360 Degree Dungeon

[Zyon Rockler]

Is it possible to create a 360 degree dungeon that you see out of the character's eyes? What the character sees you would see. Create a whole conversion so that once you enter the dungeon it loads you into a 360 degree world. So, that instead of converting the entire game, maybe just add some small areas.

I truely believe UO should be capable of more than just one view. I like the view it has now and I like the zoom feature but I think once you zoom all the way in it should become the eyes of the character. I would really love to be able to see the sky someday or look out over the ocean's horizon and see the sunrise.

 

[Morgana LeFay (PoV)]

Have you ever played Ultima IX?

I was already hooked on UO when this game came out, and let me tell you...walking around Sosaria rendered like this was a treat...



...for all 4 minutes the game would run without crashing!

 

[Fink]

DEAR GOD! 3D AND HOTBARS IN ULTIMA! SHIELD YOUR EYES, KIDS!

 

[Zyon Rockler]

Ultima Online 7th Anniversary Edition came with a stamp on the box, bonus includes the classic Ultima IX: ASCENSION also inludes rare in game items! See back of box for details. I got every edition and upgrade so I was able to play this game and still have it.

But, i'm talking about seeing this put into Ultima Online today. Please. Put it in the game! That's all.

 

[AesSedai]

- lol & good vibes to Fink

My ideal MMOG will not be viewed in first person (from my character's eyeballs) until I am wearing virtual glasses with 360 degree sound, or have a computer implant in my own eyeball & a micro-computer-earbud in mah ear, hehe. Perhaps if I am uber-rich, I can play a rich version of this in my 'MMOG Room' before that happens. Otherwise, I genuinely enjoy UO's perspective of actually being able to see what is around me, at a simple glance, rather than having to spin around to see what is behind me.....
Of course if you really want UO in that perspective... Stygian Abyss's success will be your best hope for it, imho.

 

[Harlequin]

Have you ever played Ultima IX?

I was already hooked on UO when this game came out, and let me tell you...walking around Sosaria rendered like this was a treat...



...for all 4 minutes the game would run without crashing!

I actually replayed U9 recently. With my much better PC, it didn't crash at all until I overdid the extra pouch bug to get like a hundred pouches heh.

Realized that I missed many things the first time around, like the secret maze in moonglow reg shop. No falling thru floors either. It was amazing and rendered beautifully.

I now think that U9 was well ahead of it's time! You should give it a go again

 

[Ni-]

Is it possible to create a 360 degree dungeon

???

It might be possible, but that would be waaay too hot for me!

 

[Connor_Graham]

Ultima Online 7th Anniversary Edition came with a stamp on the box, bonus includes the classic Ultima IX: ASCENSION also inludes rare in game items! See back of box for details.

*starts digging through the myriad of software boxes to find the 7th Anny*


My oldest daughter has been itching to be able to play UO but her mom is dragging her heels on getting the internet connection. She'd love to be able to play UO on the new comp she got last Christmas. Thanks for this reminder. I'd completely forgotten that game was part of that box set.

 

[Beefcake101]

One of the Main reasons i Play UO is that it is not 1st person view. I like to see what is around me.

 

[RavenWinterHawk]

One of the Main reasons i Play UO is that it is not 1st person view. I like to see what is around me.

I wish they would stop this all on nothing mentality and make UO 2D with 3D pieces.

Like yeah. You enter the dungeon and 3D.

Why is that so hard?

 

[Gellor]

No thanks.

The through the character eye's view is the main reason I don't play any of the first person shooters or try WoW, EQ, etc. I flat out don't like the view.

I didn't care for it back in Ultima 3(I think that was it)... I didn't like it in Duke Nukem.

I'd rather play Majjong than be subjected to that perspective.

 

[BadManiac]

Ultima Underworld, get it and dosbox and go play it, it's amazing.

 

[Phaen Grey]

I just found my Ultima 9 copy recently was going to install it again for grins.

 

[Zyon Rockler]

One of the Main reasons i Play UO is that it is not 1st person view. I like to see what is around me.

I'll never understand why people feel the need to argue. This isn't about taking away a feature of the game it's about adding one.

If you have chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream and someone says that chocolate ice cream is better and then everyone agrees oh yeah chocolate ice cream is so much better and then builds an entire world around it and just disallows vanilla ice cream at all. This doesn't make sense. If we add vanilla ice cream to the game then we can have both vanilla and chocolate and everyone can be happy.

In the idea of being first person view there could be a snap option where you could set the default view for war mode. So, if you were attacked or went to attack someone then the view would automatically snap to your preferred viewing style.

 

[Maplestone]

Anything is possible, but is it practical?

Yes, you could create a client that translated the 2d grid into 3d objects, but the game map is designed as a 2d surface. Based on the promo art for KR, they do have 3d models of a lot of the art, but even if they have it all, naively turning on 3d would give you a very skewed world - and all the decorations and housing in the land are created with a the 2d perspective in mind.

 

[Zyon Rockler]

Wouldn't it be possible to run the code through a system that would automatically draw the art based on what's already used as dimension to finish the drawing or complete it in a way that it would look correct from any view.

 

[Harlequin]

Logically, I think it would work the other way round, since the world will need to contain the 3D data.

That way the 3D rendering would be correct and the 2D client can just ignore the extra info that's not required (for even better efficiency, the server would not even send the extra data to the 2D clients).

