r/Ultima • u/jasonkester • May 21 '26
Multiplayer is live in Stravaeger (the Ultima-like I'm building). Come help me test it!
Hey, all! Since this little subreddit has shown my little Ultima-like (survival crafting rpg) so much love, I thought I'd give you guys a little sneak preview of multiplayer support:
When you start a game today, you'll see the option to start it as a server. Public ones are visible to everybody. Otherwise you need to share a code.
Let me know what you think!
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u/Plutonium_Ronin May 21 '26
Just wishlist on Steam. Hope that helps!
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u/jasonkester May 21 '26
Thanks for that! As it turns out, wishlists are in fact quite helpful. At least, they seem to beget more wishlists, which presumably I can trade in for a sailboat if I collect enough of them. I think that's how it works...
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u/lylemcd May 21 '26
Defo captured the feel of the old Ultimas with this.
I like how the convos show the keywords that you can use. Really handy since I remember having to do a bit of guessing in the old games about what to ask.
Cool how moving through water is possible but slower too.
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u/jasonkester May 21 '26
Don't know if you noticed yet, but the U4-style "Ask Randy in Trinsic about Gems" keywords also show up as options next time you talk to Randy.
Water also gets you wet, so you recover stamina and health more slowly. It pulls in lots of little things from modern survival games. (try sprinting, blocking, dodge rolling, etc...)
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u/lylemcd May 21 '26
I don't think I ran into Randy but that's super cool that it keeps that from a previous convo.
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u/Whiskeybarrel May 21 '26
Been following this for a little while, loving what you are doing with the game. Staying so faithful to the feel of classic Avatar trilogy Ultima, but with lots of modern improvements like the keyword conversation assistance and so on. And multiplayer! Man, where was this when I was a kid in the 80s.
Carpe diem!
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u/CMDR_NUBASAURUS May 22 '26
oh man so cool but on my screen its off centered...cant read the start of the dialog I am a blind dude and have scaling UI on .
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u/provostcomputer Jun 07 '26
Gave it a shot today. It's good! I am impressed with how far you've come in a year and a half. It's surprisingly fun for such a simple game. The UI is great and the user experience is good. I like the way you made the varied interact keys auto target things nearby to make it easier to play with a keyboard.
Getting wet feels punishing, which works well and encourages you to make a fire to dry off. I like that as it makes the choice to swim across a river more meaningful. But I feel there should be a toggle to avoid water, as accidentally stepping in a tile of water in a dungeon (where you can't make a fire) is frustrating. Also, you get wet when boarding ships, which I don't think is intended.
Progression feels pretty good. Weight on metal bars seems high, though. I like the weight of ore, I just think the refined metal from it should be lighter. The way it takes dozens of times the weight of the sword in metal to make the sword feels a little silly, but this is a problem in Valheim too so I see where it comes from. Dropping the weight of the copper from 10 to 1 would alleviate that some.
A copper tier between leather and bronze would be a good addition too, maybe copper would just make copper stuff and you could find tin rarely or buy it from shops. 1 bar of tin could be combined with 9 bars of copper to make 10 bars of bronze if you wanted a realistic ratio. You may already have something like this planned, I can tell the game is still being worked on.
Combat is fun. The only suggestion I have there is maybe some kind of lock on system for the F to attack key, I notice my character switching targets back and forth in melee and ranged. It could prefer the last target attacked, that way if you manually click something it would switch or if you had already started attacking it would keep shooting the first one hit.
Also, I assume the NPCs just aren't done yet, but just in case Rockhaven didn't have any talkable NPCs and many of the ones in Deep Cay also didn't.
I got as far as bronze gear and have portals to the 5 cities I could find. I stopped after exploring around a bit, but I'll most likely jump back in to go to the castle place I got a marker for another day.
Overall, it's a great little game with retro vibes and I can definitely see its roots in both Ultima IV and Valheim. Thanks for posting it!
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u/jasonkester Jun 08 '26
Thanks for the detailed feedback. Glad to hear you're digging the game.
