In his latest news post, Dino mentioned this interesting-looking new project, which aims to craft an RPG maker that features Ultima 7-ish graphics and no need for programming skill.

It seemed worth a project entry.

Though it has yet to produce any releases, this interesting-looking RPG maker software, presently under development, was announced on a short-lived thread in the Exult forums, and is obviously quite heavily influenced by Ultima 7 (indeed, it would appear to be using a colour-shifted version of the golden doors from Serpent Isle as its door graphics in the screenshot above).

Foody’s desire is to create an RPG maker that requires no programming knowledge on the part of the user, which suggests (to me, at least) that he will be coding all manner of wizards to assist with scripting events, encounters, and what-have-you.

Thanks to Matthew Johnston, the download archive for this interesting Ultima-inspired tale is no longer corrupt.

Matthew Johnston’s total conversion for Exult is once again available for download.

And with that, I’m out sick for the rest of the day.

I was always a big fan of Syndicate when I was a kid; I spent countless hours in front of my friend Tiago’s Mac LCIII laying into mercenaries (and sometimes civilians…who am I kidding?) with the Gauss Gun.

The isometric world of Syndicate.

So you can imagine that this news caught my eye:

A modern update of isometric cyborg sim Syndicate is presumed to be the surviving half of a planned two-game collaboration between EA and Starbreeze Studios. As noted by Superannuation, EA filed three new “Syndicate” trademark registrations in August concerning “video game software,” “electronic computer games” and, in one case, “collectable toy figures.”

Rumors of a new Syndicate sprang up over a year ago, and a document from the U.S. Copyright Office recently linked the Syndicate name to both EA and Chronicles of Riddick developer Starbreeze Studios. While the publisher has never made an official announcement, original Syndicate designer Sean Cooper stated in June 2009 that several “misguided” attempts to revisit the sci-fi franchise had been made since it debuted in the early 90s.

Syndicate isn’t particularly related to Ultima in any meaningful sense, though it did boast an isometric game engine that would be instantly familiar to any fan of Ultima 7 or Ultima 8. The linear, mission-based storyline was far from an Ultima-like RPG experience (indeed, I don’t think you could classify Syndicate as an RPG, at least not one in the same category as Ultima), although the squad controls were somewhat tighter than even those offered by Ultima 6.

Led by Sergorn Dragon, Return to the Serpent Isle is a “fan-made game based upon the legendary Ultima series and…crafted with the use of the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine.” It intends “to follow in and uphold the tradition of the Ultima series, it will lead the players to revisit the Serpent Isle which first had been introduced in Ultima VII Part Two,” Serpent Isle.

This ambitious effort isn’t a remake, but is in fact a completely new story set in the Ultima universe, and will tell a completely new tale set in a post-holocaust Serpent Isle. Several familiar faces from the second part of Ultima 7 will be making a return in the game, though many new characters will also feature in it.

I’ve just added a project entry for a very promising-looking Ultima 7 remake using the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine. As yet, the team has only released screenshots of their work, and in truth they may never release more than that since the remake was part of a game design course offered at a college in Singapore.

Still, in the hope that they’ll push something out the door in the next little while, I’ve added Team Exalted Crown’s offering to Aiera; check thou it out!

(hat tip)

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.

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.

First, it was Ultima 7. Then, it was Lazarus.

Now, the “Let’s Play Ultima” craze, which has slowly been making its way across YouTube and across the series, has reached my personal favourite amongst the Ultima titles. That’s right, Dragons…a young lady who goes by the handle enirya is playing — and broadcasting — her way through Ultima 6.

And what’s more, she’s playing the FM Towns version.

She’s only three episodes in at this point in time, but expect that number to grow.

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.

Dino links to a pair of articles (1, 2) by Sheri Graner Ray, 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!

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

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?

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?

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?

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.

Andrew Brozyna contacted me to inform me of his new project — which he calls “Ultima XXVIII” — which is an effort to create a tabletop wargame homage to the Ultima series using classic 28 mm metal figurines.

Here’s Dupre, for example…modeled after the image that graces Dupre’s inventory gump in Ultima 7:

It’s a pretty interesting effort. Do check it out, either at the project entry here or at the project website (linked above).