New Gallery: Ultima 7 Technical Documents
Courtesy of former Origin programmer Bill Randolph, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Joe Garrity of the Origin Muesum, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present fifteen documents — which have been broken out into over 130 images — which discuss some of the technical details of an early version of Ultima 7.
Specifically, the documents — all of which appear to be internal documents from Origin Systems — discuss the conversation syntax of the game and its technical implementation, the object design of the game, the in-house map editor that Origin developers used to construct the Ultima 7 game world, and much more! The most interesting detail about all of these documents, however, is that they are in fact focused on a very early version of the game, which is different in several ways from what was finally shipped.
There is some truly fascinating stuff to be found within these pages, at least for those who enjoy getting a look at the technical foundations of software. And, of course, many of the documents are heavily marked up with notes and on-the-fly edits.
Anyhow…the images in the gallery, in JPEG format, are lower-resolution extracts from PDF scans of the original documents. They are legible, but not of particularly high quality, and thus are not recommended for printing; download the PDF files for that purpose.
Most importantly, though: enjoy! Pull up the images, download the PDFs, and pore over them. Search out every little detail, and enjoy a fascinating glimpse into the nuts and bolts of how Origin crafted a truly ground-breaking RPG. Ultima Aiera is indebted to Joe Garrity for providing these documents, to Bill Randolph for releasing them and making them available for us to see, to John Watson, and to everyone who worked at Origin Systems.
Outstanding. I wonder if there’s anything surprising or unexpected in there.
I have an ultima question. A little off topic. I’m having a disagreement with someone about Serpent Isle.
Was Serpent’s Isle story taken from what Richard Garriott’s u7 and was just story elements taken from what was cut from the original u7.
Or was it started off as a pirate game and adopted into a full fledged Ultima written by Sherri Graner and Bill Armintrout?
As far as I know, it was the latter.
Sergorn knows more, I think. I’ll tell him to swing by.
That’s the later one. It started as an unrelated World of Ultima kind of game and with development of U7 wrapping up, they decided to make it a follow up on Ultima VII (thus adding the reference to the Serpent Isle in the game), first as a pirate themed kind of game, and later as the game we know when the original director jumped ship and Armintrout was promoted as Project Director.
You can have it straight from the mouth of Bill Armintrout there:
http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/bill-armintrout-on-the-original-serpent-isle/
The misconception about Serpent Isle being actually the second part of U7 that got cut during development has been going on for a long time, and it’s probably gonna stay a while yet… but that’s because of all the confusion about this that I took the liberty of asking Mr. Armintrout about this, and he was kind enough to answer me back.
One thing to add, though I think I mentioned it back there, is that Mr Armintrout didn’t remember if the World of Ultima concept was thought up as an Ultima game, or an unrelated project like Arthurian Legends – but as he recalls since they had barely done anything on this project before it mutated as a sequel to UVII, the decision had not been made yet.
Thank you very much. Ya know, I even showed the guy Sheri Graner’s blog where she talks about designing Serpent Isle and he didn’t believe me. “Oh no, I saw it in a Richard Garriott episode, it was EA that split the game to make more money.” Oh well, we’ll see if this can change his mind ;).
Holy craps! This is like Christmas for compulsive Wiki editors!
Bloody fantastic. Nice work, and thanks to all involved.
got a zip of these?
I can throw one together, maybe tomorrow if I can find a few minutes to myself.
On a cursory glance something that struck was the fact that some of the gargoyles are marked as female. That’s interesting…
I missed that detail, but it is interesting, indeed.
Good find!
Nevermind, it was the Fellowship marker…
Pity.
On an unrelated note, an “all documents” ZIP file is now available.
Awesome information, I’ve perused through it and the technical information is interesting. Did anyone ever see the world editor that is mentioned ?
One day perhaps, we’ll find similar information on U4 or U5 🙂
Jc