RPGWatch Feature: U6 Project May Update

Archon's Aletys and Jesse "Zephyr" Strachman have a new progress update on the U6 Project for us, with details of new towns and some great screens:

The Lycaeum Keep, shown in the 1st screenshot below, is the headquarters of the Britannia mages, and the mages congregate there to discuss their most important business. It will in the future include their great library. When you visit the Lycaeum, be sure to also pop over & check out Xiao's workshop with all that interesting looking equipment (see 2nd screenshot below). Xiao is a mage who likes to experiment, but what on earth (or Britannia, in this case) is she doing with all those gears & pulleys? Obviously there's no OSHA in Britannia – looks downright dangerous in there!

Read the article.

More information.

A big thanks to Corwin for these articles.

Looking very nice - I hope they get the extra help, because Lazarus was pretty cool and this looks better (especially with the journal).

I should confess, I've joined the U6 team myself to help out and I encourage others to do so. This will easily be as good as or even better than Lazarus.

Nice article, I don't think my Ultima knowledge is really good enough to get involved mind.

Oooh boy, this project is starting to make me tingle. Thanks for the update!

Looks nice. So, how playable is this for someone who has never played U6 (blasphemy, I know!)? Or, perhaps and even better question - how much would I be able to contribute if I haven't played the original?

As a playtester, previous knowledge of the original while helpful, is certainly not essential. If you have talents in helping create the game, such as art, then I wouldn't think previous experience was needed with the game at all.

I'm one of the Ultima 6 Project team members, & from personal experience, I can attest to Corwin's comments. Until I joined the team I had a lot of Dungeon Siege & other gaming experience, but absolutely no Ultima experience whatsoever, other than playing Lazarus (which is how I got hooked in). I also had never worked on a development team. So please don't let that keep you from considering joining us. It is definitely not required.

After June 30, my schedule should open up a lot. I'd really like to contribute in someway.

I think the next project should be to build an open source version of the DS engine. I'm half kidding, I know how much of a massive undertaking that would be, but DS is so hard to find, that these remakes really have a limited market. My brother wanted to play Lazarus, but was unable to find DS anywhere in Austin and, at least at the time, Amazon wasn't selling it. I guess he could have gone the eBay route, but most of the stuff on there is pirated anyway. I finally just sent him my discs after I made a backup copy for myself.

An exult type effort would be awesome, though certainly more complex.

I understand where you're coming from on the engine, however as you said, that would be a huge undertaking at this point, and at least for the Ultima 6 Project, rather late to make a switch. FYI, at least for now, it's available from Amazon (just checked), & one of our team members reported he'd seen it in his local stores last March, & that it's now being published by Ubisoft.

When you're schedule frees up & you're ready, contact us on the PB forums (link is in the article), or PM me, & we'll get things moving.

When I see these screenshots (and Lazarus) I wonder if there's some sort of limitation in the Dungeon Siege engine that doesn't allow for higher-resolution textures and more polygons. I don't mean to knock the project, because I think it's cool. But can't the DS engine do more, graphically, or is there some other reason that graphics haven't been significantly improved over the original DS games? (i.e. nostalgia, system requirements, development time, etc.)

Unfortunately, DS uses only low poly, which limits what we can do. While a couple of our team members (Zephyr & Frilly Wumpus) have done wonders to get beyond the limitations in some areas, remember that DS came out over 8 years ago, so it just doesn't have the newer capabilities, & there's a limit to what can be done with it. Also, the lighting system in DS can cause limitations to the textures and their look when items are found in the world. The spinning wheel and/or the ferry picts in the article are typical examples of the low poly meshes.

Okay. I just didn't know why a graphics engine would limit something like that, or, for instance, drawing distance. One would expect that processing power would be the limiting factor, but I know nothing about graphics engines, of course. I am a software developer, though. I guess there are some algorithms and optimizations involved that would break with the larger number of polygons.

I'm not sure whether the DS engine is well optimized. I'm playing U5 Lazarus at the moment, and the game can get choppy at times, and my comp is still quite good. There's a mod to increase view distance available, but that one made the game run pretty roughly.

That said, I enjoy the game immensely. The DS graphics are not ugly and manage to convey the right atmosphere. Which is more than enough for me .

I'm looking forward to playing the U6 remake one day .

There is no specific limitation on the number of polygons used; however, we are re-using a great number of the existing meshes. If we were to create models that used a lot more polygons, it would work, but it would look wildly inconsistent with all the rest of the DS models. We have pushed the limits in many ways (the winged gargoyles are already stretching the capabilities somewhat) and the map sizes are FAR beyond the original DS.

It would be a massive undertaking to rebuild all the hundreds (possibly thousands) of meshes with more complex versions that all fit together like a gigantic 3d jigsaw puzzle… and with the smoothing that the engine already does, it seems like there would be relatively little gain.

The original DS engine does seem to have some limitations on performance, even on newer computers, because it just doesn't take advantage of some of the newer advancements in video cards. Anyway, we don't apologize for the "dated" look of the game engine; it's still way better than the original, and there's still no other game engine out there that can deliver the features we need. For example, DS2 only allows for 6 party members (not 8), and the modding is much more limited and the 3d modeling software you have to use isn't freely available.

Test - please ignore

Originally Posted by Zephyr
Anyway, we don't apologize for the "dated" look of the game engine; it's still way better than the original, and there's still no other game engine out there that can deliver the features we need. For example, DS2 only allows for 6 party members (not 8), and the modding is much more limited and the 3d modeling software you have to use isn't freely available.

And you don't need to apologize, it still looks great! I was wondering why more stuff wasn't done with DS2, thanks for clearing that up!