I haven’t found myself with much free time to work on my project in the last few weeks but I did manage to get some basic signs up and running.
It’s actually quite interesting the way that signs are stored. At least 2/3rds of them. There is a signs.dat file that contains the majority – however for some unknown reason I have unable to find a file with all the Eight Laws signs. As a result I have had to hard code them for now.
Also many signs use non english characters which I believe are indexes into a font file – but I haven’t got to the point where I can analyze them quite yet.
Lastly some signs are stuffed in the data.ovl file. I can only imagine why they needed to sink signs into any file other than signs.dat. I haven’t had to hardcode the sign text, but have had to hard code some file offsets which is a little gross, but I’ve done it before.
Thank goodness for the original rev-eng work here: http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_V_Internal_Formats#SIGNS.DAT
Also I have begun to update some of the finer details in the wiki starting with Signs and NPCs.
Signs look great. Especially like the shading/voxel effect on the first one.
Your pace of progress is impressive as well!
My only suggestion would be to have a similar scale for all the fonts. Might lend some style points.
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I don’t disagree about the sign scale, I tool the quick and dirty route and used autoscaling fonts to make sure every sign fit.
I am trying hard to not get too bogged down in the details of the graphics to start with full intention to go back and tweak, tidy or even redo. For now, just get the logic down has been my priority.
All that being said – please keep to feedback coming, I document all of it to eventually go back to later in dev.
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Looking awesome. Also I have to thank you for inspiring me to finally sit down and learn how games and such work. Already had a good idea on backend/server-side stuff, but this is something insanely different.
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Thanks man! That is such a kind thing to say 🙂 I agree that game programming seems to be altogether different. Unity forces me to break my own rules of coding on the daily, but it absolutely works!
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Looks absolutely repulsive. Do something original and leave Ultima alone, the original graphics have 90 times the charm of this refried dogshit.
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I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that on the other end of this keyboard is a human who has worked very hard on this project so far – and will continue to do so. The game will cost you $0 when it’s done, and 0 hours if you opt not to play it. Thanks for the feedback and best of luck in life.
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