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Arx Fatalis Updated, Released Under GPL
Kevin Fishburne writes "According to WtF Dragon at Ultima Aiera, 'The long and short: Arkane Studios have released what is probably going to be the final patch for their Ultima Underworld-inspired game (which, indeed, they tried to license as the third entry in that series), Arx Fatalis. They have also released the source code for the game. That's right, the complete source of Arx Fatalis is available for download.' The readme notes that the original game installation is required in order to play the compiled game, as the data files are certainly still copyrighted. Linux is in need of a good FPS dungeon crawler, though the code will need a hell of a lot of cleanup as it's a VC8/9 project and uses DirectX (ugh...)."
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25782
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
If anyone can fix the input mechanisms for those spells using the source code, you'd be helping the game immensely.
Oh, and of course, remaking Ulima I & II would be a nice follow up... seems that's always been in the works for FPS modders, but it never seems to get completed. They're beautiful games that deserve the chance to appeal to modern gamers with a modern interface.
Ryan Fenton
and I am offended.
After recently building a new PC, I've been searching for some games to play. Since almost all of the PC games coming out these days have malware in them, this classic and now open source game looks like a good, clean alternative. This game came out in 2002, so it should also be just before the point when PC games became nothing but sloppy console ports. I think *that* happened circa 2003.
Arx Fatalis looks like a nice game, but Arkane studios only released the source code. I wonder how much work it will require to replace all the graphics.
Here is a video with sample game play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2MM8bn1Tew
Awful to cleanup? The awful part will be implementing it in OpenGL. OpenGL is garbage compared to DirectX these days. OpenGL had it's time and moved like a sloth and was surpassed by Direct3D at version 9. It's gotten better and more feature-rich since.
I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, but I've never heard of this game before. It sounds like a niche game. Can somebody give me a better description of it?
I know, I could google it or look it up on Wikipedia, but to be honest, I don't enough to do so.
This game is awesome. This is great news.
If you want to play FPS/RPGs, really, get a windows partition or a console. Not trying to flamebait or something, just being rational. The game is 8 years old, with the software engineering maturity of a random sample company that this fact implies. Data files being copyrighted. DX-based being ultra-fun to port. Nope, I can't see serious effort thrown into this. It only gets funnier with feature requests, improvements & bug fixes. The first post here is a request FFS, imagine the port's forums.
For research:
You have source code for Quake3. I bet it's coded far better than arx fatalis, and it's already there.
I think Fishburne meant to say that the "data files" are under different licenses (probably far more restrictively licensed) than the Arx Fatalis code. Since Arx Fatalis is licensed than it too must be copyrighted. So you may run, share, and modify the GPL'd Arx Fatalis program, but you don't have these freedoms with the "data files".
Digital Citizen
Sources/DANAE/ARX_Script.cpp is 13719 lines in size, most of which handles script parsing and evaluation simultaneously, in a uselessly convoluted way. It deserves a proper rewrite from scratch.
I do like how they used names from Greek mythology to refer to certain components of the source code: Athena handles audio, Eerie handles some graphics, Mercury handles user input, Hermes is probably there for communication or saving/loading, Minos is only there for pathfinding and Danae gets everything else.
But then I bought it on XBOX because, seriously, those spells really aren't easy to cast, especially not with a touchpad. At least with the xbox controlle,r you just had to follow key-sequences.
A little practice was all it took for me. Maybe you just suck.
I'm happy when people release source, but why do people think it is some sort of magical potion to create new software? This is especially true on Slashdot. I completely understand if you want to mod the existing source to patch the game, add on content or features, but for a new game, application, whatever, it's normally useless.
I do professional software development and I've worked for game companies as well as straight up businesses. I find that even the best written source that I authored is rarely useful for new projects. It's good to have a point of reference if you are inexperienced, doing something unfamiliar, or need something simple. I might say, "Hey I need to implement an A* algorithm, how do I do that again?" Anything remotely complex though in any real, decently designed piece of software ends up depending so much on the approach, tasks, framework, and environment it is developed. Even for simple algorithms like A*, it can depend highly on what graph library you use for example. It's nice to have if you've built an engine and you're releasing new software on the same engine.