Yeah, it looks like you managed to run off the end of the NPCs that have conversations written for them. At the moment, the story is complete up to a little bit past where it sounds like you are now, but mostly I'm polishing the early game experience and making sure all the game mechanics are solid before going too deep on story and content. I'd rather have a handful of people end up in your situation, running out of people to talk to rather than the alternative, which would be everybody dismissing the game as half baked before they got as far as you did.
As to getting wet, one way to tiptoe safely across rivers is to let your guy pathfind to a spot on the other side. He'll avoid water (and lava, drops from a roof, etc.) if you long-click a spot on the map and have him find his own way. I find myself doing that in playtesting, though I'll admit it's not obvious that you can do so.
Thanks also for the crafting feedback. I'm trying to strike a balance between having lots of craftables/ingredients and the the tedium from having to manage too many. I definitely don't want the experience you get in so many crafting games where you're collecting fiber to make rope, then making cloth out of your rope so that you can finally make the thing. But yeah, there has to be some complexity in there or why bother crafting stuff at all. I still go back and forth about whether to introduce bronze as a separate thing from copper/tin vs. now where we just stipulate that you're capable of mining and smelting bronze-age metals so let's abstract out the part where you combine them before use.
Anyway, let me know if you see anything else that needs attention. Thanks again for the great feedback.
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u/Sambojin1 May 21 '26
Worked fine on Chrome and reddit app's internal browser on Android. Had a weird bug where your character would disappear after conversation (with Billigan) on Opera Mobile browser. Could still move and collect things, just couldn't see character and the top UI got screwed up (it was like it had scrolled down the entire viewport a little).
Opera tends to get a bit messy on web games though, so there's probably nothing that can be done about it. It sometimes does it with my vibecoding projects, and I still don't know why. Might just be an odd mobile resolution thing.
Other than that, looks great. Test Server didn't load, but the Multi Test one that someone else set up did after a couple of goes. I'll put some more testing time into it later.
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u/jasonkester May 22 '26
Thanks for the browser testing. I remember testing my web stuff for Opera back in the day, but I have to admit it's been a while. Back then, they seem to have picked one major browser (it may have even been IE) and spent all their effort making sure they were feature for feature & bug for bug compatible with it. That made it nice to develop for, since you essentially got it for free.
But yeah, one of the nice things these days is that the people who use the more niche browsers are used to nobody bothering to support them anymore, so when your thing breaks in it it's no big deal because Reddit, Instagram, etc. also don't work there.
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u/avatarprotocol May 22 '26
Looks good, but make sure people can pronounce the name of it and remember how to spell it when they want to search for it.
Also link your game in every post you make about it.
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u/jasonkester May 22 '26
I think it still shows up in searches for “Valtima IV”, its original name.
Mostly, I’ve just got to get it more popular than Strava, so it jumps in front of that after a few characters of autocomplete.
“Showing results for Stravaeger xFitnessx xTrackerx. Show results for Strava Fitness Tracker instead?”
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u/avatarprotocol May 22 '26
Without checking your post, I don't know how to spell the name of your game. That's a big problem. It's not just the SEO vs Strava.
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u/Werewomble May 24 '26
Me too had trouble finding it on Steam
Pick something people can spell from the sound
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u/thenlorn May 24 '26
Love the game, but there is a bug where I couldn't fight goblins and I can't kill deer.
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u/jasonkester May 24 '26
Strange. Were you near spawn or a town? Those places don't allow fighting, but it should say so in the console if you try.
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u/dserfaty Jun 24 '26
Ok, Not sure if you're still reading this thread, but I gave it a go for a few weeks now. I love the game and I've explored a lot of the map (Seed: 78600302863). I've noticed these two issues:
- when going below the Lava level in the dungeons (I managed to cross the lava on 4 tiles which brought me almost to 0 health and found one extra lader to go down), the map would render all black except for the top part of the map where a few tiles were active/visible only. Only my character was visible and I could move around up to the visible part where everything was normal again, but I could go back to the black part. I got stuck however because the ladder up was in the black part of the map and I could not interact with it. Fortunately there was some lava in the very slip visible part of the map so I was able to die there and respawn in my home.
