It’s good to be back, even if it does mean there’s a bit of work ahead of me.

But I’ve covered the whole “yes, I am in fact back now” bit in the previous post — there’s serious news business to get to here, so let’s get to it! I see that in the month-and-change in which nothing has been posted to the site, quite a few things have happened in the remake community.

First off, new and resurrected projects!

Ultima 3 Online

This project still resides in the Cemetery, as there are no available project files for it. However, former developer Carl “Darkshard” Hamilton informs us that the maps for the project were completed, and can be purchased from his website.

Blackrock Undead

This is Razimus’ proposed continuation of the Blackrock Engine, an early attempt at making Ultima 7 playable online.

As of this moment, I’m not going to pull the Blackrock Engine out of the Orphanage…but I encourage anyone who has experience coding online applications and a passionate love of Ultima 7 (and a bit of free time) to visit Razimus’ website and offer to assist.

And now, updates to existing projects.

UCR

This project, which I moved to the Orphanage some time ago, seems to well and truly have kicked the bucket now. Its website has been decommissioned and replaced by the hosting company with a generic advertising front page.

Redemption

Direhaggis brings news of this remake of Ultima 9, in which he highlights a few developments currently underway:

*Spyder has been working for weeks on the Scintillus Academy. It is sweet. The new textures alone are quite good looking. There are features you will not believe until you see them.

* Worldbuilding continues to go well. The Serpent Spine Mountains are being worked on, as well as outlying areas of the globe (or the square smack in the middle of star-specked nothingess if you take U6 literally). Skara Brae has been re-done, for example. This is one of my cities, so at first I felt odd about it. But the new look is quite nice, with rich green glows all around at night.

*I’ve been working on the main plot: equal parts dialogue and multiple quest completion options. There’s something like 14 more chapters or so that need to be written. I confess that certain parts have gotten larger and more elaborate than I expect. There’s one new area in particular where you’ll see this.

Sounds interesting…and long. This has all the makings of a spectacular world and story.

U3 Project

There have been numerous news updates to the U3 Project website that I failed to notice in June, mostly concerning technical details (the latest one talks at length about the scalers being used). Not much in the way of news of project progress, but the coders out there might find it an interesting discussion.

Nuvie

The developers have posted their yearly update, discussing the long, long list of changes made to this “Exultification” (do you like the new word?) of Ultima 6. Notably, the project is now powered by a Lua scripting engine, which apparently speeds implementation of magic spells specifically, and perhaps most of what would otherwise have been done with Usecode.

Other updates include:

• New magic spells
• Working torches and powder kegs
• The game can now look “inside” containers
• Random blood is added to an actor’s position upon death
• Tweaks to Avatar respawning
• Desks can be searched now
• Lots of work on in-engine object management
• Dithered EGA and CGA graphics mode simulations are now available

There are also a number of other things still being worked on:

• Blue Moongates
• Timing the moongates to the moon cycles
• Fine-tuning moongate Usecode
• Tangle vines
• Sleep fields now make the actor fall asleep
• Minor interface upgrades
• Musical instruments can be played with the keyboard
• Numerous code bugs are being corrected
• Support has been added for Savage Empire and Martian Dreams dialogue and portraits

A new Windows snapshot has been uploaded to the Nuvie site, and this has been posted to Nuvie’s entry at Aiera.

Underworld for Pocket PC

It appears that this port of Ultima Underworld to the PocketPC is no longer available online. Pity.

As this was a payware project, I’ve decided to bump it into the Cemetery, since obviously I have no playable demos or game downloads available for it.

Eriadain

Continuing with the theme of dying websites, Eriadain’s old website no longer exists.

EUO

This project’s website has been completely redone, and looks much swankier. Also, the program itself has been updated to version 1.2, which has been uploaded to the project entry here at Aiera.

Black Gate Keyring

This is an older update, from back in July, but I missed then so it’s getting posted now. Marzo has updated his Keyring mod for Ultima 7, in which he corrects a bug that caused some actors to develop a purple outline.