In the real world though, often what happens is even when you write great code, technology advanced and the way you do things has to change. For instance I worked on PS3 projects and I might as well have flushed most of the significant game code I ever written down the toilet unless I wanted things to run like garbage. The same thing tends to happen when new versions of frameworks like OpenGL or DirectX come out. Especially in game programming, code becomes obsolete very quickly, usually as you write each line. What is valuable normally is the personal knowledge you gain from writing the old code, but that's much harder to gain from someone else's code at face value. Moreover, in game programming in particular, each game has such specialized concerns that huge chunks of code get written certain ways to be optimized for what you are doing. It's even worse in a commercial project because deadlines and such drive people to do incredibly stupid things to get out patches or builds. I wish I could get paid for the amount of times I fixed problems where someone just would add a random parameter, data type, or wrapped data type just to get something done rather than do it properly (you will see things like PlayerOptions2, PlayerOptions3 used side by side in real code because someone didn't want to change the old class).
Code reuse all sounds good on paper, but it ends up being mostly theory and pipe dreams. I do love having source to pick through, but usually it just says to me - wow, wtf was this person thinking, I can think of 10 better ways to do it. Like I said, good for inspiration and learning, bad for real application. I find it's usually the people that don't program or are really poor programmers who endlessly tout this kind of stuff. Bravo for releasing source, but boo to the summary for suggesting as much. Also boo for the jab at DirectX and VC - like it or not, people use it for a reason. I love Linux, but it's no joy to write games in, I'm sorry. And no, things like Boost and other popular C/C++ libs don't get used much in most real games for better or worse.
If someone can fix the impossible-to-get-outside-past-the-troll-in-the-cave-because-the-damn-objective-never-triggers bug so I can actually play the whole game for once I'd really appreciate it :)
Amusing CAPTCHA sequence today. Apparently I've had my bowels verified.
The FPS "modern" interface is, IMHO, overused and the addiction to virtual reality is what is killing the brain cells of the gamers. Profitable, sure, whizz-bang impressive makes profitable, sure, good games, definitely not.
The Ultima series is one of (perhaps only) the few that became better with sequels. That was because they were perfectly timed to progress with the progressing technology. Ultima I had good game play and story line but was primitive on graphics. Ultima II had good game play and good new concepts woven in but was similarly primitive on graphics. Ultima III (Exodus) took the intricate storyline concepts from I and II, meshed them together, and then put that into a fantastic and colorful UI with that completely outside background music.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
What I miss about Ultima ]I[ is that the graphics were good, real good, game play was good, real good, game complexity was good, real good, and story line was complex, real good--it was also top down 2D so your characters _really_ looked the way you wanted them to look, the encounters were top down 2D so the enemies _really_ looked as frightening and gruesome as you wanted them to look, the battles were not movie quality full-motion video so you could imagine your spellcasting and imagine the impacts and imagine the blow by blow the way you wanted to imagine it.
Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Looking at it, a lot of the init code revolves arounds windows stuff (HINSTANCE, for example), it looks difficult, somewhat.
And then, there are the damn tabs. Why does a "professional" IDE still use tabs for indentation?
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So you seem rather surprised and/or disgusted that a game that was written for MS Windows uses DirectX.
I guess if a Russian book written by a Russian author went public domain you would complain that it was written with a Cyrillic alphabet.
After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Portal.
Oh, does it have to be an actual shooter? Alright, then, how about...
Natural Selection.
Half-Life 2.
etc...
But I chose Portal because your complaint was about the FPS interface. Portal makes good use of that interface to deliver a decidedly non-FPS game. So does Penumbra.
There's more that could be done, but I think leveraging the years of experience people have playing FPSes, and just the overall fluidity of that interface for actually exploring a 3D world, is far, far better than trying to make any sort of 3D game in which you reinvent the controls, badly. If I recall, The Sims was particularly annoying -- completely different controls which ended up being less effective overall.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can get Arx Fatalis at Good Old Games for the required data files
Games like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and the like are crediting with innovating and pushing 3D engines. People always seem to forget Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld shipped a full year before Doom, ran on lesser hardware, and had a more advanced engine.
