This is (was?) a promising-looking remake of at least the first part of Ultima 7: The Black Gate, produced as part of a game design course offered at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore.

The challenge of porting a 2D game of Ultima 7′s caliber — including its interactivity and living, breathing world — into a 3D engine (Neverwinter Nights 2, in this case) with a much more static world (at least by default) would make for an excellent primer in game design, and it’s just a pity that as yet the team has not released its work into the wild.

Full details can be found at the project’s discussion thread in the Exult forums. Updated downloads are available there, or through the project entry.

This interesting mod for Exult imports the shapes from The Black Gate into Serpent Isle, adding hundreds of new shapes, with a few being repeated for use with The Black Gate‘s usecode.

It is still in development, and still buggy (some in-game functionality may be lost by use of the patch), but for users of Exult Studio this may well be an exciting development indeed, as it vastly expands the versatility of available shapes when modifying or creating maps.

Additional Files
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* Nokia 770/M800 - Data (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Music (mono, low quality) (0 bytes)
* Nokia 770/M800 - Music (stereo, higher quality) (0 bytes)

Exult 1.4 (unstable)
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* SDL 1.2 Libraries

An amazing remake, Exult is a cross-platform reworking of the Ultima 7/Serpent Isle engine that allows the game to be run on modern operating systems with expanded memory environments. This is not the same as a Voodoo memory-manager wrapper program, and it works on many systems apart from Windows.

Exult 1.2 is the latest “stable” release – Team Exult is making massive engine changes, and subsequent releases are expected to have instabilities as a result. It has Windows, Mac OS X, Sharp Zaurus, and Fedora builds available. Also avaliable is the source code, so that people running other systems can compile and build Exult. ]]> http://www.ultimaaiera.com/ultima7/exult/feed/ 22 http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/exult-14-updated-tools-and-studio-as-well/ http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/exult-14-updated-tools-and-studio-as-well/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:44:26 +0000 Withstand the Fury Dragon http://www.ultimaaiera.com/?p=333 There’s still no new news posted on the project’s main website, but Exult — the engine that enables Ultima 7 (both parts: The Black Gate and Serpent Isle) to run on virtually every OS imaginable — has been updated. Exult 1.4, the “unstable, beta” build of the engine, was updated earlier this month, as were Exult Studio and Exult Tools.

Major changes in this release include correction of a few problems associated with creating a new game from within Exult Studio, a code change to prevent dead NPCs from taking additional damage, a tweak to the proximity-based wake-up feature of NPCs, and a few other code corrections.

I have added downloads for all three updated programs, plus an updated copy of the Exult source code, to the project entry.

Also, the full version of a patch translating Ultima 7 to Spanish has been released. Following up on this lead led me to translation patches for Serpent Isle, Ultima 9, and Ultima Underworld about which I had previously been unaware, and these have all been added to Aiera.

• Ultima 7 Spanish translation
• Serpent Isle Spanish translation
• Ultima Underworld Spanish translation
• Ultima 9 Spanish translation

Additionally, the Ultima 6 Project Development Tools Package has been released, which enables the user to edit and compile conversations, edit game objects, edit game logic, and provides a host of other functions as well. It can be downloaded from the Project Britannia website, or from the Ultima 6 Project entry here at Aiera.

Other Ultima-related news I found whilst wandering through the Internet today includes:

Aklabeth

The web home of this remake of Akalabeth seems to be offline. I hope it’s just a temporary thing.

Ultima Underworld for Pocket PC

Conversely, this port of Ultima Underworld to the PocketPC seems to be back online again. Nice to see. That means that I get to move this project out of the cemetery!

Exult

This port of The Black Gate and Serpent Isle to…well…pretty much every operating system one could dare to think of…doesn’t look as though it’s been updated, by its website. But I noticed that the Windows and PocketPC snapshots were updated earlier this month, as was the snapshot for Exult Studio. All of these can be downloaded through the project entry here. The chief modification seems to concern a bug with multiracial Avatars.

Ultima: Iris

This 3D frontend for Ultima Online has been updated recently, to build version 2365. Linux and Windows source, and the Windows installer, can all be downloaded via the project entry here, or at the project website.

Finally, I was contacted by Yannick “Alcibiade” Kirschhoffer regarding a new piece of Ultima-related material he has produced. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

I’ve been huge fan of the second Ultima trilogy. In 2003, I began work on writing guitar arrangements of most of this era’s music. I did the Ultima 6 score almost entirely, and some of U4 and U5 too. Then I compiled these in a songbook that I illustrated with artwork and quotes from the games.

It is available for download in PDF format at www.alcibiade.org

This is a handy little creation, beautifully arranged and attractively compiled into one volume. I’ve added a project entry for it under the category of “General Utility”, and it can be downloaded from there as well.

Well done, Yannick!

This is a full translation of The Black Gate and Forge of Virtue into Spanish. It does not require Exult in order to work, although it can use all of Exult’s features.

As Zen doesn’t have a website to host the project at for himself, he has made it available to the world via Aiera, and I have (finally!!) created a project entry for it. Check thou it out, O Reader, if you’ve still got those Dungeon Keeper discs tucked away in a drawer or closet!

Also, I have added a download for the Ultima 6 Project‘s Milestone 5 release to that project’s entry, so if you haven’t grabbed it from somewhere else already, you can now get it here as well.

Also, other news, courtesy of Dino’s Ultima Page:

Ultima V: Lazarus

Cheerful Dragon has released version 1.29 of his various mods and bugfixes for this remake of Ultima 5. These can be downloaded either at the previous forum link, or via the project entry here at Aiera.

Seven Towers Exult Mods

Marzo has released updates to his mods for Exult, for both The Black Gate (Keyring) and Serpent Isle (Fixes). The latest revisions of both can be downloaded through their respective project entries here at Aiera:

• Black Gate Keyring
• Serpent Isle Fixes

Ultima: Iris

Apparently, the project’s developers took home first prize at the Dusmania 10 hobby game development meeting in Frankfurt, Germany. Congrats!

Ultima 5 for TI Calculators

Ranman has released version 1.01 of his port of Ultima 5 to the Texas Instruments calculator. The up-to-date download can be found via the project entry here.

Exult

This Ultima 7 remake has been updated recently — or, rather, the unstable 1.4 version has been updated, as has Exult Studio and its accompanying tools. The Exult team‘s plugins for GiMP have also been updated this month, and the whole mess of things can be downloaded via the project entry here.

EUO

This Ultima-inspired game has seen the release of version 0.16 of its rudimentary 3D client, which can be downloaded via the project entry here at Aiera.

Ultima Restoration

This comprehensive multi-project has released screenshots of the Kilrathi space station from their remake of Ultima 1. With this completed, they now have all the cities, dungeons, and space stations fully mapped in the game — which, if I do say so myself, is damn good progress!

They’ve also added links to a good couple-dozen Neverwinter Nights modules that I’m going to have to sort through in short order, so…well, it’s nice to know in advance what I’ll be up to for at least part of next week.

Also, the Wing Commander CIC team are attempting to back up what remains of the Origin Systems data library. They are looking for people with experience with this sort of thing, so if you’re one of those people who lives and breathes in backup tapes, you might want to check their project out.

This is actually a collection of small upgrades to Ultima 7 (and the Forge of Virtue — this is required!). Chiefly, it adds a keyring to the game to assist the Avatar in managing the massive number of keys one tends to accumulate as one progresses through the game.

It also features a number of modifications to the game’s event scripting and a fair bit of custom usecode, plus some other “not so subtle” changes according to the developer, so it almost qualifies more as a remake than a patch…but not quite.

This patch requires Exult.