Added: Back to Roots

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Back to Roots running Ultima 4

Commenter Fearyourself, who has stepped to the fore to help Kevin Fishburne with his coding issue, has an Ultima-inspired engine creation project of his own, which I have just now gladly added a project entry for.

Its aim is to create a unified game engine that can handle both user-defined files and inputs, and also play many of the early Ultima games. As is often the case with projects of this nature, Ultima 4 is serving as the test case for the project (as can be seen in the screenshot, above).

The engine has been implemented with C++, OpenGL, and SDL. Fearyourself was initially experimenting with an Ultima 5-like tileset, but switched over to integrating game data from Ultima 4 at some point during the fall of 2010. Thus far, he has decoded the cities, stores, and conversations, and is (for the most part) using the original sprites that appeared in the game. A configuration option exists, however, to toggle between VGA and EGA graphics. Combat and enemy AI are also present in the game.

At present, Fearyourself hasn’t decided if he’s going to create a straightforward port of Ultima 4 or depart from canon to some degree. He also plans to integrate Ultima 5 into the project next, once he has finished with Ultima 4.

2 Responses

  1. fearyourself says:

    Little disclaimer: Note that actually the screenshot is a world view of Britain from Ultima V which is the world map I worked with first.

    I’ve since actually concentrated my efforts to Ultima IV compatibility and get that working. I’ve almost finished cities and world handling, and will hit Ultima V compatibility to make sure the engine is compatible between the two.

    😉

    Thanks for the post and I’ll keep you posted in the future,
    Jc

  2. Jc/FEARYOURSELF is an excellent and competent programmer who has helped me immensely. The advanced state of his project is a testament to that:

    http://www.ultimaaiera.com/beyond-ultima/spin-offs/back-to-roots/
    http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/backtoroots/

    With a GUI editor added, this could become the “Adventure Construction Set” of Ultima. Downloading custom games, even with custom tile sets, could be worked into it. We need a good ACS-type editor using any Ultima port. That would be awesome and wouldn’t require a 30+ man team to work for five years.