Michael Hilborn — AKA A New Breed of Dragon — is a name well known to those who have played through (or who followed the development of) Lazarus. But before there was Lazarus, there was another fantastic work of New Breed’s Ultima-inspired storytelling, which was Ultima: The Dark Core.

What was arguably the first browser-based Ultima spinoff (take that, Lord of Ultima!) is once again available for download here at Aiera, and I have also updated the project entry with some notes and considerations for getting the game running on modern systems. Downloads to compatible Internet browsers (The Dark Core’s requirements are, sadly, very specific) have also been added.

Some of you may recall that Aiera did in fact play host to a demo version of Arkane Studios‘ epic, Ultima Underworld-inspired RPG Arx Fatalis. Also to be found were a handful of update patches in various languages.

I rather doubt that the collection of files was ever all that complete; the demo was available in English, German, and French, while the update patches were available in English, Italian, and French (so I’m missing, at minimum, one demo version and one patch). Be that as it may: what files I did have are once again available for download.

Yeah, I know, there’s nothing particularly Ultima-related about BioWare‘s Dragon Age series of games. At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the Dragon Age toolset is ludicrously powerful and would, I think, be well-suited to developing an Ultima adventure in.

And hence, I’m reporting this, because as I previously noted, my goal was — and continues to be — to expand Aiera‘s scope somewhat to serve as a kind of developer connection for people wanting to tell an Ultima tale. Keeping abreast of available engines and toolsets is a big part of that.

And who honestly doesn’t think that Dragon Age 2 won’t have a wicked toolset? Update: I have been informed by JasonNH that Dragon Age 2 will not have a toolset. Which, frankly, sucks.

(via Joystiq)

I’ve grown tired of manually updating the Ultima Facebook page with news from Aiera every time I publish, so I’ve installed a new plugin, called FacePress, to automate the process.

This is, admittedly, mostly just a test post to see how it handles things, but I figured some of you might be interested to know, in case you had your own WordPress blog and Facebook profile, and wanted some means of echoing every blog entry onto your Wall.

You know, because you’re awesome like that. You’re a fan of this site, after all.

The long-time reader will know that I have a fairly broad selection of daily reads, including many political, religious, and gaming sites and blogs. The long-time reader probably does not know, however, that I also follow a few game blogs of a very different sort. Perhaps I should capitalize the ‘g’, as well; these blogs pertain to Game, the social interaction study and model that is primarily the purview of pickup artists, but also works as a general means to understanding interactions between men and women in social (and intimate) situations.

One such blog is The Spearhead, and I was struck by a post there recently in which the author spoke about his desire to cater to his international visitors by blogging not only in English going forward, but in other languages as well.

Now, I’ve tried before to learn other languages (Ukrainian & French, specifically) and the result has always been the same: I get praise from my teachers for my ability to properly inflect the words I’m reciting, but I’m never able to actually internalize the language in my memory so as to be able to draw upon it outside of the classroom context. In short: I can mimic a language well enough if I have something to read in front of me, but I seem to be completely unable to learn new languages.

Now, in looking at my site reports in StatCounter, I observe that traffic to Aiera comes from many countries. The United States ranks highest, not surprisingly, and is followed immediately by Canada (my home country)…but the remaining eight countries in the top ten are all European:

1. 32.60% United States
2. 12.40% Canada
3. 11.60% Germany
4. 8.40% United Kingdom
5. 4.00% Finland
6. 3.40% Portugal
7. 3.20% Italy
8. 3.00% France
9. 2.80% Ireland
10. 2.80% Australia

Some of these countries are also English-speaking countries…indeed, running the blog in just English, I cater to the national language of 59% of my visitors.

However, I’m thinking it might be nice if I could bring on board two or three (or more) additional editors who would be willing to transcribe — occasionally, if not frequently/consistently — site news from English into German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, or maybe even Finnish. I realize that this would technically result it some duplication of posts and content (given Aiera’s integration with e.g. Twitter, I don’t want to go the route of using the translation plugin that Team Return uses)…but I think it would be a nice feature to offer, even if only on occasion, to some of my visitors from countries not situated on the North American continent.

If you’d be interested in assisting with this endeavour, good reader, either drop a comment below or drop me a line privately.

Sergorn Dragon reminded me that even though I had announced his ambitious project — for which I am a member of the production team — on Aiera previously, I had not yet added a project entry for the effort.

That oversight has been rectified.

In Edmonton, the coming weekend is a long weekend, which means I will be offline (or, at least, away from the site) until Tuesday. As such, I will be using that time to test a new template for the site that I’ve slowly been polishing up. Come Friday afternoon, Aiera will look quite a bit different.

