Exult 3D Screenshots I

smatthews · Post by **smatthews** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 2:18 am

Exult...

in THREE three thr... ... DIMENSIONS dimensions dim... ...

[center]Exult3D[/center]

Sorry for the echo effect.

Anyway, Exult has been made 3D with all the original data only! Here are some nifty screenshots:

[center]

[/center]

There's still a good amount of work to be done to make it comfortable to play in 3D mode, but it works quite well, is smooth, and all animations and translucenies and that sort of thing work correctly. I hope to release the source changes soon.

[Edited by Colourless-Fixing up the posts]

smatthews · Post by **smatthews** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 2:59 am

More silly Serpent Isle pics

[center]

[/center]

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 4:01 am

Anyone on IRC knows I'm following this project with great interest. Here are some more screenshots from the preview binaries, for those of you who havn't run it yet.

Above Empath Abbey
Above Iolo's hut
Above that stone bridge/fortress thingy near Britain
The Guardian's bigass chair
The Black Gate (close angle)
Codex Shrine guardians
Empath Abbey
Forge of Virtue add-on area
New Magincia Greenhouse
Killwrathy
Pirate fort
Misc. Pirate Hideout #7
Game hall
Poor Weston
Ships (before proper depthmasking was added)
A pirate shipwreck?
The Baths (before business hours)

Sevaton · Post by **Sevaton** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 6:37 am

Wow!!!

One question:Where i can get exult 3d?

Best regards.
Sevaton

smatthews · Post by **smatthews** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 6:48 am

The code changes aren't even worth distributing yet, but here's a linux binary:

exult-alpha-r5.x86

Here's a support file you'll need to put into /static/

static/palettes.flx

As soon as I make some major fixes, I'll see what the Exult team wants to do with the source.

Achile · Post by **Achile** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 7:56 am

Is that me or the Avatar and Iolo are well flat

Antagonist · Post by **Antagonist** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 9:40 am

This looks terrific !

Do you have some kind of project homepage ?

Post by **Dominus** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 10:11 am

Servus, thanks for going "public". Can't wait for it to be stable enough to have it implemented in "flat" CVS

Daemongar · Post by **Daemongar** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 11:01 am

Well, not that it counts for anything, but I'm blown away! That is very creative and must have taken some work. Congrats - can't wait to try it!

Tristan de Inés · Post by **Tristan de Inés** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 12:09 pm

Holy cow.... that's AMAZING!

XxVenomxX · Post by **XxVenomxX** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 1:40 pm

I just peed my pants a little

awesome stuff

Gruck · Post by **Gruck** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 2:07 pm

Colour me stoked. As soon as I can my grubby hands on a working windows version of that I'll be as happy as a clam.

MidgardDragon · Post by **MidgardDragon** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 10:40 pm

Very cool. One question, what exactly is the deal with the "outside" areas. i.e The Parts that are all black or all white, etc. Since the U7 world always seemed consistent, with nothing that had to load or anything, to me, I assumed the whole world existed the whole time you were playing. Is the outside area just a space-saver to add skies or something (that would be way cool) or does only that area exist while you're in it and the other areas have to load as you walk so there's really nothing to see in those "outside" parts?

I have no clue about how U7 works other than being able to play it on Exult, sorry for my ignorance.

*waves*

smatthews · Post by **smatthews** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 12:04 am

Hopefully everything that looks 'funny' about the pictures will be fixed in a release build. That includes (to some extent) skewed objects, missing areas of the terrain, and a lack of lighting/proper colours on the translucent objects... Hopefully things will get better soon.

Grandor Dragon · Post by **Grandor Dragon** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 12:10 am

This looks amazing. I haven't played Ultima VII for ages. Never tried Exult because it didn't seem to give the game anything new, and I already finished it a lot of times. Now I got a reason to replay my favorite RPG. Keep up the good work!

Post by **drcode** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:26 am

Really cool! I'm still curious as to how you turned U7's 2D shapes into 3D. As a guess, are you texture-mapping them onto the cubes specified in the 'tfa.dat' file?

