Iris2.de

In my eyes UO KR might be the doom of the UO freeshard community. I mean, of course there is a loader for UO KR and well I guess in about 1-2 years we might be lucky enough to get some scripts and what else to actually support UO kr on RunUO and other server emulators.

But, I wouldn't bet on it. RunUO has officially said that they wouldn't support KR client and even though I don't have any info about POL I guess their views are pretty much the same.

And, I have noticed that the player base on freeshards are slowly dieing. Because of other games coming on the market like Hellgate: london, world of conan (or what ever its called) and whatelse that just shows the middle finger to the crappy old 2d gfx (that I still love but got to say good bye to)

Now, Iris 2 is for me the solution to get players back. Hell it's the freaking solution to never ever have to think about a EA update that might be having a new encryption and what else.

Iris 2 is what will make us server owners and players to be able to actually make a game as we now got the possibility of making own 3D models and what else.

So, when don't be offended when I....
*whips developers* "We need this freaking done ASAP!"


And thanks for actually using your time to save the UO freeshard community from falling apart! I have been a part of the freeshard community for 5 years or more.

oh btw I have been up for like 19 hours now coding for my really customized shard so sorry for any typo's in here as my brain stopped functioning for like 3 hours ago.

Thanks again.

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Star of Chaos - RP Race/Class Runuo Server.

Thanks, nice to hear this from a community member !
Well this is why we are doing this. We want to get away from EA and be independant. But it's much work. Esp. the graphics. When we started Iris 2.0, we thought, the community might help us, doing an fully independant client.
But 95% of the work is done by 4 developers. I don't know why the community/shardadmins didn't realise the chances. We really need skilled 2D/3D Artists.

It's true, that Iris2 needs a lot of work to get Iris2 pvp able. But everything needs his time and for only 8 Month of development, i think Iris2 is great.

If your shard supports Iris2 or maybe migrate to an Iris2 only shard, we can add it to our supported list.

We can also add it to predefined freeshards in config.lua.dist.

UO:KR has too much deficits (no serverside gumps, ...)

I wish I knew how to model ;(

Have you guys tried mass recruiting different places where UO is or used to be popular ? wtfman.com and so on or maybe runuo.com. Should show them how far iris has come !

even though I cant see ;( stupid vista

We have posted Iris2 thread at runuo, pol, sphere and so on.
recruitment is not our aim, people do somethign for iris2 or not. we don't have the time to show all people how to model or making graphics.
therefore we have our wiki. we answer questions and help a bit, but we are not paid and do this in our freetime (and this is very short). we better develop iris2 and we will see, if some skilled people are interested in helping iris2.

Iris 2 is such an open project, any one has the chance to join.

However, the critical issue is EA will not longer release 3D models for mobiles, instead they moved back to the ugly 2D world. Sure, the Shader in KR and everything might help Iris, but building the entire game's 3D model requires a huge commitment, and it'll take a long time, not matter how much harder you can whip the iris devs

The other problem is with the way UO's world is modeled, as pointed out earlier, the height of all models are not to realistic scale. That means you simply can't build a world that supports both 2D client and a pretty 3D client (a world with no buildings but just grass, sure). This might also be the reason of why UO2 must be a totally separated project - one that directly competes with UO and got shut down.

However, I hope KR at least can gave Iris team some Insight into how a totally different client can integrate into the world. For example, the way KR translate gumps using Lua script on the client side is very interesting. Similarly, effects and interfaces are also supported via Lua script - something that's directly accessible to us. I'm sure Iris can borrow something useful from these

_________________
The New Jarry's Ultima Online Server
Since July 1999
One of the longest lived (and still active) Chinese UO Server
http://www.uofans.com

Iris brings my hope up!

hey pmouse.

how stable is Iris2 right now ? Can you tell us what your users are talking about when playing with iris2?

what do they expect or what features do they want?

what needs improvement to full playability?

regards

SiENcE

Currently they only use Iris to take screenshots when there's an event - this is because the Unicode support is broken, they can't even communicate with others in Iris.

Most of the players in TNJ has at some point tried Iris (and UOKR) out. All I can say is many just uninstalls KR directly, but kept Iris on their hard drive.

Also, since shaders and such are not causing any problems, you might want to enable them by default, in the config.lua.dist file. It does have a significant impact.

annnnnd finally, correct mount display and mount animations!!

Regards,

PQ

_________________
The New Jarry's Ultima Online Server
Since July 1999
One of the longest lived (and still active) Chinese UO Server
http://www.uofans.com

Iris brings my hope up!

aye, i'll be working on that next =)

I've been a Freeshard UO'er since the Cir days of UOX. I've worked with UOX3, RunUO, bit'o'POL, etc.

