[Dominus]

Does anyone know how to contact Matthew? His hotmail address doesn't work anymore

The mod/patch still has a webpage at http://mailmaker.tripod.com/u7mod/index.html and the mod itself can be downloaded from http://mailmaker.tripod.com/u7mod/m-johnston-mod.zip.
I'm currently collecting all patches and mods I can find to keep them safe on our download page. This one I plan to modify to keep the shapes.vga smaller and not contributing all the copyrighted art from the original.

[Knight Captain]

Could this Maine SCA member be the man thou seekth? Society of Creative Anachronism brings medieval Europe to Maine.

[Dominus]

Thanks, that looks like it could be him.

Meanwhile a slimmed down version of this patch, repackaged as mod is available from our download page.

[mjohnston]

yeah, thats me! haha... anyways, my new email is mailmaker1523 at gmail.

Thank you Dominus for snagging that and hosting it here as well... I put a lot of work into what I've done so far (though it is very far from complete) so having it hosted someplace other than my own site is kind of nice.

Other things in life have taken over my time and I'm really quite sad to say that I have not worked on this project in several years. I hit a few roadblocks that slowed down progress... I'm not a programmer - I can do HTML, figure out some Java, and somehow got through a college level programming 101 class 15 years ago, but figuring out usecode was really pushing my limits... I managed to make a some conversational NPCs and almost had one who could buy and sell stuff - but it was a lot of trial and error... making multiple towns of NPCs and doing code for items and flags and whatnot was just way too much for me. I had a couple local people who showed some interest in helping with programming have but they have up and died.

Has anyone really checked out the stuff I had put together? Most of the feedback I got was people having trouble getting it to run.

The map for the main world is just about complete. There is another map that is deeper underground... there was to be a whole map of caverns, underground rivers and lakes, etc. That is probably something like 25% fleshed out. I wanted to do a very open world where you could go into a cave in one part of the map, go through a labyrinth of caverns and tunnels, and depending on how far in the game you were, come out on a different continent... some places would of course only open up after a certain event in the plot or whatever, but I wanted that feeling of a huge underworld to explore (though not an underworld like Hades sort of realm... that would be another map). So there was also another map in the early planning stage that would have been sort of your hades/hell sort of place... kind of.

Something I was trying to figure out that was going to be pretty important was if there is a way to set the place where you respawn after dying to a place based on proximity to where you died... for example, die in the goblin besieged north lands and you would probably respawn in the large town associated with that area; die in the south and you might respawn at a healer or temple in whatever town is near.

[Knight Captain]

There's got to be a way since the Silver Seed healer brings you back if you die in that area (all near the bottom of the map) yet the Monks do north of that.

[Paulon]

Does that resurrection in Serpent's Fang happen if you teleport into the Silver Seed area via the cheat options instead of by using the Amulet? If not, then maybe that's the area of usecode to look at. Just a thought.

I don't have Exult set up right now or I'd test it out myself.

[Dominus]

Hey matthew, now that I packaged the patch as mod, it should be easier for people to set up.
The whole usecode needs updating to make it compatible with our current ucc - there have been som changes to ucc that prevent compilation of your mod's usecode. And while the old compilation still runs, there are problems with running the old one (triggering conversations, ...).
And your mod needs a name!!!!

@resurrect point: my guess is that there is a global Is_In_SilverSeed flag or so and that the resurrect code checks whether this is set and uses SerpentFangor Monk Isle accordingly...