The project entry here at Aiera has the updated version available for download.

Iris

The 3D client for Ultima Online has been updated to build version 1286 (Windows installer) and 1305 (Windows source). The project entry here at Aiera has been updated accordingly.

Project Britannia

Several project files have been updated. To britannia_art.dsres, a new blue robe texture has been added. As well, a “Britannian Fashion Collection” has been added, including robes for older persons, some other clothing types, and a colour pattern based on Inquisitor’s robes.

To britannia_logic.dsres, the gypsy faction has been added, and some usecode tweaks have also been done. Numerous other updates have been made, including some tweaks to the lorebook and some clothing updates.

Meanwhile, to the Lazarus/PB compatibility layer, an issue with picking up and resurrecting dead party members has been corrected. All of these updated diles are available at the project’s entry at Aiera.

Exult

There is now a port of Exult for the PSP. A download has been added to the Exult entry at Aiera.

And in closing, let me just add a belated “Happy Fifth Birthday!” wish sent out to Dino’s Ultima Page, and also a belated “Happy Twentieth Birthday” to Daniel D’Agostino, a.k.a. Dino. A frothy mug of ale I do now hoist in the direction of Dino the Dark Dragon!

And one more frothy mug of ale for Corv of the Redemption project (linked above), and congratulations as he embarks on the journey of fatherhood!

Frilly Wumpus posted a lengthy reflective article on the Project Britannia website yesterday that chronicles his journey into the Ultima community, and into the remake community after that. As a history both of his own involvements and of the projects he’s worked on, it’s an instructive read.

What really struck me about what he had to say, however, was the following, which appears close to the end of his article:

I’ve also started really noticing some of the other teams and indivuals out there. There are a lot of really passionate and talented people doing stuff. I see that some news sites such as Aiera, , and Ultima: the Reconstruction pull these different efforts together, but I don’t see much discourse between the different development teams. Is this something that other teams are interested in?

Even though the technologies and goals may be very different between projects, could there be some crossovers? Could there be a sharing of knowledge or information or even cross-project plot references? Maybe just a central place where different Ultima developers could share ideas or just talk about what they are doing. I really don’t know the answers to these questions, I’m just wondering if others feel the same way or are interested in sharing thoughts. Is there an Ultima Developers Forum or gathering place out there already? If so, I’d like to hear about it. If there’s not, would that even be something other developers would be interested in?

This is something I’ve thought about more than a few times myself, and indeed is something I’ve toyed with setting up.

Of course, on the surface at least it sounds like a difficult prospect, because there is a certain…transience to the remake community, and the Ultima community as well. I’ve been following the remake community since around 2001, and in that time I’ve seen Avatus Kingsman and Zonker — among others — all but disappear from the community, taking or almost taking their projects with them. Eriadain is on the web today only because Moa Dragon and I spent several weeks in conversation on MSN, and because my server had (at the time) about 30 GB free for him to upload his files to. People and projects come and go, often unexpectedly.

The other issue is that while some remakes and/or spin-offs, such as Lazarus, the U6 Project, Lost Sosaria and Project Britannia all make use of other game engines with generous editing suites to complete their work, other projects are either concocting their own engine or modifying the original engine of whichever Ultima title(s) they’ve chosen to focus on.

At the same time, out of those issues, a few opportunities emerge. Frilly Wumpus points to the collaboration between Lazarus and the U6 Project, which combined the Lazarus team’s exceptional artistic skills with the technical horsepower of the U6 Project. Taken together, not only did this produce the completed version of Lazarus and the momentum which the U6 Project today enjoys, but it gave rise to Project Britannia as well, an effort to create an “out of the box” Ultima development environment.

In a certain sense, the same level of collaboration could be useful to other remake teams as well.

To be fair, obviously, there’s only a limited opportunity for actual swapping of technology and game components between project teams. I’m building in Neverwinter Nights…Dungeon Siege maps and models are useless to me. Morrowind-based projects are similarly limited.