 

[Crysta]

I should mention that, if I remember correctly, UO2 was originally running on a modified version of the Ascension engine, and definitely using Ascension's models and textures.

 

[Dragonchilde]

Can you imagine how some of the houses designed today around the illusions available in a 2D world would look in real first person? LOL.

 

[Zyon Rockler]

I'm not sure what they would look like. I'm sure when the devs use a flying camera view to look at their world, i'm sure they have a very good idea of what exactly the present
2d models look like from the view we can not see. But again you think it would be possible to have the engine self draw the other missing parts. Then, you would just have to add sky, tweak the thickness of floors and god knows what else, really would need to be done.

But, i'm sure for most of the objects you could create an intelligent engine or modify it to be intelligent so that when it sees the 1d perspective it could automatically create a
2d image. Kinda like a mirror, when you look directly at an object you see one perspective, the computer could then automatically mirror that image to the side you can not see and then calculate dimension. So, in theory it would become a 3d object.

So, the computer would only need some information to calculate the information it does not have and then just place the object back in the world in theory.

That would include being able to run the map code so that houses would become objects and the parts that you do not see are automatically drawn according to the part that you can see. Thus, a complete and finished building in theory. I'm really not sure if it would be possible but it would make more sense in making an engine that could do it for you, rather than drawing each pixel by hand in my opinion, of course.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

The problem with turning 2d sprites into 3d objects is that you need some idea as to the "shape" of the object in order to stick a sprite on it.

In UO, all characters are the same shape: They take up a tile and have no specified height. That's it. For example, from the game's perspective, there's no difference between a Crimson Dragon and a Rabbit in terms of how large they are. Some items (stuff you can pick up and move around) have a height property, but that's about it. There's no concept of width/depth other then "this item takes up a tile".

Some old sprite based games (eg Ultima 7, UFO: Enemy Unknown) actually DID have 3d data stored to correspond with the 2d sprites. In these cases it IS theoretically possible to create a 3d view and slap the sprites on as textures. Case in point.

UO, however, lacks this info. You'd need to create a model for every item in the game to make up for it. Oh, and assuming you could justify the cost of doing so, you'd then need to come up with an interface that compensates for the fact that you wouldn't be able to look past/target past things like you can in the usual client.... Walls for eg.

Edit:

One of the reasons I like certain games is because of the bugs. Once in U9 I dropped a staff, which promptly fell through the ground, slowly speeding up as it went. For some strange reason I found this hilarious.

You could also, on the other hand, create a stack of items - a sword balanced on it's point with a shield on top, for example - then climb on top of them. You could get into all sorts of interesting places by messing around with this feature.

Not to mention the skeletons - beat them up and they turned into a pile of seperate "bone" objects that'd re-unite if left alone for a while. Thing was, you could grab 'em all and take 'em with you, to set loose in a town somewhere...

Yes, the crashes were annoying and the story line severely broken. The game was never properly finished before release. But as a result many areas were left in the game with no purpose; you could spend an hour or so progressing through an area filled with puzzles and traps to find nothing at the end of it at all...

Er, that bit's kinda like UO, now that I think about it...

 

[Zyon Rockler]

Well it's good to know that it is possible but at the same time disappointing.

Part of the problem I think is that not many games would really have the need for a program that would convert 1d, 2d into 3d. If there was a real need for it, it would of probably been developed into a basic tool. But, it seems to become even more complicated in the case of UO.

Being that each tile is flat and contains no dimension and what bothers me is that each tile is seperate as well. It seems you would need some kind of xray of the tile to actually get an image at all. After all we can see the image on each tile so obviously there is some type of draw data, but when it comes down to it, it seems to me like UO is way overdue for a complete rebuild.

I'll keep my eyes open though for that magic wand. After all who knows what computers will be able to do in the next 30 years and hopefully someone will keep a copy. Thanks again for the replies.

 

[Harlequin]

One of the reasons I like certain games is because of the bugs. Once in U9 I dropped a staff, which promptly fell through the ground, slowly speeding up as it went. For some strange reason I found this hilarious.

You could also, on the other hand, create a stack of items - a sword balanced on it's point with a shield on top, for example - then climb on top of them. You could get into all sorts of interesting places by messing around with this feature.

Not to mention the skeletons - beat them up and they turned into a pile of seperate "bone" objects that'd re-unite if left alone for a while. Thing was, you could grab 'em all and take 'em with you, to set loose in a town somewhere...

Yes, the crashes were annoying and the story line severely broken. The game was never properly finished before release. But as a result many areas were left in the game with no purpose; you could spend an hour or so progressing through an area filled with puzzles and traps to find nothing at the end of it at all...

Er, that bit's kinda like UO, now that I think about it...

Same here! "Ocean crossing without a boat" ftw. Or stacking bread loaves to get back into the tower to get your spellbook (after using the teleporters to get a full set of armour), infinite pouches etc

Hyloth is one of the areas where RG says it was too difficult and had a exit placed midway. Only rewards for finishing it is some minor loot.

But it rarely crashed on my new PC though. I had a much more enjoyable time with it than my first play through and now think that it's well ahead of it's time.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

One bug that really worked in my favour was in the buc's den pirate house (or whatever it was). There was a glass cabanet in there with a blackrock tunic behind it... No door, no nothing, just a box with a sheet of glass showing the unobtainable contents.

I sorta just looked at it with my mouth open, then (for who knows what reason) moved the cursor over the glass and attempted to pick up the tunic BEHIND it.

It worked. >:]