[HN Gopher] Ultima (2012)
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Ultima (2012)
Author : luu
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-01-06 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.filfre.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.filfre.net)
| sedatk wrote:
| > Like so much in Garriott's early games, simply because it
| sounded cool; certainly this title has no more bearing on the
| game's plot, such as it is, than does the name Ultima.
|
| I mean, the name doesn't even have a bearing on the game's genre,
| let alone its plot. I'd say Ultima was a space shooter if I'd
| only heard its name.
| jakderrida wrote:
| You mean like an 8-bit space shooter like Gradius or Blazing
| Lazers for Turbo Graphix?
|
| If so, I definitely agree. Actually sounds way more dope as a
| space shooter, tbh. Like the "ULTIMAte" fighter spaceship.
| Would also explain why even a novice pilot with an NES
| controller can still annihilate 100 other ships before going
| down.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Uridium maybe.
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, exactly. Like Uridium, Katakis, Delta. It sounds like a
| sequel to one of them: ULTIMA!
| pvg wrote:
| Ultima 1 does have a space part where you need to become a
| space ace by shooting down bad space things that look like TIE
| fighters.
| thom wrote:
| There's also a later Easter Egg that implies it's in the same
| universe as Wing Commander.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| > _I do wonder that no one thought of it in even the relatively
| brief history of videogames prior to Ultima; it does seem a
| fairly obvious approach, after all. On the other hand, I can't
| point to a specific example that would give me grounds to really
| challenge the claim. ... Ultima's tile-graphics engine was not so
| much the work of Garriott as of a friend of his who was the only
| other person to have a significant role in the game's design and
| implementation: Ken W. Arnold (not the Ken Arnold who created
| Rogue)._
|
| I'll comment briefly on this as someone who spent a couple of
| years trying to build an Ultima-esque tile graphics game on the
| Apple II. Ken had a clever insight that eluded me completely:
| "Don't try to draw the tiles one at a time, dummy."
|
| Ken's code was fast enough to be useful in an interactive
| fullscreen game because it drew an entire row of 280 pixels at
| once, then went back over the same row of map data, reusing the
| indexes for the next 14 lines in that row of tiles. There was
| less indirection and practically no overhead compared to drawing
| individual 2-byte-by-14-row block shapes.
|
| Conversely, anyone trying to draw one tile at a time would have
| ended up with a low update rate, or would have been forced to
| draw the map in a small window. Either way, a worse gameplay
| experience would have resulted, especially if you were (as I was)
| comparing your work to Ultima.
| pengaru wrote:
| > A good example of the same kind of thinking, much later,
| would have been Abrash's exploration of the undocumented "Mode
| X" on the MCGA cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X),
| without which Wolf3D and Doom would have been much less
| awesome.
|
| Neither Wolf3D or Doom used Mode-X, they're both 320x200
| "Mode-Y" games IIRC.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Thanks -- I'll remove that postscript, as it appears to be
| wrong. A quick search doesn't make the story 100% clear, so
| it's better not to spread potential misinfo.
| pengaru wrote:
| Conveniently both your examples have received technical
| deep dives by Fabien Sanglard, who has made both the
| relevant texts freely available in PDF form [0][1].
|
| Mode-X was an annoying video mode to actually make use of
| without a performance hit. So despite its highly desirable
| combination of square pixels and 256-colors, it didn't see
| much use in games from the DOS days. 13h (320x200x256) was
| _far_ more common because of its contiguous, linear frame
| buffers. Mode-X needed annoying bank switching where the
| first bank had pixels 0,4,8... and second bank pixels
| 1,5,9... and so on. The VGA was such a PITA.
|
| [0] https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbwolf3d.pdf
|
| [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf
| dekhn wrote:
| Huh, well that's reason #27 that my ultima-like tiles never
| rendered fast enough. I was making the equivalent of sprites
| (hex codes) and I think you could even draw them from BASIC
| (although looping in BASIC was too slow to update the tiles).
