The Titans of Ether Are Recruiting!
Alex Shabeel, a member of the Titans of Ether, posted a “help wanted” note on the UDIC Facebook page:
Hey guys, if you loved Ultima and Ultima played the same role in your life as it did in mine, I’m sure you’ve been following the remake scene with some degree of interest. Unfortunately, for every success story such as Lazarus or Archon, there are 10 remakes that don’t make it, because of people moving on, because of exhaustion and a host of other reasons.
I’ve been working at Titans of Ether since 2009, mostly writing dialogue but also doing some very basic programming and helping out with everything I can really.
There has not ever been any talk of terminating the project, because we believe in it and will finish it even if we’re grandpas by the end. But we could use some more hands on deck. Please, if you have any talent or skills that could go into the production of a completely new Ultima (which is now pretty much in the story implementation phase, with some unfinished interiors still needing to be done), LET ME KNOW. Add me, or shoot me a message, or both – its all up to you. Just because Origin is dead doesn’t mean Ultima has to follow it into the grave.
You can reach the other team members through our boards:
http://cfkasper.de/ultima/board/
It would appear that something has changed since May, at which time the Titans reported that there were no job postings open.
Regardless; if you have some skill with writing, art, programming, or pretty much anything that might be useful in crafting a Morrowind mod, drop the guys a line at their forums, speak out on the Facebook post, or make yourself known in the comments here.
I’ve offered to share resources before and received “go to the forum”-type responses. I’ve also mentioned we should share a common repository for Ultima-related assets. Whether a common original engine (shat-upon) or just graphics, sound and music, should there not be a chest of assets that we may all draw upon to finish a project?
That would be nice, yes. But there is Ultima Restoration (NWN1-only and dead as far as I can tell) and Project Britannia (DS1-only but with the advantage of having two complete remakes to show off) out there already. If something like this is to be done, it needs to be engine-independent. And that could get tricky.
As for “common original engine”, well people could help or use Nazghul/Haxima, OpenMW, Exult etc. Why re-invent the wheel? Yeah, you could use something like the NWN2 engine, etc., but they’re not free and they’re not cross-platform. I think Cube2 (Sauerbraten) would be a good choice too.
@Sanctimonia: Who did you talk to? For sure not with me…
As for a common original engine: Our main goal is to finish this project and everything else is irrelevant for now. If we engage in side projects while we struggle for time to get Redemption done it will never get done and would be one more project that suddenly dissapears. We won’t let that happen.
I’m not sure who I talked to… May have been for the xu4 project.
I understand completely about the importance of finishing one’s main project before indulging in side quests. I have my hands full will Sanctimonia myself, which is one of the reasons I was suggesting a “asset repository” we could all contribute to and share.
Writing a new engine (or borrowing and combining parts from existing ones) would have to be one hell of a collaboration, and certainly shouldn’t draw resources away from serious projects with a good chance of being finished.
Anyone know of the equivalent of FTP that supports thumbnails for images? I think we need something simple like that, accessible through accounts given to trusted contributors and organized by directories. Something like:
/
/audio
/audio/soundeffects
/audio/music
/audio/samples
/image
/image/tilesets
/image/textures
/image/animations
/code
/code/algorithms
etc.
Someone could be designated as the “maintainer” who would occasionally make sure all the user contributions were organized properly, moving things around if necessary. I could host it here since I have up upstream bandwidth and a ton of hard drive space to spare (over 1 TB and can add more if necessary). I also have RAID 5 and a UPS so the data should be well protected.
Is there an FTP server that supports thumbnails? “Super FTP” if you will? I’ve found CMS type systems like Joomla are a major pain in the ass to use for this sort of thing.