Exult Ultima 7 RPG Remake -- for Nokia Tablets Arnim Sauerbier 2007.04.26 Installation: ------------- Install the gstreamer-tools package onto your Nokia tablet. Download the exult_*_bin.tgz tarball and extract into /home/user. Download the exult_*_data.tgz tarball and extract into /media/mmc1/games. Download the Ultima7_music_stereo_mp3.tgz and extract into /media/mmc1/games/exult. Put your Ultima 7 - The Black Gate files into /media/mmc1/games/exult/blackgate. Put your Ultima 7 - Serpent Isle files into /media/mmc1/games/exult/serpentisle. USAGE: ------ Execute the exult binary (/home/user/exult). Some gameplay tips: - Walking is via dpad. - Dpad-select selects menu items and goes through dialog. - To converse with characters double-tap them. Double-taps need to be accurate - not shifted in position. - To pick up objects, tap precisely and drag to one of your characters. - Activate objects with double tap - many objects in the game are usable! - Bring up game options menu with circular arrow - Tap on character portraits at bottom-left to bring up a display of your character. From here you can do inventory management and perform a variety of tasks Game options notes: - Selecting a smaller game window will not give you much faster scrolling speed - The only 2x scalers that work are 'point' and 'scale2x' - Digital music playback (dsp mp3) is implemented, but needs more testing Buttons mapped on Nokia tablet: * Fullscreen Button: Toggle Combat * Zoom Minus: Eat Food * Zoom Plus: Use World Map (circle-arrow to exit) * Dpad-Select: Enter key for menus * Circle-Arrow: Esc / Hide Menu / Toggle Game Setting * Menu-Button: Show maemo menu / toggle fullscreen Howtos, maps and walkthroughs can be found online. Investigate the murder, talk to the townspeople. Find what the key opens. When you have found the clues to the background to the murder, talk to the mayor. He will ask you copy protection questions, the answers for which Origin has kindly put on-line here: http://www.owo.com/archive/ultima7/coord.html If you experience any problems, please comment in the developer forum http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?p=46056#post46056 DEVELOPMENT NOTES: ----------------- Original code had several issues. - Nokia SDL_mixer did not support ogg or midi playback - Screen size too small - No support for keyboard input method - No shortcuts for common actions I've hacked it to use the full 800x480 screen, which is a bit slow without pixel doubling, but not as bad as i had feared. I couldn't get any version of timidity to reliably play back the U7 music with below 10% cpu usage. Best average was 12-14% with all options set to minimal. Maybe eventually i'll find a way to hack timidity to be more lightweight, but at this point it's not looking like a smart option. The obvious choice is to go with mp3 played back by dsp, as this uses almost no CPU. So i've been transcoding to mp3 tonight. The latest batch is decent quality but slightly larger than ogg source. Gstreamer was having trouble with my vbr mono encoded mp3s so i switched to 56k abr joint-stereo and haven't noticed any playback problems yet. I increased volume which led to occasional clipping, but that's preferable to not-hearing-anything during quiet passages. You'll still have the option to turn the volume down, but as they were there was no way to hear some of the sound effects/music in normal environments. Currently the mp3 playback is spawned as a seperate process using gstreamer-tools. This is somewhat inefficient and ugly, and it may cause problems in some situations. I plan to add proper dspsink gstreamer support in the future. The original Exult engine requires two-button mouse, or on mac mouse+command key to run/walk via clicks. I spent a day working on an alternate mouse input method that would collaps left and right click functionality into a single tap, but this had unpredictable results, so this is still a work in progress. Todo list: Make the todo list