Okay, so at least a few people contacted me while I was away with news of Ultima-related news, either via the contact form, direct email, or the comments for this post. Once again, it’s good — no, great — to see the community pitching in to help the site move along. Thanks go out to everyone who submitted information.

So…what’s news?

Ultima 5 for TI Calculators

Ranman dropped us a line about the status of his port of this classic Ultima title to the TI calculator. He pegs the development status as being 90.5% complete, and offers a new screenshot of Orcs in the game.

SI BG Merge

This was an interesting little tidbit that I tripped over in the Exult forums. It’s a patch that imports the shapes from The Black Gate into Serpent Isle, fabricated by Malignant Manor.

I’ve created an entry here at Aiera for the project, and uploaded the latest version of the patch (6.7) for download. It looks like this is a pretty active project at the moment, so I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it.

Project Britannia

Frilly Wumpus posted news at the Project Britannia website concerning an update to Siege Tools. This is definitely a developer-oriented update, and he notes that the improvements include things such as:

• DS1, DS2, LOA, and BW code completion
• Built-in API explorer and the ability to add additional documentation to core GPG classes
• Basic Syntax checking
• Code completion for Gas templates

The latest version of Siege Tools (1.0.29) is available for download either from the PB website, or through the project entry here at Aiera.

A forum for posting information and comments about Siege Tools has also been set up, which developers using this engine will hopefully find useful.

Ashes

The project website for this Ultima-like game has been changed a bit, and now features an updated note from project lead Andrea concerning what the game is and what its inspirations are. No new news is present, however.

Nazghul/Haxima

Gordon has released version 0.6.0 (only the source at present, though) of his Ultima-like engine Nazghul, and the associated game he is making with it, Haxima. You can download the updated version from the project’s SourceForge page, or from the project entry here at Aiera.

Hopefully there will be Windows and Mac OS X binaries available soon.

Notable improvements in this version of Nazghul include:

• Detailed speed handling
• Better support for diagonal movement
• Partial opacity support has been added to the terrains
• Improvements to the map editor
• New spells
• Improved dungeon randomization code
• …and a whole lot more

Serpent Isle for NWN2

Continuing with his tendency to move with alarming speed, Jaesun has made several updates to his remake of Serpent Isle. Notably, he has finished the Arrival Area, dialogue for Moonshade, the Northern Isle quest, the Mad Mage Isle, and Monk Isle. And all this in the last couple of weeks.

There are a few nice screenshots to see at the project site, so be sure to give them a look!

Also, there seems to be a bit of an interesting debate going on in the Exult forums over the practical and technical implications of making an “online” version of Ultima 7. We’ll see if that turns into any sort of project in the future. It wouldn’t be the only one to come along, of course.

Personally, I count myself as being in the camp of people who would like to see Ultima 7 go online, as has been done with Ultima 6, although I admit that I lack the necessary technical skill to put any sort of meaningful work into the code necessary to realize that dream.

Tags: Ashes, Dungeon Siege, Exult, Haxima, Mac, Nazghul, Neverwinter Nights 2, Project Britannia, Serpent Isle, Siege Tools, Texas Instruments, The Black Gate, Ultima, Ultima 5, Ultima 6, Ultima 7, Windows

There were a few updates that were worth reporting on today.

Ultima IX: Redemption

Corv of the Titans of Ether brings news that Redemption will, thanks to the efforts of new team member Spyder, feature ships and sailing, and offers a video on YouTube as proof. Of course, the ship model looks so pretty that there’s really no point in making you click a link to get the video:

Pentagram

The Pentagram team bring us a small news update, just to keep us informed on progress: improvements have been made to pathfinding, and to Avatar movement as well. Enhancements to item manipulation and missile trajectories have also taken place.

Ashes

Over in the Ashes forum, there are several new artwork samples of the game’s character creation process.

WtFD

Tags: , Ashes, Pentagram, Ultima 8, Ultima 9, Ultima IX: Redemption, YouTube

Resle, one of the developers working on Ashes — an RPG inspired by Ultima with a home-made 3D engine powering it — gave a bit of an update on the project’s status in the project forum. Ashes is developing slowly at present:

What’s happening? Well yes, hiatus is a good word to describe what’s going on – but the developement heartbeats are just very slow – not absent. Ashes is in a controlled coma, so to say. There’s a long moment of unbalance between the time at MY disposal and Olly’s disposal. He’s quite free while my personal life/job is a bit of a mess now as I am in the process of moving back to my home city (long story).

…

The next build is going to feature:

• Finished, polished combat
• Finished, polished dialogues
• Reworked GUI (more pratical, but arguably less nice to see – I.E.: no “live” paperdoll npc)
• Particle system
• beta magic
• beta fully scheduled NPCs
• beta menu

And thanks to Olly, lots of new graphics.

It’s good to hear that this promising project is still active. I look forward to the next release!

(Frothy mug of ale: Dino)

Tags: Ashes, Ultima