Chad Cuddigan

12 Feb 2025

It's a little overdue, but @joshuaskelly.bsky.social and I released Delver seven years ago! What even is time!? How does star dust think? Does the chaos of the universe just pop out a video game every once in a while?! Anyways we're super proud of this. store.steampowered.com/app/249630/D...

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮

Reviving the Ultima Underworld editor

Chad Cuddigan reposted

@unormal.bsky.social

sloptober

Chad Cuddigan reposted

Nexxtic (Selaco Lead Dev)

@selaco.bsky.social

Replying to @selaco.bsky.social

"tHe IsSuE iS ThAT YouRe UsInG ReDDiT" Shut up. Indie dev communities were fun. Seeing what other people made kept me motivated through my own work in recent years. Now it’s just another casualty of the AI slop factory.

Adventures in decompiling Ultima Underworld! Decompiling the DOS build gives an inscrutable mess, but the Power PC port looks more promising as the assembly code seems to have been ported to C for this port

Couldn't resist trying to implement some quality of life features and then fullscreen mode kind of happened

@lorenschmidt.bsky.social

Still noodling, a transparent message area seems a bit nicer

Chad Cuddigan reposted

loren schmidt

village generation update: things are in a neat place now, where the villages are newly connected to the world sim. population is synced, and i'm part way making it so resources a town or city has, like ceramics, salt, etc. are actually reflected diegetically!

Been focusing on NPCs - fixed up their rendering and revived their AI state machine, but biggest of all: the Babl conversation VM was recoverable and is working again!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YttE...

youtube.comUltima Underworld 1 Pocket PC port recompilation projectYouTube video by Chad Cuddigan

Holy shit, an old DOS issue of the 90s magazine GameByte included a screenshot of the level editor used for Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 - I don't think I've seen this anywhere before!

A photo of the level editor for System Shock 1 was posted a few years ago, they look very similar, just re-arranged

(Thanks for posting these, @borman.bsky.social )

Holy shit, an old DOS issue of the 90s magazine GameByte included a screenshot of the level editor used for Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 - I don't think I've seen this anywhere before!

@unluckychloe.bsky.social

The rumor had always been that the editor and game were a single executable, this seems to show that it could flip back and forth between the game view and the editor.

Chad Cuddigan reposted

ⓘ chloe

22 Sept

terrain litter

20 Sept

Inventory and HUD are a lot more solid now. Working on this has made me wish more games let you nest bags in bags

21 Sept

Stats screen is starting to work too! That flip is wild, they capture the screen and then draw a series of squished and cropped rectangles to fake perspective.

12 Sept

Also starting to get some more object types like Critters, and 3d objects like the Doors and Door Frames rendering

13 Sept

Punch!

8 Sept

Movement is a bit more solid, object sprites are starting to show. Revived the scroll output too!

@nightdivestudios.bsky.social

12 Sept

Ultima Underworld uses the same 'pick index buffer' drawing that System Shock used to get pixel accurate picking

Chad Cuddigan reposted

Nightdive Studios

11 Sept

Huh... not so secret anymore, is it? youtu.be/VdVODbtS344?...

youtu.beThief: The Dark Project Remastered The Tarnished Mirror Teaser| Nightdive StudiosYouTube video by Nightdive Studios

7 Sept

Better!

7 Sept

5 Sept

Haven’t found the entry into the 3d world rendering yet, but the level looks to be loading properly. If I hack my way into the automap and reveal everything

6 Sept

Ship it

Wiring up some sleeps and palette fades has things looking a bit better, also fixed up the main menu buttons

4 Sept

Character generation is looking much better now, that weird rectangle in chargen was a special color that was telling the next draw to pull from a saved buffer instead of being stomped on. Now trying to get in game!

The blank rectangle on the left is the current mystery - this code seems to be a rect fill with a set pen color, but what it seems like it should be doing is marking that area of the screen as 'do not draw here'

Interestingly this simple rect fill is not that simple, it also seems to have a mode selector, and if set there are two special palette colors - 20 and 21 - which do a temp buffer save and restore respectively

So far this can get into character creation but most of the text does not render, except for the very end at the 'Enter a name' step. Continuing past this also just loops to the start of character creation again

Made some more progress, revived some of the mouse code which was mangled due to this port using a stylus and not a mouse. That black area at the bottom of the screen is actually an on screen keyboard that can be clicked on!

So far this stubs out the Pocket PC hardware functions so that we can use SDL instead. So far we can draw the framebuffer to the screen and can do some basic keyboard input

Interesting note: the Pocket PC ran the game rotated 90 degrees in portrait mode, so the framebuffer is actually 240x320 and not 320x240, to display properly it needs to be rotated back before drawing in SDL