Shattered Moon

Unfortunately, the last two months have been very busy for me, so progress is still slow. For September and October, the following areas of the game received the most attention:

• Script, network, resource, and sound system improvements
• Engine debug logging
• UI support for some Ultima 4 commands and transactions
• Ultima4 merchant support:

Hopefully, you can see from the video that I’m reworking a lot of the game to work with UI dialogs. The idea here is to provide alternative input methods while still supporting legacy input. For instance, you’ll still be able to mix up a spell with the same key combinations, or you can arrow through the menu.

Finally, here’s a bonus video of my son’s science project. We used CUO to make a full game for his assignment from concept to completion in just 3 evenings. Since the game editor is in a completely broken state, I had to use a hex editor to do some of the mods, but I hope that this video shows a little of what CUO is easily capable of doing.

The graphics are from Ultima 6 and the sound is from Ultima 8. The goal is to save all of the patients within a single workday by taking a blood sample from each and identifying their problem under the microscope. The book shelf can be used for information and to see which of the three doctors are experts on the various cell subunits. The black book can be used to put the game into hard mode which changes the microscope images to realistic looking slides. Each doctor will recommend a vaccine for the problem, but only the expert for the current cell subunit being researched will recommend the correct one. Giving the wrong vaccine to a patient will kill the patient and the game will end. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected any game could be involving things such as the Golgi apparatus.

… at a video:

Apologies for the poor video and sound quality. It’s why I program.

That will have to suffice for this month’s update. August proved a bit too busy and no real progress was made, unfortunately.

In the meantime, be sure to pick up the first trilogy in the Ultima series now available for download from Good Old Games.

At least, that’s a little of what I’ve been doing instead of working on CUO. But now, I’m back from vacation and the work continues.

As a reminder, the previous client is still playable on Dennis DeMarco’s shard at http://www.demarco.com/ultima. Once downloaded, launch the client and specify u4m.demarco.com as the game server.

The majority of work done during the month of July:

1. Reorganization of the project file structure
2. Title screen
3. Client archives of maps and sound assets (vs. raw assets)
4. Server performance metrics
5. Sound & Music

The aforementioned testing of the client and server went better than expected. However, there’s still a little work to do. The entire (debug) project weighed in at about 4.5 MB, with the client making up about 72% of the size due to graphics and sound.