Maybe someone should submit a story about this to Slashdot:-)

RazorBlade · Post by **RazorBlade** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:40 am

OMG!

Looks amazing! Like that screenshot that woman once posted(forgot her name.)

Is the camera angel fixed? (or will there be an option to fix it?) Can you change the viewing range (not camera range but the range of displayed landscape) so it covers the whole screen or is that planned?

Will you redo the PC/NPCs to be 3D?

Yeah I know, you are doing it on your own and you will do what you will do, but I am curious of your plans

smatthews · Post by **smatthews** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:50 am

DrCode: Thanks! and yes, I first get 3D bounding boxes from the data in tfa.dat, then I do some tricky texture mapping to get things to line up mostly-right. The original Ultima 7 artists did a pretty good job of setting correct bounding boxes for objects and then colouring inside the lines, so to speak.

RazorBlade: Thanks! That's a lot of questions:) The camera angle is currently fixed, but will be freely modifiable by tonight. It will definitely be manually rotateable and give you the ability to zoom up/zoom out, but I might make it move on its own, like it does in most third person games (think Ultima 9). As for it not rendering enough landscape to fill up the entire screen, that's a temporary thing and it'll get fixed soon. I don't know about remodelling all the NPCs, though; that's a lot of work! I will most likely make a little plug-in system for changing models though, and I'd start with very simple things that don't look very good, like columns, ships, and mountains, and then some of the more jarring-to-view animals.

For the technically curious, I'm probably going to use a simple format that supports everything I want, like the Quake MD2 model format (which is frames-based, just like U7 shapes). If someone wanted to help me model/find a lot of suitable (GPL/free) character models, that'd be great! (Currently 1st-person mode looks a little gross with all the shapes that were never meant to be viewed in 3D, e.g. everything living looks bad; everything non-living looks pretty good, except for Erstam's telescope, which got bent in two

Achile · Post by **Achile** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 12:16 pm

COOOL

WWWWolf · Post by **WWWWolf** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 2:34 pm

This is probably one of the most exciting game news I've heard in the whole year... or something. =)

I should sit here and mutter something along the lines of "well, it's just superficial stuff and won't add to the functionality", but... well, damn, I'm completely blown away.

I have to say that
1) this is just about the most clever graphics-related thing I've ever seen (3D out of 2D, wow!), and
2) I hope this will be stable enough one day so that people who whine about U7's isometric angle will shut up =)

...Because that's what most people complain about U7. I've tried to get some people interested of the game, but they keep saying the angle is annoying (before they actually play the game and find out it really doesn't matter that much).

While I don't think U7's view angle was that annoying, I thought U8 and UO looked a bit more interesting in this respect, so I don't see why I would not try this one day. It's certainly very very very very clever.

Quester · Post by **Quester** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:52 pm

It's great work, I just dream about Ultima 7 in 3D.
You planing leave landscape plain, or we will see a hills and lowlands?

RazorBlade · Post by **RazorBlade** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 12:11 am

> I will most likely make a little plug-in system for changing models though,
>and I'd start with very simple things that don't look very good, like columns,
>ships, and mountains, and then some of the more jarring-to-view animals.

Hmm, I'd always thought about trying to model some 3D Objects, but never got into it cause doing some random purposeless stuff wasn't that motivating to me

What tools would I need to to create something, like a chair or whatever, which would work with your engine? And how do you intend to extract the textures, are you using exult-studio for that?

Although I just got invited to Jump to Lightspeed beta, I somehow find this more exciting lol

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 3:40 am

one very great application would be for new games made with ExultStudio.

Right away, you will be able to drawn people more recent comers in the gaming world since all they've even seen were 3D games.

I applaud the work done and the results you've obtained.

Artaxerxes

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:00 am

Is Andrea B. Previtera reading this?

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:25 am

Artaxerxes, I was thinking the same thing! Remove the artificial lift limit, and you'll be able to build a giant tower to look down upon the land from.