Now, let me reiterate that this is only going to be a test. I will be deploying a new template (‘Milano’, by this guy) in place of the current one (‘Aspire’, by these guys); no site content will be changed or removed. And come Tuesday (or possibly late Monday) I’ll put the ‘Aspire’ theme back in place while I review comments that I hope — and I’m stating this now to get your attention — visitors will leave.

Truth be told, I’m not 100% satisfied with the ‘Millano’ theme, though it has a few nice features (such as a jQuery-driven rotating featured content pane, dropdown menus, and other stuff) that are the primary focus of my test. ‘Milano’ likely won’t be the actual new theme I select for Aiera, but I want to see how people react to different interface elements that the new theme, whatever it ends up looking like, will probably feature.

So come back on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, and leave your thoughts!

Forum user Saxon1974 alerted me to the existence of the two MP3s linked from this forum thread, which feature an interview that Ultima creator Richard Garriott gave during the production of my personal favourite entry in the series, Ultima 6.

It’s not really the sort of thing that would merit a standalone entry here at Aiera, but I’ve uploaded the mp3s to the site and present them here for your listening pleasure, good reader.

Part 1:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Part 2:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’ve just added a project entry for a very promising-looking Ultima 7 remake using the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine. As yet, the team has only released screenshots of their work, and in truth they may never release more than that since the remake was part of a game design course offered at a college in Singapore.

Still, in the hope that they’ll push something out the door in the next little while, I’ve added Team Exalted Crown’s offering to Aiera; check thou it out!

(hat tip)

The good folks at Team Archon have posted a notice concerning a plot-stopping bug in version 1.0 of the Ultima 6 Project:

Team Archon is currently working on a patch (1.0.1) to address some problems with the 1.0 release, one of which will prevent you from winning the game. This patch will be compatible with your saved games from 1.0, and therefore all players should download and apply it immediately once it is released. We need your help to make sure that all players get this patch, as they will eventually get blocked and be unable to proceed without it. The patch is nearing completion and should be available before too long.

If you are already blocked, we may be able to distribute an early, “experimental” build of the patch to those who would like to try it (at their own risk). Make sure you save your game before applying the patch. If you have questions about this, we recommend that you post them in our forum. We will be making an announcement here and on Project Britannia when the patch is publicly available.

Aiera will be hosting the patch when it releases; if you need/want it before then, follow the link above to the Project Britannia forum and let then know.

If so, you should follow you some Ultima Tweeters.

Like Aiera, for example. And also Team Return.

If you know of any other Ultima fans who tweet, or Ultima-related Twitter feeds, drop ‘em in the comments.

Produced by: Team Archon
Website: The Ultima 6 Project
Releases:
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (1,015.3 MiB, 2,684 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (1/10) (105.0 MiB, 13 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (2/10) (105.0 MiB, 13 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (3/10) (105.0 MiB, 15 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (4/10) (105.0 MiB, 13 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (5/10) (105.0 MiB, 12 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (6/10) (105.0 MiB, 13 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (7/10) (105.0 MiB, 12 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (8/10) (105.0 MiB, 12 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (9/10) (105.0 MiB, 12 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project v1.0 (10/10) (69.2 MiB, 15 hits)

Milestones:
* Milestone 1 (147.9 MiB, 105 hits)
* Milestone 2 (225.6 MiB, 100 hits)
* Milestone 3 (270.9 MiB, 109 hits)
* Milestone 4 (356.8 MiB, 107 hits)
* Milestone 5 (442.5 MiB, 96 hits)
* Milestone 6 (140.0 MiB, 107 hits)
* Milestone 6 Patch (3.2 MiB, 94 hits)
* Milestone 7 (713.7 MiB, 113 hits)
* Milestone 8 (Beta Release) (808.9 MiB, 112 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project Beta 2 (834.0 MiB, 313 hits)
* Ultima 6 Project Beta 3 (994.9 MiB, 192 hits)

Tools:
* Font Builder (619.0 KiB, 114 hits)
* Interface Designer (1.2 MiB, 117 hits)

Tech Demo:
* Tech Demo (36.8 MiB, 108 hits)

Another Dungeon Siege-based remake, this high-profile (and high-tech) project aims to re-create Ultima 6, adding many of the same features to the game that Lazarus added into Ultima 5: enhanced music, expanded storyline, new characters and additional side quests.

