Don’t get your hopes too high, Dragons and Dragonettes, but when I was putting together the Ultima Underworld subdomain, I took a brief look at the Abysmal engine, another attempt to re-create the engine for Ultima Underworld and System Shock. The project’s website at SourceForge hasn’t been updated since about 2009, which would lead the average person to think that the project was…well…dead, abandoned by its author.

However, I took a bit of a look at its Git repository logs, and was surprised to find that while the project’s lead developer, Julien Langer, had started working on and checking in files again…as of January of this year.

Here, indeed, is the point at which he resumed development, and the last update prior thereto:

2012-01-10 jlanger85 Some fixes for Mac OS
2010-10-16 jlanger85 avoid temporary copies in the image loaders

The focus on Apple is telling, by the way; several of the updates since January concern getting Abysmal working on OS X. For now, there’s no news on the Abysmal project site, nor have the download snapshots been updated…but it would seem as though this project may have had some new life breathed into it. Which, I submit, is kind of exciting, since at least one of its screenshots shows Ultima Underworld running on an iPhone.

You can find the latest Abysmal snapshots available for download at the project’s entry on the Underworld tribute site.