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 6:56 am

it seems the engine requires libvga.so.1.
Do you know where I can get that and what other requirements are there?

Artaxerxes

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 7:28 am

That is part of SVGALib.

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 7:30 am

got it to work when I installed libsvgalib.

I was wondering if the screenshots you posted are taken from the binary you linked to, as the result on my machine are quite different. On SI, you still see the blue boxes where the chunks meet and the base of building does some waving as you walk by. Also, as a side (cool) effect, the Moonshade Palace (with the fountain in the middle) is absolutely gorgeous and the water spitting scultures actually rock back and forth! Very nifty!

Artaxerxes

smatthews · Post by **smatthews** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 11:03 am

When I get around to it (and keep in mind that I have full-time school and work), I will be playing around with Quake 2 model files (MD2) that I'll make in 3D Studio Max and Photoshop.

As for extracting the textures and their bounding boxes, I have my own tool, which just outputs an image file for each shape-frame. You could use that if you really want, or I think Exult comes with tools for exporting all the shapes and their frames. Animated objects might be a little laborious because I'd want to make the MD2 frames match the number of 2D shape frames, etc.

Luckily, the models that need to be made most are simple (columns, fountains, etc) I wouldn't jump the gun and start on anything just yet, but when things get rolling I'll be keeping things extremely low-poly to keep in Ultima 7 mode.

Ooh, and I don't even know what Lightspeed beta is, just don't expect this thing to be finished overnight. I'm working on it with all my freetime; I just don't have much of that!

Artaxerxes: I'm not sure about the rocking back and forth bit. I think you've discovered a bug in alpha-grade software! *gasp*grin*

(As for the hills/lowlands question... if something like that were to happen, it's at the bottom of the priority list... all the trivial things still need to work first:)

MV · Post by MV » Tue Oct 05, 2004 12:04 pm

The camera angle is currently fixed, but will be freely modifiable by tonight. It will definitely be manually rotateable and give you the ability to zoom up/zoom out, but I might make it move on its own, like it does in most third person games (think Ultima 9).

Yea I was wondering that after looking at the shots as they arn't from the "right" angle, so I thought you might have had a user rotatable camera in it. But I guess it will be soon.

I'd also like to see it in action on how it scrolls the scenery. I hope it doesn't do too much of a "fish eye" effect.

trevor_clim3 · Post by **trevor_clim3** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 11:34 am

thats absolutely cool!

great work!

at the first moment i thought: oh my god, he modelled whole britannia from scratch!

hmm, but the NPCs will be a problem... and the monsters?

but anyway, its really cool!

Eric.w · Post by **Eric.w** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 7:20 pm

WOW!!
This is amazing! I was dreaming about the possibility of this myself.. and here someone comes along, and does it!

I love the new "look".. it looks like this is the way U7 was designed to be

If there is a need for something like replacement textures.. or higher res textures to replace the stretched ones.. I'd love to help out! (like what those guys are doing for Quake retextured...it's legal as long as you make the new textures from scratch)

Quester · Post by **Quester** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 7:44 pm

2Sam Matthews: One wish - please use "unsigned char" type for text, it will help to use localizations, like Russian.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 8:48 pm

Impressive.... Very Impressive

Now seriously.... WOWWWWW!!!!

Andrea B Previtera · Post by **Andrea B Previtera** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 1:04 am

Once the "Exult 3d engine" will be finished and polished, brand new possibilities of modding will open up, I am quite sure that new worlds will quickly see the lights.

Reminds me of the project I dropped last year because of the lack of 3d artists... I had to recreated objects by myself, and I didn't even thought that it was possible to remap those flat shapes even to "fake" 3d objects.

Sam's remapping algorithm, based on the bounding boxes of exult 2d shapes, is one of the smartest things ever conceived... and I will borrow it to extract'n'remap all the wall shapes to textures, something which I did one by one manually before

Post by **Colourless** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 6:01 am

Sam's remapping algorithm, based on the bounding boxes of exult 2d shapes, is one of the smartest things ever conceived

Yes well, what can I say... I'm a genius for suggesting he do things that way... Hehe...