| pvg wrote:
| Are you thinking of shape tables? Those were 'vector' based
| (sort of), hexy, usable from BASIC but too slow for anything
| 'real', at least, not on a Ultima-sized game type of scale.
| dekhn wrote:
| yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_table after I
| realized I coudln't do this in BASIC fast enough I went
| down the assembly route but never could figure out the
| various math bits required to deal with the weird
| addressing of Apple IIe high res graphics.
| pvg wrote:
| Yeah, I think the effective purpose of shape tables was
| to waste the time of the zillions of kids who thought
| they could write a game that way. Although I did make
| myself a crappy _Rally X_ clone (although my
| 'inspiration' was _Super Off Road_ ) using shape tables
| for the (two) cars and that mostly worked. For a pile of
| tiles it would be hopeless though.
| hoten wrote:
| The start implies there may be a prior article, is there?
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| The previous articles appear to be these:
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/lord-british/
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/akalabeth/
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/california-pacific/
| block_dagger wrote:
| Ultima VII: Part 2 is one of the best games ever made imo. I
| still remember waiting for the UPS truck to deliver it to my
| rural childhood home. One of the great things about these games
| is that they were packaged with real maps, ankhs, sometimes coins
| and other artifacts. Really pulled me in as a youth. I wore an
| ankh as a necklace for several years and still consider Garriott
| a personal hero.
| Implicated wrote:
| U7 was my original introduction into what I now consider "good"
| games. Changed everything for me :D
| johndhi wrote:
| Same experience with Ultima 9 - except I never got to play it
| because my computer wasn't up to the task. I had the map on my
| wall for years though.
| hinkley wrote:
| My computer was barely up to playing U VII and unfortunately
| I played it over summer break the year it came out, and a bit
| the following, and never finished it.
|
| Instead I got all the spoilers for Starflight from Usenet and
| finished it.
| conception wrote:
| 7:2 is amazing but I'd put 5 over it. Five was the last of
| being able to "talk" to the game. Something that we haven't
| been able to do really in mainstream games until now with LLMs.
| I'm really hoping for an updated 5 style with really
| conversations here soon that gives the same sort if magic 4 and
| 5 did for me then.
| thom wrote:
| Yeah this is one of the things that made me sad when dialogue
| heavy - especially voice-acted - games became the norm.
| Wizardry VII was another good example, it really increases
| immersion when you have to remember things and prompts aren't
| just multiple choice. But I suppose people said that about
| drawing your own maps too, and I'm not sure I want to go back
| to that. :)
| mtillman wrote:
| Should you want to try map drawing again, it's alive and
| well in games like Grimrock, Etrian Odyssey, and others. In
| Etrian Odyssey, you use the lower screen as a map drawing
| tool.
| swayvil wrote:
| Ultima III for me. That game has a VIBE. It's like the King
| Crimson of games
| pixelpoet wrote:
| 100% agreed about U7 being kind of the best game ever. It was
| utterly mindblowing for me back in South Africa in the 90s,
| pre-internet, to have this massive "living" world. It's
| unfortunate that U8 was such a let down :/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Same site as TFA talks about U8, and it treats it fairly
| (which is hard to do with a game that followed up U4-7)
| ajxs wrote:
| Ultima VII: Part 2 was my favourite of the series as well. The
| world of Serpent Isle had such a rich setting, and folklore.
| There was something really haunting and beautiful about the
| world they created. I feel like they really took the things
| that made U7 great, and perfected it. In case anyone hasn't
| read it. Here's a great interview with one of the lead
| designers that explains why the story pivoted in the way it
| did:
|
| https://ultimacodex.com/interviews/bill-armintrout-si20/
| TillE wrote:
| It's difficult to overstate just how influential D&D was in video
| games, I don't think there's anything else remotely at that
| scale. Ultima and Wizardry would inspire the creation of the
| first JRPGs, and on it went. Maybe it's partly because D&D was
| becoming popular among nerds just as personal computers were
| becoming semi-affordable.
|
| And it's not even just RPGs, literally any game with the concept
| of experience points and levels ultimately owes some small debt
| to Gary and Dave.
