Easter Updates
[image:98:r:s=1:l=x]There have been a few updates made in the Ultima remake community over the Easter weekend, including a few snapshot releases and some news announcements.
Ultima IX: Infinity Eternal
Thepal dropped a bit of news just to keep his project’s site fresh, and assures us that things are moving along. He has been working on dialogue for the demo — which will apparently feature 90 to 100 NPCs(!!) — and has been continuing with world-building. More music is also being created by other team members.
Seven Towers Exult Mods
The Avatar Pack was updated over the weekend with a minor revision that split the optional resources of the pack into The Black Gate- and Serpent Isle-specific versions; installation instructions have been updated accordingly. I have updated the copy of this mod that is hosted at Aiera.
Exult
New snapshots of Exult 1.4 and Exult Studio were released in the last few days. I have uploaded these to the site, and they can be downloaded from the Exult entry.
Project Britannia
The Project Britannia development team have released new snapshot versions of some of the game’s core files — britannia_logic.dsres and the Lazarus compatibility mod, to be specific. I have updated the Project Britannia and Lazarus downloads accordingly.
Ultima: Iris
Iris’ snapshot version has been updated to build 933, and I will add this to Iris’ entry on the site by this evening (remember: GMT -7 timezone).
Additionally, there is an AVI-format trailer available from the Iris site demonstrating the new engine in action. It can also be viewed on YouTube.
Worlds of Ultima: Lost Sosaria
One of the tilesets that is used on the project has been updated, and will be tested in short order.
🙂 WtFD
We’ll see about Infinity Eternal… might just take an eternity! This project seems to have “too ambitious” written all over it.
We’ll have to see about a lot of projects. Yes, UIX:IE is ambitious…but then, so is Redemption (see the latest news posting on their site). So, in its own right, is Lost Sosaria. So was Lazarus.
When did ambition become to be seen as an obstacle to success? It seems to me that the community as a whole would benefit from a little more ambition and a little more support for those who show it. 😉
So, what’s he going to do? Use a random NPC generator?
Lazarus had people in the game industry – professionals – behind it. That’s why it’s the only successful Ultima remake. Is Thepal a pro?
That’s one solution. Another is to take 5 years to do it. Another is to realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew and scale the number down. I don’t know what Thepal is planning to do, what tools he has available to him, and how much time he has on his hands. I don’t know his level of skill with the engine and its toolset.
So I’m not going to speculate to any great length on how he might achieve his goal. What’s the point in antagonizing over it, though?
Industry professionalism is a big boon, to be sure, but it’s hardly a requirement. I’ve taken some game design courses in university, but I’m no industry professional, and yet I’ve resurrected Lost Sosaria and I’m developing the new version at a faster pace than I was ever able to maintain with the old version of the module.
Thepal has restarted UIX:IE as well…who is to say that he has not learned valuable lessons in the meantime and plans to leverage those in his work?
The claim of 90+ NPCs is impressive sounding, and to be fair it’s probably at least in part akin to the megapixel race seen in digital cameras (“yes, but do we NEED that many?”). I’m sure many of them will be minor, non-plot-critical characters with small dialogue trees, much the same way as the guards in the Ultima games never really had much to say in most cases.
But then, that’s all you need to create a convincing game world; if a critical player is going to be so measurbatory as to expect and seek out meaningful conversation with every NPC in the game world, they’re the sort of player who probably never enjoys a game anyhow and spends all their time rating it 1/5 on Amazon and other user-review sites.
😉 WtFD
I’m not in the game industry, though I do have a degree in IT. I’m also very good at English and am creative, and can therefore write dialogue fairly quickly (giving each NPC a different personality and even different ways of phrasing their words). Dialogue is the main issue in relation to time, as I’ve always said. The ability to complete the game within the next ten years will depend on gaining more team members eventually that will write dialogue. I can’t write thousands of NPCs’ dialogue myself.
As for the 90-100 NPCs, they are kinda necessary. We’re going for realism, so we listed the NPCs that would exist in Jhelom. And we came up with around 50 people (different professions and their families). When I started going into it a little deeper, I realised that we still needed more people for the town to actually make sense. So another 20 or 30 or so were added. The other 10-20 aren’t actually from Jhelom, but the crew of some ships and other random NPCs. The game would suffer from having less NPCs, so we won’t cut them back. I also don’t plan on two sentence people. They will all have at least as much dialogue as the average person in U7, and most will have more.
The game world itself is probably the other area that people think is a little too ambitious. But that is the beauty of the Oblivion engine. It *should* be able to auto-generate the trees, rocks, grass, etc after we have our base landscape created. We then just need to fine tune it. Not having to place every blade of grass ourselves obviously means creating the world won’t take nearly as much time as it could. So the world-building shouldn’t be too much of a problem (it won’t take any longer than the other stuff, so while some team members are working on other things, other members can be working on that. That’s the way of a team)
Of course, the NPCs are still a problem. Jhelom, it seems, is going to have around 80 NPCs. Trinsic, Moonglow and some other towns will probably have a similar amount. New Magincia, Skara Brae and some others will have less. Britain will have well over 100, probably closer to 200. Adding them all together Britannia will probably have around 1000 NPCs. There will probably be at least 500 or so from the other worlds as well. That’s a lot of work. I know that. But I think it is doable.
Of course, this all relies on being able to put together a team. Hopefully that won’t be too hard. Our demo will hopefully catch peoples attention and make people see that our goals aren’t impossible. I really want to have this finished sometime in 2008. Including the time I spent making it for Morrowind, it has taken way too long. It’d be nice to have not spent a tenth of my life working on it. :p (a tenth of how old I’ll be when I die that is… already spent well over a tenth of my current life span)
>Lazarus had people in the game industry – professionals – behind it. That’s why >it’s the only successful Ultima remake. Is Thepal a pro?
Actually, Lazarus helped to get people into the game industry. A lot of team members used Lazarus as a reference on their resumes to try to break into the industry. This incentive probably helped the project since people were trying to get jobs based on their work. The most important ingredient to Lazarus’ success was a very clear vision, a lot of dedication, a lot of talent, and a lot of hard work.