New patch - Ultima 6 conversion

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 6:12 am

I was inspired to start an Ultima 6 total conversion patch for Exult after trying out the Quests & Interaction's patch by Alun Bestor. Thus far I have completed Lord British's castle, including the NPC's inside the castle walls. Any input on my work thus far is welcome!

You can get it here: http://users.tpg.com.au/fade2blk/ultima6patch.rar

Natreg · Post by **Natreg** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 7:16 am

Are you doing it from scratch? I think it would be better to use some conversion tool or something for the maps.

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 7:30 am

Yes, I'd prefer to do it from scratch, however long it may take. It should take me about a month to finish Britain, then I'll move on to the surrounding areas.

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:26 pm

Heres some comparison shots:

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:34 pm

Woops, try that again.

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:35 pm

Oh well, you can just copy and paste the image links then.

Crysta the Elf · Post by **Crysta the Elf** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:44 pm

tags are [ i m g ] [ / i m g ] minus the spaces

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 3:01 pm

Ahh, thanks Crysta Elf.

(edit by Dominus: pointed the images at web.archive.org)

Crysta the Elf · Post by **Crysta the Elf** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 5:33 pm

the only one that looks odd is the office, because the desk needs legs on the left side as well else itd fall

cyberfugue · Post by **cyberfugue** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 6:26 pm

looks great so far!

Sevaton · Post by **Sevaton** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 8:26 pm

Hello!

Your patch is very good(Book of Prophecies-rocks!!!).Can you,in future,separate arhive into several files,something like this:Music,Gumps,Shapes Usecode and etc,for easy downloading purposes.

Regards,
Sevaton

Sevaton · Post by **Sevaton** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 7:46 am

Mikefictiti0us,do you have site?

Sevaton.

Annorax · Post by **Annorax** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 9:45 am

That's looking great, keep up the good work!

And yes, do you have a website for this? I can't wait to see it complete.

Vasculio294 · Post by **Vasculio294** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 9:56 am

Its so sad that origin didn't have keep the blue floor tile! I really like that better than the floor matching the walks.

Tawn · Post by **Tawn** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 2:23 pm

Hi Mike,

I agree, it is looking great.

I would love to host your mod on ESGuides.com, new content is always welcome.

Take care,

Tawn

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 4:19 pm

Thanks for the positive comments so far. I probably shouldn't have posted this here until I completed Britain, but I was curious to see what kind of a response it would get.

Mark, just give me another week so I can finish the underground sections of the castle and fix the usecode, then you can host it.

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 4:31 pm

Sevaton, I don't have a site yet, but I'm working on it.

Timo Takalo · Post by **Timo Takalo** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 5:59 pm

>Mark, just give me another week so I can finish the underground sections of the castle and fix the usecode, then you can host it.

Out of curiosity, how do you intend to do the underground areas? Using Serpent Isle-style stair teleporters there probably isn't enough empty space in the mountains. Does Exult support multiple maps?

Post by **marzo** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 7:11 pm

Does Exult support multiple maps?

For quite some time now. Although it is likely that there are undiscovered bugs in it -- no one has throughly tested it thus far.

nex666 · Post by **nex666** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 9:58 pm

Looks great, I'd love to play U6 in a U7 style

Madoc · Post by **Madoc** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 11:43 pm

Hey, I have never played U6! Only once for one hour or so. I will love playing U6 with Exult! *grin*

Post by **artaxerxes** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:20 am

one word:

PHENOMENAL

I have a special fondness for u6. That's the game that taught me English!

Artaxerxes

Vasculio294 · Post by **Vasculio294** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:15 am

Ultima 6 is almost good as Ultima7 except for the spotlight nite time.

But the game is good! I also enjoyed Savage Empire and Martian Dreams

TMNM Dragon · Post by **TMNM Dragon** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:58 am

Excellent, I was hoping that someone would do this.
I made an attempt about 2 to 3 years ago.
My first attempt was to modify the current U7 building to match U6.
I decided it might be faster if I converted the U6 map to work with U7.
I wrote a small program to do just that. I then had to re-organize the chunks file to match U6 (which has 1024 chunks), and create the rest of the chunks.
I think I finished over 800 of the 1024 chunks. Enough so that the world map looked complete. The dungeons where still a mess, and there was no multi-map support at the time. I stopped working on it about a year ago.
I think I finished the usecode for the first few NPCs (Dupre, Shamino, Iolo).
I even got Iolo’s gold gathering/splitting usecode to work, but not the spam-cheat.
I even went as far as to modify the exult source code, so that I could get the vortex cube to work. I had to modify the jawbone code, I made a nice gump of the cube and the stones fit into it nicely. I have some other art as well.
Anyways, mikefictiti0us if you are interested in any of the work I had previously done then you are welcome to it.

Post by **artaxerxes** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:41 am

hey, a fellow Torontonian!

What part of the city you're in TMNM Dragon?

Artaxerxes

TMNM Dragon · Post by **TMNM Dragon** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 10:13 am

I live in the south-west end by Etobicoke creek and Lake Ontario.
But I work downtown (Where I'm posting from).
Which part are you from Artaxerxes?

Post by **artaxerxes** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:00 pm

about the same! I live in bloor west village (at Jane/Bloor) and work in the Ernst & Young Tower, TD centre, downtown Toronto.

