It's heading in the right direction I think, but it still needs alot of work

I don't think so. Just lock down the camera so you can rotate the game world only around the Z axis, which points up, around the center of your screen where the character is.

The resulting looks would still be faithful to the current UO look. After all, you can rotate most tiles and objects in UO already, even in the 2D client. Currently it is just a matter if there is 2D artwork or not. Just take your house deco tool and try it.
That is how I would imagine a rotating client to work - except the whole view could rotate and not just single objects and it would not be in 90° steps but seamlessly - without change to camera angle or focus - the perspecive would still be isometric. Imagine it like rotating a grid on which the tiles are arranged.

Now why is this hard in 2D? An artist would have to hand draw every single side of an object, for every direction it can face - north, south, east, west.
Why would it be easy in a 3D client? You model an object in 3D studio max or any other 3D app and in there you can turn it every direction you want - seamlessly.
Example, a chair in UO 2D has to be drawn 4 times by an artist so you can have it face in every direction in your house. In a 3D environment you just have to model a single chair instead and you can rotate it to face any direction.

With this said, I think it would be quite easy - or at least much easier than now - to create a world where you can rotate the view around your character. However there would still be a fair amount of work for OSI to do. They would have to test that the world still looks alright from all directions and they would probably have to "fix" one or the other NPC building or landmark.
Also they would have to make sure every 3D object looks nice from all sides. But I think this is the goal of the UO:KR anyway. To get away from tediously hand drawn tiles and frames, to proper 3D meshes.

*agrees with Floria*

If they wanted to be lazy instead of hand drawing everything, couldn't they do the initial model in a 3D app and sorta copy/paste each angle (say every 3 degree so needing 120 per object) into a 2D still?

DiP, this technique is currently used in UO:2D, and has even been used in Ultima 8 Pagan. The UO characters have always been 3D - sorta. The same applies to the characters in Ultima 8. But there is a huge disadvantage

Let me elaborate a bit...

The characters were created and animated in a 3D program. I don't know what was used for UO but I know 3D Studio DOS was used for Pagan. Then all animations were rendered out to single images - like frames in a film (the 2D still you referred to).

There was a "running-north", "running-south", "running-west", "running-east" animation which consisted of a few single images. Then there were animations for walking, idling, jumping, parrying, attacking - for all 4 directions. In UO there is even more - in UO this exists for EVERY piece of clothing, armor, basically every item that can be worn.
You can view all this when you download InsideUO. It's an enormous amount of data that sits on your harddisk. Tons of single images that add up to animations.

This is true for the characters in UO. They have always been 3D in a way. Except they were pre-rendered at Origin's studios. In the 3D clients, the 3D data gets rendered locally by your own 3D card and there is no need for tons of pre-rendered stuff. Drawback is that you need a good video card because now your own PC has to do all the work.

Anything else in the 2D client - terrain, items (from furniture to house tiles), effects - has most likely been hand painted by an artist in Photoshop or some other 2D app.

P.S. Here is the site of Origin artist Denis Loubet, who created character art for U8. You can even download some of the 3D meshes: http://www.io.com/~dloubet/

Neat site

something you could do with a 3D client, which I think would be cool...



I did this real quick with 3D studio max. I grabbed the textures from the current client using InsideUO. It's just a quick hack, that's why the character is pretty much stationary. But I think it gets across what I would like to see in a proper 3D client.

Thanks for elaborating. That would be a nice addition if they added it.

I though I read somewhere that they were not adding the rotating camera views

yeah, but I think they should

I think it's definitely possible, but it will sure require some extra work. Maybe we can expect this in a future upgrade to UO:KR. That would be sweet.

ahhh, yeah I like the rotating camera view just wasn't getting too excited about it since they are not adding it on the release date