| mtillman wrote:
| Early DnD CRPGs are really good too IMO. Eye of the Beholder 2
| & Ravenloft were great.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Even before those, the gold box games were great too. Pool of
| Radiance, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, all of the Krynn
| games, etc.
| livrem wrote:
| Still grinding my way through the Goldbox games. Same party
| as I started with in Pool of Radiance ~1995 is now
| somewhere halfway(?) through Pools of Darkness. Not sure if
| I am going to try to complete the rest of the Goldbox after
| that, or continue with something more modern. My queue of
| CRPGs to play "once I'm done with the Goldbox games" is
| getting ridiculous.
|
| Put all the games in a git repo, scripts to launch the
| games in Dosbox, all the game-files and documents installed
| from GOG (originally the ones from the old Wizworx CDROM).
| Version-control is great, since there is a limit to number
| of saves in the game. And keeping notes of every thing I
| do, every time I load or save, really helps keep my sanity
| in the branching alternative time-lines that are created
| when savescumming through a CRPG.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Wizardry was the shit, it's an understatement how influential
| that series was.
| acomjean wrote:
| We loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in
| middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to
| advance. Before the internet thats all we had. Out of our group,
| at least one of us had a real copy of each game, making the spell
| books and instructions available... The cloth maps were fun, but
| I don't think we used them during game play. The games were a bit
| of grind, but we didn't care.
|
| I do like the Ars Video on how they spent all this time on the
| "ultima online ecosystem" only to have it not work out..
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Ultima III had this weird quirk where you could draw a "path"
| across the map by killing monsters and _not_ opening the chest
| they 'd drop. We'd do that between towns / important locations:
| we'd surround our desired line with unopened chess all around
| or path, leaving only one "square" line (a line with a width of
| one square).
|
| That way it'd be very rare that monsters would spawn in our
| path and we could travel across the map really quick.
|
| That trick wasn't working in Ultima IV anymore.
|
| As a sidenote, I find this one mindboggling: an Apple ][e with
| a MIDI interface which Ultima V supported back in... 1988. The
| Apple ][e is hooked to old Roland gear. It looks and sounds
| georgous, amazing stuff (skip to 12m to hear a demo):
|
| https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk
| dekhn wrote:
| As a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in
| Boston (1985, I think?). I told him all about how I loved his
| game and he said that since I liked it so much why didn't I
| present at his kiosk?
|
| Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which
| was unreleased and already being copied illegally.
|
| I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to
| reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close. These
| days... there's a community dedicated to reverse engineering the
| source code for Ultima and fixing bugs:
| https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ and even a team that made a modern
| Apple IIe Ultima-like (https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-
| archaist.html)
|
| Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of
| the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was
| key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using
| the right spells by your cleric and magician. I never knew I was
| supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams
| always ended up wimpy and dying. I learned how to hex-edit my
| player's disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game
| much easier.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 14x16 tiles were used because 14 pixels wide is the native
| resolution of two bytes on the Apple II.
| conception wrote:
| For those wanting to play in the universe
| https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com is still running and still
| getting regular updates.
| bhauer wrote:
| I highly recommend Michael Coorlim's video series on Ultima [1],
| which balances some playthrough with background on the game's
| design.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFCs_cDvTi4
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I've played ultima a lot since i was 10 until I was like 15,
| emulating it with wine on linux I think has contributed to my
| ability to troubleshoot issues
| WillAdams wrote:
| Enjoyed playing a friend's copy of Ultima 1 so much, I bought
| Ultima 2 for my Mac and played it through in black and white ---
| which was quite the contrast to the full-colour cloth map (which
| I really wish I still had).
| musictubes wrote:
| Heh. I remember putting the underworld disk in the 1541 while on
| the surface. When you moved out of the sector the map would
| update with chests and monsters strewn about above ground.
| Putting the regular disk in again it would right itself
| eventually.
|
| The c64 with Ultima III and IV brought my D&d dreams to the
| screen. Was a wonderful thing to pursue during summer vacation.
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