Artaxerxes

Timo Takalo · Post by **Timo Takalo** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:09 pm

Have you tried any of the tile floors? There are some rather nice ones in Fawn and Moonshade.

Post by **Dominus** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:28 pm

Do you have the main map of brittania already created? Just asking you don't get into space troubles, later on (or are you using the u7 map?).
Also best try to divert any underground to a new map (how to teleport/create teleport eggs between maps is in the Exult studio docs), to avoicd the SI ugliness.

Vasculio294 · Post by **Vasculio294** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:22 pm

If you ever finish this project! You can count me in for beta testing.

mikefictiti0us · Post by **mikefictiti0us** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:51 pm

Dominus, I'm using the u7 map but I'm altering each chunk as I go, to fit with the u6 landscape (which means I have a huge amount of work to do).
You might think that I may not have the patience to take on such a task, but I do plan to stick with it, however slow my progress may be. I've wanted to do this for quite some time now.
TMNM Dragon, when I started this I was actually thinking about getting someone to write a map conversion program for me, but I decided against it since I'm actually having fun doing it piece by piece.

I do think I will need some help with the usecode for the more advanced features though, but I'm not planning on implementing those until I've progressed considerably with the landscape.

Timo and Dominus, yes, I'm using multiple maps with the intermap egg to telport between. So far its working perfectly.

Post by **marzo** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:54 pm

I can help with the usecode needs.

Timo Takalo · Post by **Timo Takalo** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 5:11 pm

What Dominus said about space reminds me of another space issue. The Britannia in U6 is clearly bigger than in U7. Even walking from Paws to Britain took several minutes real time and several hours game time.

Tristan de Inés · Post by **Tristan de Inés** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 11:47 pm

>The Britannia in U6 is clearly bigger than in U7

I think that depends on how you define the size of the world. Clearly, U7 has alot more tiles than u6, so in a sense U7 is alot bigger than U6, but the tiles are alot smaller. I think its the very limited view and slow movement in U6 that makes the world seem larger.

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Tue Jul 19, 2005 12:27 am

I don't think you can compare the small (size of the avatar's foot) 8x8 tile in U7 to the 16x16 tiles in U6 which are used for entire objects and walls. The U6 tiles are comparible to U7 shapes.

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Tue Jul 19, 2005 12:29 am

But in terms of absolute movement speed, I see what you mean.

TMNM Dragon · Post by **TMNM Dragon** » Tue Jul 19, 2005 4:02 am

The U6 world (Dungeons and all) is actually smaller (in terms of chunks or pixels).
When I wrote my map coverter, I found that I could fit the whole world plus all the dungeons onto the U7 map and still have lots of black space.
Since the original U6 was a flat world with the etheral borders, I put the dungeons around the outside of the main world map (SI style).
But this was before multi-map support, so I think mikefictiti0us way would turn out better.

Post by **drcode** » Tue Jul 19, 2005 8:23 am

This looks great, and I have only one suggestion: Please make regular backups of your 'patch' directory. I'd hate to have you lose months of work because of a bug in ES.

The Viking · Post by **The Viking** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 6:41 am

One thing that would be nice would be if you either 1) made the Avatar wear a backpack from the start or 2) put a backpack within his supplies in the storeroom

amano · Post by **amano** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 11:01 am

Any news on this?

Erbornic Dragon · Post by **Erbornic Dragon** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 7:26 am

THIS IS AWESOME!!! Makes me want to play ultima 6 again!

Post by **drcode** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 8:41 am

Haven't heard anything for a while.

Clank · Post by **Clank** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 7:05 am

But isn't nuvie doing something like that? Isn't nuvie a remake of u6?

SB-X · Post by **SB-X** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 3:14 pm

No. It's an engine to play U6 like Exult, with gameplay and visual enhancements. For now, just use DosBox. It plays U6 perfectly.

WWWWolf · Post by **WWWWolf** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 3:24 am

The screenshots look absolutely great =)

The game also looks great, except that it seems to crash for me as soon as the first gargoyle dies (looks for file called share/exult/bodies_bg.txt at exult directory, and can't find it).

WWWWolf · Post by **WWWWolf** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 8:11 am

(Eep, sorry, that appears to be some snag in Exult-CVS in general for me. Started playing BG again and it happens there too. Never mind. Hoping newer CVS checkout might help...)

Jets Connor · Post by **Jets Connor** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 7:08 am

I'm afraid I have a problem installing this. The readme instructs that I add "./ultima6patch" to the section for Black gate.

The problems are: there doesn't appear to be a section; when I add a section, exult hangs and takes all of windows with it (which I've never seen happen in WinXP before); and if the readme meant the section, adding ./ultima6patch or replacing the original path with ./ultima6path or ./ultima6path or .\ultima6path or even the full path results in Black Gate being removed from the main menu of Exult.

I am attempting this on v1.2, Windows binary.

Thankyou,
Jets

Post by **Dominus** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 8:57 am

you have to use the snapshot. Doesn't the readme say so?

Jets Connor · Post by **Jets Connor** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 9:06 pm

Ah. No, it doesn't. Thankyou.

Jets Connor · Post by **Jets Connor** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 9:33 pm

Still no section. Should it be path or patch?