Ultima Rebirth Dev Notes

Mockup of Rebirth .01 Done

2005-08-25T09:12:00.000-05:00

Just finished some bitmaps that show pretty much what this release will look like.

Now I can start work on the studio.

Changes to the Team

2005-08-22T10:11:00.000-05:00

Erstam the Mad Mage has gone on to better things. So we are down to 1 member now. Just me.

Web Site Upgrade & FAQ update

2005-08-18T21:47:00.000-05:00

The website was upgraded to php to make things easier to update.
Also the FAQ was updated so the information is current.

Designs done for .01 Version

2005-08-13T16:25:00.000-05:00

The .01 of the core rules is done.
The .01 of the world design is done.
The .01 design of dawn is done.

Planning Release .01 update -- Core Rules

2005-08-10T08:59:00.000-05:00

The core rules are kind of a cross between d20 and ultima online.
The basics are d20 with a 1000 die. Like UO there will be no generic level, and profession. Professions are determined by your skills. Level is determined by your skill level. There are 8 levels for each skill. (8 because ultima is about 8's). Also what you can do is determined by your skill rank not your generic level. so feats like crafting magic items are now tied to your magery skill rather than your level. Which means that fighters can craft magic items and cast spells.

d20 similarities: Skill checks(most) are based on a difficulty rating. you roll your d1000 add your skill rank +/- bonus/penalties if the number is greater than the difficulty then its a success. 1 and 1000 are special 1 is failure, 1000 is success.

There will probably be taking a 10 or a 20 too, but thats not been looked at right now.

like d20 there are Challenge Ratings. You progress in a skill on a successful check if the challenge was high enough. if it was 3 levels below you or more, like a GM doing expert work, you get nothing. if it was with in 2 levels you get a minor increase. if it was equal to your level you get a better increase but its still small. the only way to get a good increase is to do things that are hard for you. there is a cap of 5% for a gain, so a novice that gets 1000 cant become an instant grand master.

NPCs:
Non Player Characters that aren't playable, are going to be simplified so only combat skills will be defined. Their skills will be mostly for show, since what they produce and contribute to each town is calculated.

Planning Release .01 update -- Town Design

2005-08-10T08:33:00.000-05:00

The town of dawn was selected as first. Before any one complains. I really didn't understand why dawn was removed from the series. It seemed to be cut because of lack of programming resources. I liked it so I put it back in.

Dawn is a self sufficient town, none of the others are. This is good for trying to build the first town because we don't need britain or paws, or jhelom. Its only in britannia for 1 hour a day so we can implement it in the void for now. Most items are made in dawn, and at the master level or grandmaster level so by finishing it we'll have a lot done. dawn will look more like britain or trinsic in the void. it won't look like moonglow its not a city of mages so the buildings will be reused in other cities.

Dawn is surrounded by a magical wall. this wall protects them from the nightwalkers that constantly try to get into the city while its in the void. Also when the city reappears any pcs, monsters,objects, or animals will be pushed to the edge of the city. Trees will appear in the city. These trees can't be cut down. Buildings cant be placed in dawn's brittania spot. they can be placed in dawn its self.

Teleporting to Dawn will be possible but when its in the void the skill check will be legendary > 100.

Dawn's major distinctions are the clock tower in the center. The temple, which is the only place after u3 that you can learn the piety skill. There are no healers in dawn because of the priests. Then the last distinction is the Hall of Twilight, which has the Twilight Guard. The Twilight Guard protects the city from the nightwalkers. They are all Adepts or Masters. Crime doesn't exist in dawn, but the twilight guard would probably be called if you steal something. And where are you going to go? the area around dawn is pretty small unless its in britannia. hopelfully unless you are sneaky and don't get caught you'd have to be a GM inorder to survive stealling in dawn.

I'll be nicer in the other cities for theft. But for dawn crime just doesn't make sense for it.

