Minimap

[Curiousis]

So Pentagram now has a minimap feature. Cool! Is there any chance Exult could have that feature as well? Or are there some techincal limitations beyond my know how that would make this way too difficult to implement?

That minimap screenshot sure does look swell.

[Colourless]

Just posting the screenshot here so people can see



Now, there isn't really anything stopping me from doing something similar in Exult. The world in U7 is much bigger than each map in U8, so it is more difficult. That is really just it though. Just a matter of data.

[Tristan de Inés]

Wow, this is so c00l stuff dudes! U guys R l33t!

[Andrea B Previtera]

Please please please no minimap in Exult. It would spoil all the exploration fun and that feeling of being lost. Well, I know that would just be another option, but it's one of those "other options" which any newbie would use... spoiling the atmosphere.

[Chris Schumacher]

What's it to you if someone else wants to use a mini-map?

[Dominus]

In Ultima 7 you originally already had a pretty good working map. Together with a sextant you didn't really feel lost most of the times (unless you were in Dungeons).
In Exult with the cheat map and higher resolutions, a minimap would only make it much more convenient and not really more spoiling.

On the other hand, Pagan was really frustrating in its lack of a map. I really DID feel lost and the cloth map was really no help at all. So the minimap in Pentagram really feels like a good thing for me.

[Colourless]

Note we were never planning on making a minimap in Pentagram. It just happened to be something that I made. I created a diagnostic gump called the FastAreaVisGump that sort of had the feelings of a minimap, so with a bit of brainstorming I came up with a way of 'cheeply' implementing a real minimap. It only took a few hours of real coding, but Pentagram's code tends to be really easy to work with.

Now with everything else in Exult (and Pentagram) none of these greatly gameplay changing options will ever be used by default. If I implement a Minimap in Exult it will be optional, and off by default.

[Andrea B Previtera]

What's it to you if someone else wants to use a mini-map?

I want my children to feel the original U7 experience! That's going to take a huge role in their education.

[Farrier]

If you're serious, then be careful there: I'd suggest letting your children enjoy and explore the game in their own way. If you force them to try enjoying it your way, you may kill it for them.

For example, if the exploration is what gets your juices flowing, but the packratting is what gets to them, then you'll reduce their enjoyment by making them rush off to explore new stuff when they'd rather just be building a house out of their collection of trophy skulls.

A good parallel is school. School taught me to hate Shakespeare: I'll never be able to enjoy Romeo and Juliet, nor Merchant of Venice, because of the formulaic way I was exposed to them. But afterwards, in University, in my own time, I read and saw Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Tempest, and loved them, as I was free to enjoy them in my own way.

But I'm over-analysing: you most likely had tongue in cheek

[Dominus]

to feel the original spirit you should have them use Dosbox or even better a 386 PC set up for this. No, even better, let them tinker with dos until they get it to run with sound.

[Andrea B Previtera]

To feel the original spirit they should go buy the (pirated) game in a dusty market under the burning sun of July - come back to the silent fresh air of their room and install disk after disk trying to free as much space as they can in a 40mb hdd, and after some fiddling see the face of the Guardian emerge from their 14'' crt monitor.

But, damn, I still have to make the silly brats!

[drcode]

I'd say the original experience involves fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the magic combination that gives you enough low memory to play.

As for the minimap for U8, I think this is great. That game was a pain to navigate, even though it was cool in most other ways.

[Login?]

That took me hours to get right the first time. Low memory was impossibly difficult to find

[Morg]

The Mini Map is great, I tend to get lost easily (expecially in U8) . . . and I'd also like to go on record that I learned more about how computers worked trying to run Ultima 7 than I ever did in school

[Andrea B Previtera]

I think that I am one of the few lucky guys who was ok with memory. That, thanks to the fact that I had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys since my very first Dos day in order to play Alone in the dark with sound.

But mostly, it was thanks to Digital Research Dos (For some reason my computer came with DR dos rather than MS, and damn, it was *so* better)

[tetzlaff...]

Could it be circular, like Ultima Online?
-Brian

[Chris Schumacher]

I wonder if you could make it into a Monster Radar like they had in 7th Saga (Elnard) and DragonSlayer:Legend of Heroes...

[Tristan de Inés]

Yeah, but then with outgoing "sonar" waves and a high-pitching sound that increases in frequency when monsters get closer. Then add in an assault rifle and rename the Avatar to "Hicks".

[Gradilla Dragon]

And the Armaggeddon spell should be renamed to "Nuclear Bomb".