0ldsk00l / zu4 Goto Github PK

The moongate should rise from the ground and sink back in rather than simply showing up and disappearing in one shot.

The virtue cards should show up independently with a slight delay instead of at the same time.

There are too many settings for a game this simple. Some things should just be hardcoded so the user is not confused. Other things should be consolidated. Too many dials and knobs makes for a bad time for both the user and developer.

There are unfinished or incomplete tilesets that should either be finished or eliminated from the game and archived for potential future use.

The intro sequence is inaccurate. The background should not be shown outside the border, and the border should not have rounded edges as it expands outwards.

Sounds are currently just played naively with no logic around timing or looping. This needs to be brought in line with the original ports.

There is random flickering of tiles. This needs to be eliminated. Current plan is to completely rewrite video rendering to be similar to how it is done in emulators.

This seems to only be a problem in the intro scene.

I took screen shaking out during the transition away from SDL 1.2. It should be reimplemented.

The game engine should be completely separate from the user interface layer, and able to be compiled as a standalone module, accessible using a simple internal API. This will allow anyone to write a very simple interface for whatever platform they like, without having to depend on any external libraries like libxml2 or SDL. Those dependencies need to be eliminated from the internal game engine before this can be done.

The game seems to lag a lot, and something this simple should not have these performance issues at all. I have not investigated thoroughly enough to determine why this is.

C++ is a powerful language when used correctly. Nobody uses it correctly. A codebase for something this simple should be written in C so that people can read it and it is easily maintainable into the future, as well as portable to unforseen, obscure platforms that do not have a good C++ toolchain. Over time this codebase will be moved to C-like C++ and then to actual C.

I was wondering what could be done to help testing for game logic. Any tools to put original Ultima 4 in same state as xu4? Are there random number generators that could be synched?

Maybe it's an intractable problem, but there aren't many players who can dig down and verify correctness anymore.

Cheers! (go C!)