Frilly Wumpus posted a lengthy reflective article on the Project Britannia website yesterday that chronicles his journey into the Ultima community, and into the remake community after that. As a history both of his own involvements and of the projects he’s worked on, it’s an instructive read.

What really struck me about what he had to say, however, was the following, which appears close to the end of his article:

I’ve also started really noticing some of the other teams and indivuals out there. There are a lot of really passionate and talented people doing stuff. I see that some news sites such as Aiera, Dino’s Ultima Page, and Ultima: the Reconstruction pull these different efforts together, but I don’t see much discourse between the different development teams. Is this something that other teams are interested in?

Even though the technologies and goals may be very different between projects, could there be some crossovers? Could there be a sharing of knowledge or information or even cross-project plot references? Maybe just a central place where different Ultima developers could share ideas or just talk about what they are doing. I really don’t know the answers to these questions, I’m just wondering if others feel the same way or are interested in sharing thoughts. Is there an Ultima Developers Forum or gathering place out there already? If so, I’d like to hear about it. If there’s not, would that even be something other developers would be interested in?

This is something I’ve thought about more than a few times myself, and indeed is something I’ve toyed with setting up.

Of course, on the surface at least it sounds like a difficult prospect, because there is a certain…transience to the remake community, and the Ultima community as well. I’ve been following the remake community since around 2001, and in that time I’ve seen Avatus Kingsman and Zonker — among others — all but disappear from the community, taking or almost taking their projects with them. Eriadain is on the web today only because Moa Dragon and I spent several weeks in conversation on MSN, and because my server had (at the time) about 30 GB free for him to upload his files to. People and projects come and go, often unexpectedly.

The other issue is that while some remakes and/or spin-offs, such as Lazarus, the U6 Project, Lost Sosaria and Project Britannia all make use of other game engines with generous editing suites to complete their work, other projects are either concocting their own engine or modifying the original engine of whichever Ultima title(s) they’ve chosen to focus on.

At the same time, out of those issues, a few opportunities emerge. Frilly Wumpus points to the collaboration between Lazarus and the U6 Project, which combined the Lazarus team’s exceptional artistic skills with the technical horsepower of the U6 Project. Taken together, not only did this produce the completed version of Lazarus and the momentum which the U6 Project today enjoys, but it gave rise to Project Britannia as well, an effort to create an “out of the box” Ultima development environment.

In a certain sense, the same level of collaboration could be useful to other remake teams as well.

To be fair, obviously, there’s only a limited opportunity for actual swapping of technology and game components between project teams. I’m building in Neverwinter Nights…Dungeon Siege maps and models are useless to me. Morrowind-based projects are similarly limited.

On the other hand, I’ve watched three…no…five (six, actually) Neverwinter Nights-based Ultima remakes fold since I began maintaining Aiera, and I can’t help shake the feeling that projects like Exile, Eriadain, Ultima 5 for NWN, U7 Remixed and Agape might still be up and running if there had been some manner of community framework to support and foster a sharing not only of ideas but of resources between the projects.

I know, for example, that Mike Morrato of U7 Remixed struggled immensely with his hak paks and their (in)compatibility with BioWare’s CEP community content compilation. Moa Dragon had a problem with what might be called “content bloat”, something I struggled with in the original iteration of Lost Sosaria, and only overcame with a lot of effort. It’s easy, in Neverwinter Nights, to keep adding novel content…and there comes a point when you realize all of a sudden that you have 3.2 GB of hak paks, half of which render the other half redundant, and all of which are now conflicting with each other. The usual symptom of this is that making even a slight scripting change in the module takes an hour because the toolset wants to go through and check each model, script, and metadata repository for errors and conflicts after the change is made.

Unless I miss my bet, Lost Sosaria is now the only Neverwinter Nights-based project left that is actively being developed, and I can’t help but get the sense that if I’d taken more initiative in working with other developers to get their content streamlined (for example) there might be one or two more still hanging around. I can acknowledge that I say that with the benefit of hindsight, and certainly it would be easier to (re)start a Neverwinter Nights module now that the game has reached a level of maturity and that its custom content community has established a series of unwritten (but still expected) standards for compatibility and functionality between existing “official” content (i.e. BioWare’s expansion packs for NWN, the CEP, etc.) and “third party” content.

As it is, I’ve got both Eriadain and Avatarship on my PC at home, and I intend to make use of at least some of the scripting that went into them. Zonker did a great job with the gypsy questions, for example, and Moa Dragon was working on a spellcasting system that I might try and expand.

And in a larger sense, that’s really where a “developer connection”-type site would come in useful, as a forum (in the classical, not the phpBB, sense of the word) for project teams to air problems that other developers — even if they’re not necessarily working in the same engine, or on a similar project — to offer solutions and help. This may be especially true in the case of scripting problems, which nothing seems to resolve quite as well as a question that begins “Have you tried looking for a function that…?”

Not to mention the opportunities to recruit team members, and (where possible) to swap technology and give projects using the same engine a sort of “standardized” feel. This helps foster consistency, and to a large degree user immersion, in and between remakes.

There’s one additional aspect that such a “developer connection” would bring to the forefront, and this would be the standardization and harmonization of plotlines. This is especially true for those projects that are either re-imagining canon (as in the case of Redemption, which re-images Ultima 9), or are expanding canon, as in the case of Lost Sosaria. I know I’ve tried to write Lost Sosaria’s plot in such a way that its ending would lead naturally into Redemption, Eriadain, Ascension, and other Ultima 9 projects as well, which is a striving for consistency that I think the Ultima remake community as a whole would benefit from. That’s the other benefit to idea sharing…it means that in the end, we’re all telling different parts of the same story.

What’s the number one complaint leveled against Ascension? To my eyes, it seems to be the complete discontinuity of that game from all its predecessors. How can we, as a community, complain so vocally about that discontinuity and then turn down the opportunity before us to create a fully continuous Ultima storyline?

I guess I’ll end by echoing Frilly Wumpus’ question here: if someone were to propose setting up an ideas exchange for project developers, would that be something that the various developers would be interested in?

There’s a comments form just below the fold. Please leave your thoughts there.