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.

As such, I haven’t been uploading files this week, or doing much of anything really. That said, things are going well in Paulsboro, New Jersey; things have been going swimmingly with the client, we’ve located decent coffee at the Dunkin Donuts (it’s not Starbucks, but there aren’t any of those within morning striking distance), and the hotel is at least comfortable, if not particularly impressive otherwise. It’s clean and it has Internet access; that’s all I need. And we’ve found some good eats. Also a good thing.

Anyhow, regular download updates and news posting will resume next week.

Kevin Fishburne may be a name that some remember; he coded Littoral (which, shamefully, I have yet to restore to downloadable status).

Well, last night he contacted me with a request for assistance. He has undertaken a new project, called Sanctimonia, which he describes thusly:

For the last six months or so I’ve been working on a new project called Sanctimonia, which borrows elements from Ultima IV, V, Online and arcade titles such as Gauntlet. This one’s 2D with faux 3D effects and is not a mod, as I’m coding it myself. This should allow for a much more reasonable workload as far as asset production is concerned. Other than landscape textures and building tiles, all the objects (trees, furniture, people, animals, etc.) will be photographed from real models from 16 directions to create the faux 3D effect when the screen is rotated.

[snip]

Sanctimonia will be using a largely unpopulated Britannia circa Ultima IV/V, allowing players to build it up as they please. A modest server and Internet connection (256 KBps upstream) should support around 1000 players simultaneously per server.

Currently, he’s attempting to raise funds to offset the cost of developing the project, but is still far, far short of his goal.

You can read more about the project at that link, and if it interests you, I would encourage you to toss Mr. Fishburne a donation. I’ll be adding a project entry to Aiera within the day.

Well, that sucks.

I’d hoped this trip afield would provide me with at least a few opportunities to update the site, but it would appear that I failed to factor three things into my plan:

1. My own tenacity when attempting to overcome a problem and the associated tendency to lose all track of time when researching said problem
2. The vagaries and frustrations of attempting to debug C++ code with the Mark One Eyeball
3. The utterly craptastic wireless Internet access at this here hotel

So I’ve only managed to get about half of the Ultima 7 files restored as a result. This is…er…quite far from what I’d hoped would be the case. Still, it’s some progress. I’m closing in on completion, little by little.

So…apologies for getting behind. I’ll see about getting the news postings up to date, at least; it’s month-end, which means a couple of projects will probably be publishing news of some kind.

Update: Okay, the Ultima 7 files are fully restored. I’ve just learned, by the way, that I will have to return to the place I’m in at the moment — Fort McMurray, Alberta — on or about the 12th of this month. Barring a sudden onset of Mass Effect 2 addiction, I hope to put at least some of my “off work” time toward the site here. I don’t foresee getting as consumed by work on this next trip; the program is now in a functional state, and any further revisions will hopefully be minor, and straightforward, in nature.

When I was forced to switch hosting companies — moving away from Canaca over to MediaTemple — I thought I’d lost my most current version of Aiera’s file archives. Yes, I had backups, but as I have learned over the last few months, I allowed too much time to lapse between backups; there were some files that were, apparently, forever lost.

Today was almost one of those days.

It started with someone asking for me to restore the download for the Ultima 9 Freeform Savegame. Which I finally got around to, today. However, it turned out that the ZIP archive for the savegame was…how shall I say this?…corrupt.

And believe me, there is not another copy of this thing anywhere on the Internet that I (or, rather, Bing and Google) can find. Not good.

So on a whim, I scoured my Gmail archives, and found the IP address for my old hosting server. Hoping against hope, I opened up Filezilla and tried my old account credentials. And somehow (I know not how)…it worked!

Seriously…it was like Christmas, the sequel.

I’m not sure, but I think I might just have everything back. I still have to check, but I’ve got a good feeling about this.

Update: the one file I was missing and feared to be lost — the download for Ultima Underworld for Dungeon Keeper — was among the recovered files. YES!

I’ve swapped out one plugin for another on the site here, in order that you — the good Reader — should have a bit more variety in terms of spreading interesting news from Aiera into the great, wide Internet.

Below each post, just above the tag listing, are two rows of icons, corresponding to a variety of social and news-sharing services on the ‘Web. Digg is on there, as are Slashdot and Facebook, as well as a host of others (including a few regional services, as I note that I tend to get a lot of traffic from Germany and the United States.

Basically, good Reader, this puts a measure of power in your hands. If you see something on Aiera that you think could stand to be shared with others, or posted as news to another site or service, feel free to make use of this new site feature. I can publicize Aiera only so much; I depend on my readers to get the news out to parts of the Internet that haven’t necessarily occurred to me, if in fact there is news here worth spreading out that far.

Produced by: A New Breed of Dragon
Website: The Dark Core
Releases:
* Dark Core v1.02 for Netscape (6.3 MiB, 13 hits)
* Dark Core v1.0 for Internet Explorer (6.3 MiB, 7 hits)
* Internet Explorer 4.0 (13.3 MiB, 5 hits)
* Netscape Navigator 4.08 (9.7 MiB, 8 hits)
* Dark Core v1.0 for Internet Explorer 8 (6.3 MiB, 14 hits)

Mere seconds after the Avatar arrives back in Britannia, freshly escaped from Pagan, he finds himself standing before a huge statue of the Guardian. Suddenly, he is granted a vision of the Dark Core of Exodus, and finds that he is being drawn into the core. Complicating matters, it seems that the Guardian is also being drawn in…

…or is he using this vision to deceive the Avatar?

An interactive game in the style of Myst, this web-based remake is a truly amazing Ultima spin-off!

Note: You must have a version of Netscape less than 4.3 in order to play this game! It will also work with Internet Explorer 4.0 or 5.0. It is known that the game will NOT work with more recent versions of Netscape, and I have no idea how well it will behave in later versions of Explorer. I have provided downloads of Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.08 (both for Windows only) above in order to help people get this thing running on their home system.

One further note: Given the tight integration of Internet Explorer with Windows, it might be best to try installing Netscape first. Most extant Windows installations likely sport at least version 5 of Internet Explorer, and rolling said program back to an earlier version is a trying task.

And a warning: Both Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.08 are at least 13 years old, and were built for an era of computing and Internet browsing that was not nearly so perilous as is the case today. Both browsers contain numerous vulnerabilities which modern malware can and will exploit almost as a matter of course. If you install one of these browsers on your system, make sure you never run it while your connection to the Internet is live. Better still: create a Windows 98 (or whichever version is your preference) VirtualBox with networking specifically disabled, and install and run The Dark Core therein.

Or: you could just try out Infinitron Dragon’s Internet Explorer 8-compatible update for the game. Whether or not said update will work with other browsers (e.g. Firefox, Chrome) is uncertain at present, nor is it known whether said update will work on non-Windows platforms.

See Also: A New Breed of Dragon’s System Optimization Guide.