Every few months I hear that UO/Free UO is dying etc etc etc. Every few months I see shards get 100-200 player boosts. It ebs, it flows. Life goes on.

The problem I see now, though, isn't a client thing. Yes, for awhile, people were getting tired of the same old 2D client, and hoped for an Iris-esque client to compete with the EQs of the world, while retaining the shear DEPTH that UO has to offer.

Time went on, we got the terrible 3D client from OSI, we got KUOC/PlayUO, which was more 2D, and we got Iris. Real 3D. A way to view the UO world the way it was MEANT to be seen (especially Ilsh and AOS).

KR is not a bad client, per se, it just suffers fataly, in my eyes, from the same thing that all the UO clients (including Iris) suffer from, due to what UO is at it's core: It's a tile based game.

Tile based games are easy to manage and code, a breeze to decorate and work in, and fundamentally flawed in terms of true immersion.

Iris is fast becoming a wonderful UO client, and has already surpased most of the 3D OSI client in terms of base features, but the biggest problem is that this wonderful, feature-ful, Orge3D based client is limited to... Tiles.

The biggest issue with a tile based world is that everything is limited to x tiles per action. Everything is required to be "turn based" in a tile environment, even if it's a "real time turn base".

This heavilly detracts from the feeling and flow of a "real world". It also looks damn peculiar in 3rd/1st person when walking

If/when someone takes the opensource RunUO code and Iris code and changes it to be less tile-centric, then there would be a very good, fast, viable MMORPG Server/Client set up that could theoretically do more than EQ, WoW, and UO.

Best of all, with the ample use of custom/non-OSI MULs, Graphics, Sounds, and Maps, it would be 100% free and 100% legal.

Until that happens, though, I think UO is finally on the slow decline that people have been predicted since Fall 1999.

_________________
Time is a plaything; But if it breaks, you're f*****.

making the movement of the player itself non-tilebased is possible without changing the server-code (e.g. with clientside collision detection and a few tricks), and that should greatly increase immersion i think.

@pmouse:
@psz:

thanks for your posts .

Currently we can't activate shaders directly, because we have no real fallback to UO Art. It's handled different and not every User has shader 2.0 .

_________________
http://crankgaming.blogspot.com/ | https://twitter.com/#!/crank_gaming

I have to say I am amazed at the progress you folks have made to Iris since I first used it a year ago.
I find that both Stable and Unstable use a lot of RAM, but I don't have a lot of physical RAM so it's probably just my computer. I know that you want player feedback so here are a few suggestions that I'm sure many people would love to see ultimately:

* Movable healthbars
* Queue Targets
* Less ram usage in 2d mode (Ok that's just for myself )
* Spellbook icons being movable
* Variable game window size

I simply LOVE your client, even in its current state and will continue to test it and offer feedback. THANK YOU

hi,

* Movable healthbars
? you mean a healthbar moving with it's mobile?

* Queue Targets
might be worth

* Spellbook icons being movable
What do you mean? They are moveable.

* Variable game window size
Again what do you mean? You can resize the Gamewindow like you want if you play in Window Mode. If you play in Fullscreen, you can reconfigure the resolution from main menu "gfx-config".

- Spell icons: I can't pull them from the book in the current unstable, but I may've missed something :<

- Healthbars: I meant that I can't manually 'pull' the healthbar of a creature and position it on my screen. I have to target creatures by clicking the auto-healthbar below the map(which is nice), but it would be a nice option for users to have a choice:
http://img81.imageshack.us/my.php?image ... arspv4.jpg

- Game window: Like in the OSI client and/or Razor, the 'viewable window' size of the game isn't the same as the 'total' window size of the game like here: http://img123.imageshack.us/my.php?image=uosa9.jpg


Some people like to pull spell icons, healthbars, skill gumps, etc. in the black area around the edges, that's all. Sorry if I'm asking for strange things

movable healthbars : i think you mean dragging the little healthbar gump dialogs from mobiles, it's possible with ctrl-double-click already, direct dragging was conflicting with cam controls in 3d, but i'll try to add it to 2d soon.

you can already drag them from the namegumps that appear when you hold ctrl+shift, that's brand-new in the unstable version =)



Queue Targets :
MacroCmd_QueueTargetSerial(targetserial,timeout)
is already available for usage in hotkeys =)
we're planning to add a gui for editing the hotkeys, and problably simple razor-like macro recording&editing.

Variable game window size :
very tricky in 3d due to cam-perspective offset, this would break culling etc if there is no support for such an offset in ogre.
might be easier to realize for 2d, but i'm suprised that it's so popular (got that request a few times already), i haven't seen it in any other game besides uo i think.
It's somewhere on the todo, but after the graphical hotkey&config editor =)