PraetorJudis on 24/7/2000 at 13:22

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All right, I've decided to be a bit more explicit about my plans to create a turn of the century Ultima Underworld.

I (like many of you) have wanted to see this excellent game updated, treated to a lush and beautiful engine. I've yearned to experience the Green Goblins' fantastic hall with reflective surfaces and gold inlay textures. I've wanted to watch a Fire Elemental leap and flicker, casting light on the walls around it. I've wanted to hear a Lizardman say, "Tosa yeshor'click? Tosa sorr?"

Well I'm ready to give it my best shot. There is a third person melee combat game based on the UT engine coming out this fall (October is the current target). The game is called Rune. Here are a few links for more info:

(http://www.humanhead.com) www.humanhead.com
(http://www.3dactionplanet.com/ragnarok) www.3dactionplanet.com/ragnarok
(http://www.runenews.com) www.runenews.com

Why Rune, you ask? Many reasons.

a) It's jaw-droppingly beautiful.

b) It's based on UT and the UT engine is specifically designed with the modder in mind. It should be possible (and hopefully quite easy) to create each system needed for the conversion (dialogue, inventory, spell casting) seperately and hook them all together in the final product.

c) The combat system is already built.

d) The third person perspective (*winces and waits for the explosion of protests*) provides the perfect paperdolling model right in the game engine.

e) The goblin models are already built!

f) The dwar.. er.. Mountain Men models are already built!

This project will happen, even if I end up working on it alone. This project will happen even if it takes a few years to complete. I am starting school this fall for an Associate of Applied Science degree in Computer Animation. I figure that's going to come in handy. I'm a graphic designer, and I've done several maps for Heretic II (a few of which were greeted with warm, at least one of which, hostility *grin*). I've also done skins for Heretic II. I haven't coded since my Basic days in the mid 1980's, but I have an excellent Java resource available to me (friend of the family who... well let's just say he works with AI and he's good), and Unreal Script is compared to Java in every tutorial I've seen so far, so that should be helpful to me.

If you're interested in seeing screenshots of my work to date:

(http://www.pjsattic.com/images/maps) www.pjsattic.com/images/maps
(http://www.pjsattic.com/images/skins) www.pjsattic.com/images/skins

Now. *ahem* I will continue to monitor this forum daily (oft' times hourly) for reactions. If you are interested in joining the team, please send me an email at <a maimailto:Praetorjudis@pjsattic.com>praetorjudis@pjsattic.com</a>.

I also have a message board set up at my site. There's a public forum for the project, as well as a private password protected forum for those that end up on the team. The message board can be accessed directly from here:

(http://www.pjsattic.com/forum.htm) www.pjsattic.com/forum.htm

Let me know what you think!

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*gniltrohc yawa srednaw*

[This message has been edited by PraetorJudis (edited July 24, 2000).]

PraetorJudis on 24/7/2000 at 18:45

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Good point, ShadowJack.

Ion Storm has not (as yet) released it's editing tools for Deus Ex. This is a slight hinderence (to my mind) to using it as a base. The HumanHead folks have declared their intent to release RuneEd with the game, and have thus far been extremely cooperative about answering questions that the community posts on Rune boards. Also, they have become one of the only preferred provider for additional Unreal tech, so the code base is bound to be very tight and stable enough to build on.

That's point one. Point two is that I really really like third person perspective games and would love to see good RPGs built with 3PS engines.

Whatever engine used in the conversion will basically be a feature trade off. One game will have conversations and inventory, another will have item degradation, and good melee combat.

Hope that answered your questions!

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*gniltrohc yawa srednaw*

[This message has been edited by PraetorJudis (edited July 24, 2000).]

PraetorJudis on 25/7/2000 at 11:40

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To give you an example of how supportive HumandHead is, here's Tim Gerritson's response to my announcement (I didn't email this to him, he repied to a post on the Ragnarok boards):

<blockquote>Wow, we're flattered that you picked our game for this ambitious project. We wish the best to you and hope that our final product lives up to your expectations. It should be fairly simple to do everything you want to do within our engine. You will have to create your own conversation engine, but it shouldn't be that hard, especially with some of the cool scripting enchancements we've made. </blockquote>

Pretty impressive for a game developer to reply to a thread on the same day it's started, no?! And in a positive fashion, no less!



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*gniltrohc yawa srednaw*