Exult Forum

I am currently working on a 3d rpg game, and we all always loved that not-so-real looking of Ultima7 graphics, so we are porting walls, doors etc. (not to mention ground tiles) to textures (which basically means skewing the sprites to a decent frontal perspective)

Did someone make a tool to batch extract all the u7 graphics exporting them in bmp, pcx or whatever, perhaps?

Thanks,

- andrea

Look in our 'tools' directory. 'Expack' will split 'shapes.vga' into individual shapes, and another tool, 'splitshp', that will split each shape into its frames in .pcx format.

Another tool, 'ipack', will extract to '.png' format based on a script. It probably wouldn't be too hard to hack it to extract everything; or, you could probably create a script to do the same.

'Course, you do realize that the artwork is all copyrighted by Origin/EA, right?

BTW, do you have a web site? What you're doing sounds interesting.

Thanks! The tools are gonna save my cut'n'pasting life. I was pretty much sure you had such stuff somewhere, but I can be incredibly dull when coming to browse sites for resources

About a web site: we are currently setting up it, but you'll surely know: it's all about the screenshots. We developed a very good technology, a smooth seamlessworld engine, but everyone judges from the shots, and we haven't good ones yet, due to the lack of a decent 3d modeler.

The textures, lastly, may be copyrighted but our game's gonna be freeware, and moreover the artwork will be modified... a lot! Am I infringing a copyright if I distribute a remix of a song? : )

Something I read once:

If you were off on an island for several years, with no contact with the outside world, and wrote a book that, by pure chance, was word-for-word the same as Jurassic Park, then you would not be violating Michael Crichton's copyright (assuming you could prove that you'd never seen his book).

But, if you take an existing book, and change every word, you would be violating the copyright.

Of course... from what I've heard, people take textures from existing photos all the time. If you munge things enough, I doubt if anyone cares.

Sure. People, too, is making tons of ultima remakes using a lot of copyrighted names, for example. I am not even doing a remake of any ultima (it's so stupid! Porting it is great. Remaking it is just wasting technology on a non-original design), just using it's graphics.