On the other hand, I’ve watched three…no…five (six, actually) Neverwinter Nights-based Ultima remakes fold since I began maintaining Aiera, and I can’t help shake the feeling that projects like Exile, Eriadain, Ultima 5 for NWN, U7 Remixed and Agape might still be up and running if there had been some manner of community framework to support and foster a sharing not only of ideas but of resources between the projects.

I know, for example, that Mike Morrato of U7 Remixed struggled immensely with his hak paks and their (in)compatibility with BioWare’s CEP community content compilation. Moa Dragon had a problem with what might be called “content bloat”, something I struggled with in the original iteration of Lost Sosaria, and only overcame with a lot of effort. It’s easy, in Neverwinter Nights, to keep adding novel content…and there comes a point when you realize all of a sudden that you have 3.2 GB of hak paks, half of which render the other half redundant, and all of which are now conflicting with each other. The usual symptom of this is that making even a slight scripting change in the module takes an hour because the toolset wants to go through and check each model, script, and metadata repository for errors and conflicts after the change is made.

Unless I miss my bet, Lost Sosaria is now the only Neverwinter Nights-based project left that is actively being developed, and I can’t help but get the sense that if I’d taken more initiative in working with other developers to get their content streamlined (for example) there might be one or two more still hanging around. I can acknowledge that I say that with the benefit of hindsight, and certainly it would be easier to (re)start a Neverwinter Nights module now that the game has reached a level of maturity and that its custom content community has established a series of unwritten (but still expected) standards for compatibility and functionality between existing “official” content (i.e. BioWare’s expansion packs for NWN, the CEP, etc.) and “third party” content.

As it is, I’ve got both Eriadain and Avatarship on my PC at home, and I intend to make use of at least some of the scripting that went into them. Zonker did a great job with the gypsy questions, for example, and Moa Dragon was working on a spellcasting system that I might try and expand.

And in a larger sense, that’s really where a “developer connection”-type site would come in useful, as a forum (in the classical, not the phpBB, sense of the word) for project teams to air problems that other developers — even if they’re not necessarily working in the same engine, or on a similar project — to offer solutions and help. This may be especially true in the case of scripting problems, which nothing seems to resolve quite as well as a question that begins “Have you tried looking for a function that…?”

Not to mention the opportunities to recruit team members, and (where possible) to swap technology and give projects using the same engine a sort of “standardized” feel. This helps foster consistency, and to a large degree user immersion, in and between remakes.

There’s one additional aspect that such a “developer connection” would bring to the forefront, and this would be the standardization and harmonization of plotlines. This is especially true for those projects that are either re-imagining canon (as in the case of Redemption, which re-images Ultima 9), or are expanding canon, as in the case of Lost Sosaria. I know I’ve tried to write Lost Sosaria’s plot in such a way that its ending would lead naturally into Redemption, Eriadain, Ascension, and other Ultima 9 projects as well, which is a striving for consistency that I think the Ultima remake community as a whole would benefit from. That’s the other benefit to idea sharing…it means that in the end, we’re all telling different parts of the same story.

What’s the number one complaint leveled against Ascension? To my eyes, it seems to be the complete discontinuity of that game from all its predecessors. How can we, as a community, complain so vocally about that discontinuity and then turn down the opportunity before us to create a fully continuous Ultima storyline?

I guess I’ll end by echoing Frilly Wumpus’ question here: if someone were to propose setting up an ideas exchange for project developers, would that be something that the various developers would be interested in?

There’s a comments form just below the fold. Please leave your thoughts there.

Bumped for news-purposes: readers should note which updates have been made.

This is mostly for my benefit, O Reader, as my memory is not what it once was (not that it was ever amounted to much to begin with) and a list of bases to cover will be highly beneficial at this stage of Aiera’s re-development. A lot of the projects have advanced in their development arcs since the last update to the site, and I need to update the site files to reflect that.