The project has been in the works for a number of years, but their development pace has seemed to surge ahead in the last year or so; they’ve achieved several milestone releases since first being posted to Aiera, each one adding vast amounts of additional functionality to the game.

When Aiera began, if you Googled the site’s name (just the ‘Aiera’ part), the first link was this group: the Asociación de Importadores y Exportadores de la República Argentina.

That was then. This is now:

I couldn’t have done it without you all! Man, but I love the Ultima community.

Just in case you were wondering what happened to it.

Truth be told, I’m not sure yet if I’m going to keep it. I’m porting the article images over to Flickr at the moment, and I might eventually move the rest of the gallery there as well. I’m not sure yet. Support for WordPress/Coppermine integration is…lacking, which is also an obstacle to continued use of the gallery. Conversely, there are a couple of quite-decent gallery schemes for WordPress itself which I find I’m tempted to leverage, assuming I can give users access to just the gallery and not the ability to post articles.

And there’s the matter of the theme; I’d like to find a Coppermine Photo Gallery port of either the forum theme or this theme, rather than stick with the “I threw it together in an hour on a weekend” theme that I currently have in place (which was supposed to be a port of the previous Aiera theme).

But while I’m still deciding all that, the gallery itself is, at least, open for business once again.

So I missed restoring a download yesterday; two will be up and running by the end of the day today as a result.

In the interim, let’s revisit a point of interest. Previously, in September of 2009, I offered a look at the site’s download statistics:

Total Files: – 197
Total Size: – 3.0 GiB
Total Hits: – 4,295
Total Bandwidth: – 50.0 GiB

Those numbers were pretty impressive; they represented the sum total of download traffic that Aiera had seen since mid-April of 2009, and then with only about half her downloads actually in a functional state.

Here are the current numbers:

Total Files: – 340
Total Size: – 7.5 GiB
Total Hits: – 31,403
Total Bandwidth: – 902.1 GiB

So…let’s review. The count of files available for download has increased about 173%, and the total storage footprint of the downloads has increased by 250%. The count of clicks on download links, meanwhile, has increased by a whopping 731%.

And then there’s the bandwidth. Since April 15th of last year, Aiera has served up nearly a binary terabyte of downloads to Ultima fans; bandwidth has surged ahead a mind-boggling 1804% since last September.

I don’t often bleg, and won’t make a habit of doing so, but if any of this has any meaning to any of you, perhaps contemplate hitting up the tip jar, which you can find, right-aligned, at the bottom of the “single post” view of any article or project entry on the site. The hosting and bandwidth doesn’t pay for itself, after all.

In case you happened to want MPU-401 General MIDI support for your Serpent Isle installation, the patch which enables it is once again available.

I have to confess, I’m somewhat ashamed; many of the links I’m correcting direct back to the days when I was still running Aiera as a subdomain of another site of mine. How out of date can I be?

This download restoration process can’t finish soon enough, it seems.

L@Zar0, the fella who alerted me to the existence of the aforementioned Spanish translations of Serpent Isle and The Silver Seed, also posed a question that I didn’t have an answer to. It concerns whether or not a particular utility exists for Ultima 8, and I don’t think Aiera currently lists anything that satisfies the request. (It’s also possible I’m mistaken and just missed noticing the utility in the relevant category.)

Anyhow, since the community has in the past proven so fruitful in coming up with answers, I’m going to put this one out there

Do you know some tool to decompile/compile usecode for ULTIMA VIII:PAGAN? I know that there is a tool to extract every function (but it does not decompile). I know that there is a tool to dissassemble every function, but I don’t know any tool to assemble again the function (i’m programmer, but no so good ).

I’ve contacted with some of the Pentagram developers but they can not help me (nor answered).

I want (or need) a tool like this to make a translation for Pagan (in Spanish) from the 2.12 English version. 2.12 version was never released in Spanish and there was no patch ever. Also, the Spanish version has a bug in which Devon does not give to the Avatar the key of his chest to get the Tear of Seas… so the game is unfinishable by normal methods. It is possible use a tool named u8menu to activate the “Destroy” cheat, and destroy the chest which contain the Tear, but nothing more.

If you can help me I appreciate your efforts.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I’ve restored the download link for the Ultima Underworld 2 Character Editor. It’s a simple little utility, command line-based if memory serves, for modifying character statistics in…well…Ultima Underworld 2.

Also, I’ve just been informed that the final version of the Spanish translation of Serpent Isle (including The Silver Seed, by the way) has been released. I’ll be adding that to the site — or updating Aiera‘s current downloads, rather — over the next few days.

One download per day; I’m committed to this.