It really is a shame these two games aren't very playable on modern systems and have been forgotten in the mists of time.
I'd kill to see the GPL Arx Fatalis engine used to remake Ultima Underworld I and II.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
After a while, I figured out the trick. The rune stones that showed the direction/angle of curves were displayed not perfectly upright, but they were tilted maybe 10 degrees. So if you saw a line on a runestone that suggested a perfectly vertical line, it probably isn't what you were supposed to draw. Tilt your head to figure it out. But yeah, it was annoying until you learn about that trick.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
I think FPS games are more of a phase... I played lots of them probably starting with Doom (1993) and mostly ending with Unreal Tournament (1999) - my teens to my early 20s. If I had been born a decade later, I'm guessing I'd be playing the FPS games of a decade later but today they have no appeal to me. The fact is, if you take of those rosy glasses you were pretty easy to entertain as a teen. Give you action, give you splatter and you're entertained. In retrospect it's quite amazing how much I liked some rather braindead action flicks too, same thing. Particularly the single-player mode got all the complexity of Rambo, one man against a million of them. In the end I think it was "Capture the Flag" and my clan that kept me on UT, because they brought a bit of strategy and cooperation, pure deathmatch lost the appeal long before I quit.
So to sum it up, I don't think the games changed I think you changed. And there'll always be a generation of teens that want to play these games, just like there's always a generation of children to play children's games. Of course there are FPS games that appeal to a more adult gamer, that resemble real life where you have to sneak and cover and a few shots will kill you and there's real penalties for dying. But the whole "fantasy" FPS games where you dance around each other trying to hit the other guy with the rocket launcher and pocket nukes to get a MU-MU-MU-MULTIKILL and it's all about your mouse twitching skill are things I doubt appeal to many people over 25. Well, less so than other game types anyway as I still play games of Civilization and have done so since the original in 1991. I wouldn't be surprised if I sit these on the nursery home bored and whip up a game of Civilization XVII.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Towards the end of the accompanying license file, you'll find...
END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
ADDITIONAL TERMS APPLICABLE TO THE ARX FATALIS GPL SOURCE CODE.
While GPL3 authorises some flavours of additional term, these ones contain spelling errors - DAMAEGS, LIABLITY - which suggest they really haven't spent much time on this.
a tomato and a .. ... ...
nevermind, what linux needs is a good mmorg engine, that can handle the I/O (atk, def, dodge,crit, etc...) and synchronise
in real-time player separated by continents and with multi 100s milliseconds lag
the graphic is handled by the client anyways. just need to co-ordinate the "roll of the dice"
I think it's more of a preference, personally. I played Doom and Doom 2 and I'm still playing Fallout and Oblivion.
That's more or less saying "FPS games are for kids, and the ones adults enjoy don't count". I think you need to work a bit harder to establish your point here.
I knew there was a reason I stayed away from multiplayer ...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
One hears this argument a lot and it is bullshit. If crap graphics are better because they leave more to your imagination, should it not also follow that a game like Doom is better than one with a complex storyline because it leaves the plot to your imagination? If you can't cope with seeing what the characters look like, how do you ever manage to put up with being told what they say and do?
Would it be possible to port it to XBOX 360 with XNA or to a modded original XBOX with the underground XDK? The mouse input system would surely need to be overhauled to work with a game pad.
I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Then you missed out on a number of great FPS games like System Shock 2, Star Trek: Elite Force, Deus Ex, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Star Trek: Elite Force II, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Half-Life 2, Prey and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.
In fact, I would say the original Half-Life was crap. It was a generic shooter that didn't bring anything new to the genre.
This game was plagued by bugs when I decided to buy it a year or so ago on steam. It was basically unplayable from glitches with the graphics and slowdowns on modern hardware. Hopefully now we can kill 2 birds with one stone, update the graphics bugs and port to other os'es so others won't have to play in wine. It was a good game, and it's pretty cheap on steam (under 10 dollars last I checked) so it could use all the help it can get. Knowing the state it is in now, it will probably be much work, but it will add nicely to the games that went gpl lately, especially since they weren't willing to do any updates. I wish more companies would do the same for games they have no want to update to the latest os'es and just let rott in their IP library.