It's great work what Sam has done no doubt about it.

-Colourless Dragon

PanSola · Post by **PanSola** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 7:31 am

o_O"""

wow, this is so crazy cool...

When I first saw the subject I thought "not another scam or newbie request...", but then I got bored and so decided to check out what it is this time. and even when I saw the first pic I still had doubts (could've just been really smart photoshopping)...

I must say, like all others before me have already, that this is extremely impressive. Definitely interested in seeing this on /.

Keep up the good work!!! Can't wait until a stable windows binary is available (-:

Post by **Colourless** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 8:51 am

I think this once and for all proves that Ultima 7 actually IS a 3d game

Post by **drcode** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 9:16 am

I'd guess those ex-Origin programmers who worked on U9 are going to feel pretty foolish now. They already HAD a 3D engine, and just didn't know it:-)

Karl · Post by **Karl** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 9:45 am

Wow ... I don't even like 3D games, but I have to admit that this is one awesomely mind-blowing hack! I'll have to give it a rip sometime just to see how it looks, and put a new perspective on an old favorite!

I must repeat: wow! That's gotta qualify for a best hack of the year award!

Bomb Bloke · Post by **Bomb Bloke** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 7:02 pm

*BB's jaw drops to the floor and does not rise*

MkM · Post by **MkM** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 9:11 am

Yes, impressive..

Post by **drcode** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 9:20 am

Grrr... I tried submitting this to Slashdot, but it looks like another rejection. Maybe someone else should try.

Anyone know the 70's song "On the Cover of the Rolling Stone"?:-)

Juan Miguel Venturello · Fri Oct 08, 2004 11:24 am

Wow Mr. Matthews, what an excellent job you have done! My respects from your coding skills, I call myself a programmer and I have problems understanding Exult's code (not my area of expertise, granted), and look what you have done singlehandledy! I can very well appreciate the difficulties in doing this, and it is amazing how well you have made it look so far. I wonder how well you can do with the excisting textures and models - interesting to see how rather well they are doing.

Thanks, after 2 years without playing any ultima of late I got interested again on replaying and find out this wonderful project which will be very exciting to follow. Impressive!

Again THANKS!

Dragon-Dreams · Post by **Dragon-Dreams** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 7:22 pm

That is an incredible job you have done there.
I'm sure that this could be the start of something great.
You should continue on with this project slowly modelling things in 3D, eventually leading to a fully 3D exult.
But that is just my opinion.

Dr.TOBOT · Post by **Dr.TOBOT** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:48 pm

Helo I am dr. TOBOT and i EXALT U page!!!! when i have pushed my charas from 2 dims into 3 Dims it has been a very action (?)
but I have 1 question and that is what does lord british say about this dimension

love tobot
untitledgif.org

PanSola · Post by **PanSola** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 4:37 pm

hmm, that's a good point raised.

We must send a squire to inform Lord British of this new dimensional phenaminom (i can't spell...)!

Though probably after a stable build of Exult has incorporated it?

Andrea B Previtera · Post by **Andrea B Previtera** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 4:38 am

TOBOT! You here?

Gollum · Post by **Gollum** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 5:46 am

Wow, I never would have imagined anything like this was possible! Sure, a remake in 3D would not be news - but 3D from the original game is just insanely cool. I'm extremely surprised how well it looks considering the age and (lack of) resolution of the game's art too!

The sprites will certainly cause numerous problems though, as will the more exotic buildings and locations as they were not meant to be seen from differing angles and mapping them onto bounding boxes will do little good. But if you could provide a plugin interface to replace specific sprites with 3D models I'm sure there'll be plenty of people willing to help out. Since I coincidentally only started replaying U7 in Exult the other day (just arrived in Britain) I know I would (I'm a 3D Modeler/Animator BTW)...

Patrick Manderson · Post by **Patrick Manderson** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 2:10 am

Richard Garriot would be proud!