Just remember crime by the PC will be allowed, but it has consequences. Virtue powers will diminish as you do bad things. But the Anti Virtue powers will increase. in u4 there will be no way to win if you are not an avatar. So you'll eventually have to repent.

Planning Release .01 update -- World Design

2005-08-10T08:15:00.000-05:00

The .01 World Design is comming along. We have a composite map of Brittannia. It has plots of where ultima 3 cities would have been, escpecially dawn if the continent in u3 where what we all knew and loved. It has all islands that were in u5,u6,and u7(some of these wont appear until those games). It has all the towns: moonglow,britain,jhelom,skara brae,yew,minoc, magnencia, trinsic, paws, dawn, and vesper. the 4 castles are there too. In u4 the castles will be lonely, in u5 and on there will start to be more buildings around the castles. by u7 lb's castle will be surrounded by britain, and britain will touch paws. in u4 the cities are roughly the same size, but as the saga progresses britain will be huge, trinsic will be big, vesper will be big, moonglow won't really get bigger or smaller. A small town is about 100 NPCs. All NPCs will have some purpose for economy if not for story.

Ultima 3 changes

2005-08-06T19:40:00.000-05:00

Ultima 3 and Ultima 1 will be using a map similar to utima 4 through 7. This change is to make things eaiser. This places monitor south of what will be trinsic. Death gultch will be on one of the islands north of moonglow.

Dawn is planned for ultima 4 through 9. So it will be in the southern part of britannia.

Rebirth Restrictions

2005-07-26T08:24:00.000-05:00

Rebirth will be restricted to what is needed to do ultima 1-9, plus savage and martian. Unfortunatly lots had to be cut. Sorry this is a hobby it will never get done if I let the scope creep.

Rebirth Update

2005-07-26T08:23:00.000-05:00

This project is not dead. Lots of things got in the way. This is a hobby so it gets pushed back a lot. I'll be updating sourceforge with tasks for the first planning build. I don't know what kind of time frame yet for that release, because there is artwork involved. This is a planning build so it wont be distributed. Sourceforge will be updated soon with the tasks.

Rebirth Studio Progress

2005-04-04T08:22:00.001-05:00

So far this week has been just understanding compression for the package files. Unfortunatly my own simple algorithms are too slow for compressing. Wicked fast though for decompressing.

So because of that I decided that zip's deflate is good enough. zziplib I can't get to compile, and I can't get their binary working with the dependent zlib binary. I always get a missing function error. The zlib binary I got working with the contrib/minizip pgm, after a lot of work on my part.

Minizip used some really archaic C language function declarations that aren't compilant with the latest C or C++ standard so my compiler blew chunks on it. It works now, even with g++ not just gcc.

The idea was to extract a piece of a zipped file into memory rather than going to a file. this way huge files take up a lot less space and don't require me to put the hole file in memory.

My progress so far my pgm doesn't work yet. I'm trying to extract both a stored file and a deflated file. I've got it working to the point where the file ends. I have a bug in my end of stream detection routine. This bug seems to be for both stored and deflated. At least inflate is working, one step forward. But now I consoladated code because the stored and deflated code was similar and I broke end of stream on stored files, two steps back.

Rebirth Studio Progress

2005-04-04T08:22:00.000-05:00

Project is still Alive

2005-03-26T11:47:00.000-06:00

This project is still alive. I've been caught up in other things hand haven't had time to work on it in a couple months. Between moving and my day job I haven't had a lot of time. Anyway my initial approch was probably not the best. I was trying to build it from the bottom up. Unfortunatly my idea for for having test files to make the customizable parts, made those text files hard to manage. The sear amount of data for the world file, it was difficult to type in.

So I decided to to start with the world builder first,and try to have the engine and the world builder share code.

Update on sound effects

2005-01-02T15:14:00.000-06:00

After my practice program with SDL_Mixer, I've decided that I will not support MP3s. All the other music files SDL_Mixer supports will be supported. However Ogg files will be the ones tested. Also sound effects will be in WAV format.