I think it's more of a preference, personally. I played Doom and Doom 2 and I'm still playing Fallout and Oblivion.
I played through Oblivion but I've no idea how you can call that a FPS, most people would put that squarely in the RPG category even though most RPGs have bows and arrows as well as ranged spells. When I think FPS I think more like Crysis, Call of Duty, Bioshock or Far Cry 2. Fallout is something of a FPS-RPG crossover. I'd say the essence of an FPS is that it's a high intensity adrenaline rush game that requires good aim and staying on the move, not just good equipment and high level. Most game modes particularly in multiplayer is one big rush from start to finish, there's never a second downtime. The further you get from that formula the less I consider it an FPS. In any case, I never said it was one size fits all - but I think many people consider that too much stress after a while..
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The graphics *were* good, they're horrible by today's standards. Furthermore, how can a top down 2D tile based game convey more realism than a 3D game depicting the viewpoint of one of its participants? That's why FPS's took off, they are more immersive. That's also why Half-life (a game you appear to classify as the last good FPS) was so well received - it was the first FPS game whose scripted events did not allow the camera to leave the player character's viewpoint. Take a look at the Deus Ex 3 boards and see how many people are up in arms about 3rd person cover, people are more at home with FPS style play. While I agree that most FPS games are terrible these days, or are halfway between terrible and good (e.g. mass effect 2 - great story, horrible cover based level design), the FPS system is not at fault, it's the nervous publishers who won't back a project that's a bit of a gamble. And yes, I think Call of Duty is ruining our children.
Have you considered that maybe Ultima ]|[ looked so good because you were younger and more easily impressionable?
And that is true. What Half-Life allegedly brought to the genre is the same thing Duke Nukem 3D brought.... it's an overrated credit moocher.
Not to mention it looked as good as anything else at the time...
Heck, I remember being quite impressed by how good Ultima 5 looked, and it's still the same level of technology as Ultima 3 & 4.
They just got smarter with the colors.
It was the Ultima Underworld 3, Origin-Looking Glass never did.
I think there's room for a little overlap in the categories, myself. RPG means the game has role-playing elements. FPS means it's a first person viewpoint. IMHO, obviously. Granted, "shooter" is probably a bit of a stretch in the case of Oblivion.
Well, if it helps I've played Crysis (lovely game, but too short and too buggy), Bioshock (loved it) and Far Cry. When I think about FC2, I imagine a scene at Ubisoft:
It's probably a better game than I give it credit for, but as a Far Cry sequel, it was a major disappointment.
And yet in Cysis I spent most of my time in stealth mode evading patrols. Likewise in Far Cry. Bioshock has a couple of mad adrenaline moments, but you can usually play tactically and manage the size of your engagements. I think you're describing a style of play more than a game genre.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
i played it a couple of times way back when but it suffers from a major bug, as your character levels it becomes hungry at an absurd rate so you can only kill so much stuff and gain so much xp before you find yourself starving faster than you can down food. hope they fix it by removing the whole hunger thing and just turn food into something that gives only a slight hp heal or does nothing.
captcha: chubbier
sometimes i swear that whole computer singularity thing has already occurred...
Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
Really? Have you played Oblivion?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
Really? Have you played Oblivion?
Ah, I read "first person simulator" where you meant "first person shooter". Agree, used to play a lot of shooters, got tired of it. Very little imagination in the genre, just an addiction to higher frame rates and more polygons. I suppose that is why Bethesda ended up aborbing id and not the other way round.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
really? first person perspective is a step in the right direction. a true virtual reality is indistinguishable from real reality save for setting and whatnot. we are nowhere near 'virtual' reality as it is. dont be bitter just because your favorite things are outdated, be bitter that the target audiences are so dumb and marketed to that it kills what legitimacy the medium once had as an expressive form.
They made millions from their Windows games and then later used a fraction of those millions to port to OSX. So that is a model that should be avoided?
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Yes because they could have made millions in the first place and not use any fraction later on and make more millions.
Using OpenGL is really win-win for game developers.
OP was talking about Ultima Underworld 1 and 2.