So, at a glance, here’s what needs to get done:

• Finish restoring old file categories and content - DONE!
• Update the files for Akalabeth Mobile - DONE!
• Update files for Lazarus to v1.2. See if it’s possible to upload the mod in one chunk instead of 7 RAR segments - DONE!
• Get local copies of Milestone 1 and Milestone 2 of Archon online - DONE!
• Nodling Dragon’s website seems to have a number of useful downloads and utilities; get these onto Aiera if they are not already - DONE!
• ZIO Interactive’s UW1 for PocketPC seems to have a downloadable demo now; get this - FALSE ALARM!
• Make sure the latest version of Exult is available for download - DONE!
• Check to make sure that I have the latest downloadable files for UW2 Revival on the site - DONE!
• Get the Eriadain files back online - DONE!
• Make sure I have the latest files for LOW - DONE!
• Make sure I have the latest files for SI French - DONE!
• Get the latest downloads for Pentagram, especially now that they have a Mac OS X Universal binary - DONE!
• Get the latest Project Britannia files - DONE!
• Make sure I have the latest version of EUO - DONE!
• Arx Fatalis seems to have a fair bit of downloadable media; see about getting hold of this - DONE!
• Get the latest version of U6O - DONE!
• Make sure I have the latest version of U4 Multiplayer - DONE!

That ought to keep my busy until the end of the week.

As I said, this is mostly for my benefit. However, O Reader, you are certainly welcome to look over the above list and take notice of anything in it which strikes you as being “news”; perhaps you, like myself, haven’t got the latest version of something yet. You can still make use of the old version of the site to find links to projects if they haven’t yet been ported to this new version of the site…go and do a little exploring!

Update: I thought of more to do:

• Investigate the various Ultima Online mods and remakes (Legacy, Iris, etc.) - DONE!
• Check out the UO for NWN module
• Investigate the Lands of Ultima hak paks on the NWVault - NOT WORTH THE EFFORT!
• Investigate the UO Britannia map module on the NWVault

These are somewhat longer-term goals, and the immediate goals of getting Aiera back up to the level of its previous iteration remains the priority. But I think it would be neat to expand the site a bit, and these seem good avenues to approach to do that with.

Upper-date:

• Download Dark Core “offline” versions. - DONE!
• Update IRE files (Sourceforge seems to be having issues at the moment) to version 0.93 - DONE!
• Get Nazghul 0.5.5 and Haxima’s latest files - DONE!
• BGKeyring for Exult - DONE!
• Enhanced Graphics Mod for Lazarus - DONE!
• Looking Up camera Mod for Lazarus - DONE!
• Grail Quest’s Mods for Lazarus - DONE!
• Bugfix & Mod collection for Lazarus - DONE!
• Get newest Dransik installers
• Check all links!
• Check for updates to the utilities!
• Identify dead projects - DONE!
• Add Lost Sosaria again

Produced by: Moa Dragon
Releases:
* Eriadain Module (13.16 MB)
* 18in1 Tilesets Hak Pak (109.84 MB)
* AoB Super Placeables Hak Pak (33.2 MB)
* The PC Pack 3.0 Hak Pak (18.86 MB)
* Palace of Lace Social Hak Pak (Version 2) (1.94 MB)
* Extra Hak Paks #1 (3.28 MB)
* Extra Hak Paks #2 (48.22 MB)

Eriadain was a module for BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights that is based on the original storyline of Ultima 9: Ascension. This original storyline, also known as the Bob White Plot, was a much larger, more detailed plot that remained much more true to the Ultima tradition and the history of the series.

Moa Dragon has built a sizeable portion of the necessary map for this project, including much of the overworld and all of the dungeons. He has also implemented many of the scripts, although many of these are untested. Dialogues are incomplete and marked with placeholder conversations for the most part. The released module above should not be considered a demo for these reasons.

Sadly, Moa Dragon stopped working on Eriadain some time ago. However, he very enthusiastically shared the sum total of his completed work with Aiera in the hopes that someone might wish to pick up the module and run with it in the future.