The reason for no MP3 support is because I couldn't get the SMPEG library to work with the SDL_Mixer library. I didn't want to recompile it, and converting an MP3 to an Ogg isn't hard, and its free. Plus the libogg is well supported and open source.

Sorry about lack of updates

2004-12-27T13:19:00.000-06:00

I have another project I'm working on, its almost finished. So instead of programming on rebirth I've been programming on that. The project I am working on right now did use 2 classes from rebirth and the updates were checked in to rebirth.

The next step is to build the game world, but that requires some art to be drawn. That will probably start next year(2005).

I appologize for the delay but the current program I've been working on uses some SDL concepts I haven't used before so its a good learning experience.

Ovlerlay code done

2004-12-03T19:46:00.000-06:00

Work will now start on the world itself, as the overlay gui panels are done as spelled out in the task list. For now there are 3 panel types available: party portraits,party items,unit items. They are scalable to different resolutions. And very customizable.

Overlay 85% done

2004-11-30T20:30:00.000-06:00

There hasn't been an update in a while. The 3 panels that were to be done last week are mostly done. The weapons slots are grabbed from the unit type list. Next will be to add quick slots. Then some finish up on the portrait panel. After that I'll call this task done.

Its a little slow going because the unit types, party, units structures need to be partially defined in order for the overlay to partially work.

First Overlay Panel Done

2004-11-21T19:24:00.000-06:00

The first overlay panel -- paryiconpanel is done. The Overlay code is taking longer than expected, mostly to a design change. I wanted to be able to pick from customizable panels, so it could be a rpg or a strategy game. Also I wanted the customization to allow panel placement so that it isn't dependent on resolution size.

The next one coming is the charactericonpanel.

Syndicated, and Fixed code.

2004-11-16T07:33:00.000-06:00

We are syndicated now on syndic8.com. The overlay background code is fixed. it was due to another bug in ifstream I found. I'm spending a lot of time coding around things.

anyway it actually loads a bitmap from the cache. the next step is to make the icon buttons blit on top of the background. Right now the code uses rotozoom to make the surface fit the screen size. all the art was meant for 1024x768.

Flawed Overlay Code Checked in

2004-11-14T18:54:00.000-06:00

Good news the overlay code has started. Bad news the package manager didn't load the background image. Something is wrong with the package class. lots of steps are missing in the log file.

Image Cache Coded

2004-11-13T20:44:00.000-06:00

The image cache has been coded. Unfortunatly the code that uses the cache to blit the overlay undo the screen isn't. So it looks like the overlay that has the quick launch icons and portraits is getting closer to being done.

Optimization Problems

2004-11-12T19:49:00.000-06:00

mingw causes a lot of problems when at better then minor optimizations. At least the Package Manager is off to a good start.

Project Tasks

2004-11-09T08:11:00.000-06:00

Project Tasks have been updated. We'll see if we want to actually use them from sourceforge or not.

The goal right now is to get the main parts of the gui -- minus the players art done by end of year.

Art Cleanup Going On

2004-11-07T17:44:00.000-06:00

A majority of the art planned for the GUI part of the game is done. However when I tried to do a transperent bilt today, it was obvious that the transperency color wasn't solid. it looked white on the screen but it was 32 shades of white. The overlay image has been cleaned up. Lots to go. might not be any updates until its done.

TextSurface Done

2004-11-02T21:52:00.000-06:00

SDL is missing a great deal of classes and functions I take for granted when I program with DirectX and GDI in windows. I've just checked in a class that will hopefully be useful in the future. This TextSurface Class is a Surface that takes in strings in a similar way that console windows get text from stdout. The major difference is it can be any size, its transperent, and it allows for multiple fonts. Text Position is determined by the class. It has potential for scrolling. Right now its used for the initialization code.