The Ultima 6 Remake: New Portraits, Loose Ends, and Serpents Hold

The Ultima 6 Remake team have been remarkably busy over the last couple of weeks! Not content with implementing a working brawl in Jhelom, they also saw fit to rework some of the portraits of the characters involved…thanks to the handiwork of a new team member:

…we have a new member, Odkin, who is touching up all the portraits to match the quality of those in Serpents Isle. Hopefully we can convince him to help out with the intro and end game graphics too. Check out some of his work so far. Absolutely stunning.

And indeed, they are quite an improvement:

[singlepic id=2126 w=228 h=128 float=center]

Van Kellian

[singlepic id=2124 w=219 h=125 float=center]

Jerris

They have also added new screenshots, which you should all be sure not to miss. The map of Britannia, small though it is, is particularly worth a look.

Additionally, AgentOrangeGuy has been tweaking and improving the aforementioned brawl engine, while Zygon Dragon has been busy beta testing a side quest to wrap up the story of Quenton in Skara Brae. AgentOrangeGuy has also been working on a few changes to the map to tie up various loose ends from Ultima 5.

And most recently, the team began working on Serpent’s Hold. And that’s not all:

Things are certainly moving along quiet nicely with AgentOrangeGuy’s latest update, which mainly consisted of Serpents Hold. He’s finished Loubet’s training area and the keep. Still no NPC’s but looking very good. He also did some general map work, tweaking dialogues and eggs for the Quenton Side quest.

Odkin has finished the Yew portraits, screenshots to follow very soon.

We have a new member Crowley who is is tackling new shapes, old shapes and other stuff. He has been working on a new shape for Gwenno.

If you asked me to define “momentum”, I’d argue that adding the mechanics for two towns — and adding two new team members — to an Ultima 6 remake in the span of two weeks would be a perfectly fine example of it.

10 Responses

  1. Dungy says:

    Cool stuff! I really hope this project comes to fruition. The Ultima VII engine is fantastic, and Ultima VI is perfect for it. And it would be nice to see someone finally produce a finished product with Exult Studio.

  2. Odkin says:

    Thank for the kind words! Working on Skara Brae right now.

    FYI, the aspect ratio looks a little skewed on my revised pics – too skinny. Perhaps something to do with either the import or screenshot taking process? I’ll have to ask AgentOrangeGuy.

  3. Jaesun says:

    Nice! I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, since I saw AgentOrangeGuy first post about him doing Ultima VI in Exult.

  4. Marquillin says:

    Heh, from the title I thought this was referring to the 3D remake that hasn’t found an artist to finish their dialogue pictures yet. Though I suppose one could make a mod to import these good faithful pictures into that version also. Nice work!

    Does anyone envision being able to play the entire series with the Ultima 7 engine in 20 years? Or maybe the Ultima 8 engine? Or 5, 9, 6, etc?

  5. AgentOrangeGuy says:

    Marquillin – I definitely have wished that could happen, playing the entire Ultima series in a U7 type engine. I’d sure support anyone who’d take up something like that. Especially U1 & U2 which you could either do away with the whole “spacey” thing, or somehow tie it in better to the rest of the series (explaining what happened to the old space age weapons, rockets, etc.)

  6. Dominus says:

    I wish we had some more active developers on Exult atm. I’m seeing your questions in the forum and it pains me that I don’t know the answers…

  7. Sanctimonia says:

    I’m just sad my portrait generator wasn’t used. I must add some mustaches and such…

  8. Micro Magic says:

    Very pretty portraits! Looks like a pretty faithful remake.

  9. AgentOrangeGuy says:

    Sanctimonia- portrait generator??? Let me know more about this… I will need some new portraits for new npcs at some point! Email me with info please 😀

  10. Sanctimonia says:

    Everything’s in here:

    eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/software/avatar/

    There’s the executable (Avatar.gambas), source project directory, and home config directory with sample images. It has five features: head, hair, eyes, nose and mouth. I only have a few images for each so far, which were taken from random photos of people on the web.

    It’s programmed in GAMBAS 3 which runs under Linux. If you use another OS, you can install Ubuntu or such into a VirtualBox VM. Though gb3 is still in beta, you can find packages for it here so you don’t have to compile from source:

    launchpad.net/~ihaywood3/+archive/gambas3

    Let me know if you need further help getting it to work.