I’ll be limping through restoring the downloads for Ultima 7 this and next week, most likely. And I’ve begun where it is most critical to begin: with Exult.

I’ve also gone though and grabbed the latest downloads (for Exult 1.4, Exult Studio, etc.) from the the project website.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. It really took too damn long to get these ones restored, given how important a project Exult has been, and continues to be. Apologies for the entirely unacceptable delay.

Tags: Exult, Exult Studio, Ultima 7

Dino links to a pair of articles (1, 2) by Sheri Ray Graner, a former Origin employee and now a senior game designer with Schell Games, who has been in the gaming industry for 20 years.

She even worked on the cancelled Lost Vale expansion for Ultima 8!

The articles are worth a read; as Dino notes, [the] posts contain interesting insights on what it was like to work at Origin, as well as some Ultima 7 trivia, info on the original plot of Serpent Isle, and some new tidbits on The Lost Vale.

Check thou them out, good reader!

Tags: Schell Games, Serpent Isle, Sheri Ray Graner, Ultima 7, Ultima 8

Bumped again for my own purposes: there’s a few things left undone here.

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

Tags: Aiera, Akalabeth Mobile, Arx Fatalis, Britannia, Dark Core, Dransik, Eriadain, EUO, Exult, Haxima, IRE, Labyrinth of Worlds, Lost Sosaria, Mac, Nazghul, Pentagram, PocketPC, Project Britannia, Serpent Isle, SI French, Ultima 4 Multiplayer, Ultima 5, Ultima 6, Ultima 6 Online, Ultima 6 Project, Ultima 7, Ultima Online, Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld 2, Ultima V: Lazarus, UW2 Revival

As The Bladed Dragon pointed out in the comments for this article, I was mistaken in a comment I made about Beh Lem, the recruitable gargoyle character in Ultima 6. Specifically, I forgot that Beh Lem was an immature winged gargoyle, rather than a wingless. Indeed, the very fact that he could be recruited should have been evidence enough of this, since wingless gargoyles are said to be incapable of speaking (as Sergorn Dragon recently reminded me) in Ultima 6.

So, uh, yeah…my bad. There’s no harm at all in assuming that Beh Lem, in the 200 intervening years between Ultima 6 and Ultima 7, would have “grown up” and sprouted wings. As I should darn well have known.

Now the only question is: what became of his pet lizard?

Tags: Ultima 6, Ultima 7

Or “fora,” as Wizardry Dragon calls it. Either way, the Feudal Lands (Wizardry’s Exult-based expansion for Ultima 7) has a new place for folks to go and discuss the project.

So why are you still here, good reader?

Tags: Exult, Ultima 7, Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

Wizardry Dragon has posted an update to explain both his rather long absence and his site’s recent outage. As occasionally happens with projects such as these, “real life” got in the way for our friend Wizardry.

But, get this:

I will likely be releasing a fully-playable version of TFL in the first quarter of next year. This is a fully playable version. Not all the quests may be in and such, but the world and NPCs and all the little subsystems Ive spent years building and tweaking will be there. I think it adds all the more to the world of U7 and TFL, and hopefully when you see for yourself you’ll agree.

Now that’s some exciting news.

Man, is it a good month for projects or what?

Tags: Ultima 7, Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

I sometimes forget to check the Exult forums for a few weeks at a time, which I really shouldn’t do. Forget, that is…shouldn’t forget. Like as not, those forums are the hub of much of the activity in the Ultima community; much more is discussed there than just Exult.

Case(s) in point:

• Eric Fry posted a note in a discussion there concerning Nuvie, his apparently dormant attempt to create a multi-platform engine for Ultima 6. Apparently, he’s doing some behind the scenes work with the game logic at the moment; hopefully this turns into something more tangible in the none-too-distant future.
• Then there’s this little announcement, concerning what appears to be a total conversion for Serpent Isle…into Serpent Isle, circa the end of the Ophidian era. That’s right: someone wants to make a mod to tell the story of the War of Imbalance. And to be fair, it looks kinda promising, at its outset. Here’s hoping it’s able to keep its momentum!
• Finally, someone is attempting to add Beh Lem as a recruitable companion in Ultima 7, and appears to be making a lot of progress. My only gripe is that he’s given Beh Lem wings; I may be a touch out of date on my Ultima lore, but I’m pretty sure this should not be.

See what I mean? Hub of activity!

I suppose I should create a project entry for the middle one.

Tags: Exult, Nuvie, Serpent Isle, Ultima, Ultima 6, Ultima 7