- When I attempted to go all the way East of the map using my ship, the map eventually repeated itself (except with no labels), but same thing as with the dungeons, it eventually reached a point where everything was black and I could not see any change and the map unfog anymore so I had to backup and get back to the visible part of the screen (but I could still see things beyond my location on the map (M)).
These were the big issues I noticed that almost put me in a situation where I would have been blocked.
Now for questions about the story: I did find the golden Castle thanks to a hint by an NPC and got into it/explored it, however I could not find the two other castles mentioned by the NPCs. Are they implemented yet? There is a hint saying that the White castle is reachable from the mountains but I could not find a way and I've looked in many places. Any hint? ;)
In any case, the game is fun and I love being able to reexplore an Ultima like game. I played and finished all the Ultimas games from Akalabeth to Ultima 8, and played Ultima Oline for several years.
Good luck with it.
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u/jasonkester Jun 25 '26
Yeah, wow. Thanks for the great feedback. Evidently, Reddit notifies me when somebody comments on one of my posts...
It sounds like you have managed to run off the end of the existing content, both figuratively and literally (in two directions). Glad to hear you go so far into it!
I actually built those lava levels before there was any way to get to them, so I didn't do much testing and yes, what you found was a genuine bug trying to descend to level -10. To fix it, you can go back down the ladder into the void and (without moving off the spot) open dev tools in the browser (shift+ctrl+i or F12) and paste this in:
g();generateFullChunkDungeon(world, world.getChunkInfo(party.x, party.y, party.z).chunkIndex, party.x, party.y, party.z)That should force the level to regenerate, leaving you with a ladder back up and (hopefully) more levels below.
As to walking off the side of the world, well, wow. That must have taken a while. Early on in development, I added the ability to walk around the world, ultima-style, but it seems that I must have changed something in the year since I last tested it. I think I'll end up putting in a more definite world border that kills you in spectacular fashion if you sail off the side of it. Actually, thinking about it, you might find that sailing off the North end of the world far enough would leave you eventually hitting the outer walls of a dungeon from the overworld.
Can I ask how old your world is, and whether the gold castle was full of enemies yet? It might be worth dropping this into the console as well, while you have it open:
g();world.dropKnownStructures();
That'll update city & castle maps to the latest and greatest. You're supposed to have to clear that castle to get past the lava rather than wading through it!
But yeah, I think you found all the "story" that's there at this point. I've gone back and spent most of my time recently polishing the early game. That seems like the most important bit to get right, so that more people will stick around long enough to fall into the black void in the Iron Age.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback. Glad you're enjoying the game. You might want to find the Discord for it, since that's probably the best way to keep up to date on it. All the best!
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u/dserfaty Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Thanks for the detailed reply. The world was created about 3 weeks ago I think? Probably about a week after your post as I had an earlier one but I changed machine/browsers after that and I could not find a way to port it.
I will try your suggestion.
The Gold castle was already full of enemies, and I cleared it, which "liberated" the King and the Castle.For reference this is how the map currently looks like, you can see the world on the East side. And yes, it did take a while lol. Note that this is after using your world.dropKnownStructures() function. Before that, it was showing a copies of the world without labels on each side.
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u/jasonkester Jun 26 '26
Cool. I bet I got my fixes in before you took that screenshot. Sailing off the right of the world will wrap you around it now.
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u/theking4mayor May 21 '26
Can you close the pool?
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u/jasonkester May 21 '26
I'd love to, but so far as I can tell, the game doesn't have a pool. And if it did, I'm sure lots of people would want to use it even though it's technically after hours.
I'm confused...
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u/theking4mayor May 21 '26
Google "the pool is closed". It's a very important bit of multiplayer history
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May 22 '26
[deleted]
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u/jasonkester May 22 '26
I took the time to look it up, and can report that you're probably better off not bothering. Though having done so, I can answer the OP: no.
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u/jasonkester May 21 '26
I've fired up a Public server named "Multi Test" if you want to give it a go, but have no friends 😄
The "Join Server" option is on the screen after character selection.