Got exult running on the Nokia 770!



http://pupnik.de/exult770.html

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.

Sounds and speech work fine. Midi (timidity) and ogg playback not working yet. Hopefully both will be available. The ogg uses sdl's ogg playback, which isn't doing anything at the moment, although maemo's sdl-mixer appears to have this code. The exult timidity player builtin is erroring on all timidity.cfg options (such as loading soundfonts).

The original Exult engine requires two-button mouse, or on mac mouse+command key to run/walk via clicks. This is a big problem for the tablet (edit) Actually i've been playing for a while just using DPAD for movement, and once you're used to it, it's not bad. Just have to turn off button clicks in the Maemo control panel options, otherwise you get clicking sounds while holding directions down.


For the stylus, I'm working on a hack to run the whole game using just single and double screen taps. I remapped the rouble-right click to trigger path-search running if you don't click on a game object. This allows you to enter conversations, and should also allow you to pick up objects via click-drag, but that's currently still broken. (edit) Gone back to standard ui since the movement hack is breaking pickups.

In addition there are over 10 (edit nonessential) keyboard commands that could benefit from hotclick-areas, but they can also be accessed via stylus.

b Use spellbook (click on spellbook in inventory view)
c Combat mode (click on 'halo' in inventory view)
g Use Abacus (or just click in Iolo's backpack on abacus)
k Use keyring/Keys to unlock
j SI: Show jawbone
l SI: Show combat stats
m Show map (or just click on the map in backpack)
p Use lockpicks
Esc Show Game menu box and closes all open boxes (circle arrow button)
w Use watch, shows the time if you got a watch
z Show stats (click on heart icon of avatar or NPC)

i Show inventory (click character portrait open)
f Use food (drag food to character to eat)

(edit) It looks beautiful running full screen Graphics glitches now fixed!

(edit) Needs text input method for typing savenames and character name.

!

My kids will go nuts over this.

Will this work on the N800 too?

cool...
i downloaded it, but it is complaining about "config.xml"

Sorry, had a bad link up there.

Working on a new pre-release now. Graphics problems fixed! Here's the buttons mapped..

DPAD - movement
DPAD-Select = enter / select
Menu key - gets you to windowed mode and shows maemo menu

TODO:
- still need a keyboard to enter savenames and character name.
- music not working (midi or ogg)

i am happy to play one day ultima on my nokia

thank you

Download is broken

Yup, download link is broken at the moment.

Yeah no download link yet, sorry - looking to get that up as soon as music playback and savefile name generation works.

What's gonna happen is new savefiles will get a default name in format Date+Time. If you have a keyboard you can edit that, otherwise at least you'll be able to save unique savegame names w/o keyboard input.

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.

If you want to help, download and test playaback of the transcoded mp3s on the nokia, using whatever player you've got that handles dspsink playback. Audio player, mplayer and gst-launch filesrc location="FILENAME.mp3 ! dspmp3sink " all work.

Grab my Ultima7_music_mono_mp3.tgz (Edit - now downmixed to mono, 30->13MB) Let me know if the playback breaks / aborts. Remember, test with nokia dsp / gstreamer playback only! The mp3s play fine on pc.

The default destination directory for the stuff is in folder "music" in the exult data directory. This is settable in the exult config file.

As soon as the savefiles and dsp-based gstreamer mp3 playback works, i'll put up a testing binary. Later tonight i hope.

Music sounds good to me.