It has been a while — several months, in fact — since we’ve heard any news from Ultima IX: Redemption, the Morrowind-based re-imagining of Ultima 9. Now, a lot of us here have (I trust) kind of gotten used to long periods of silence from them. However, it didn’t sit well with Tribun Dragon, who popped by their forum to ask:

After three months of no news, please don’t tell me the project died a silent death. Not after all the waiting.

Shortly thereafter, team member Zini posted a reply:

There is still some work going on, but some people are indeed somewhat inactive because of RL reasons. I am very focussed on OpenMW right now. I think we will be able to get Redemption out of hibernation once OpenMW is usable (which isn’t that far away anymore).

OpenMW? The open-source Morrowind engine? Tribun was curious:

Open MW is a tool to make things easier if I understand right?

To which question, one daveanti posted a reply:

Open MW is an open source reimplementation of the Morrowind engine. It aims to be better than the original which will make things easier.

From watching the frequent releases being made, Zini and the team there are doing a great job and making excellent progress!

Zini then posted a follow-up…just yesterday, in fact:

daveanti’s description is correct.

Making it easier isn’t the main aspect. MW is just too buggy, including one very critical bug that screwed up a lot of features. We found it very late in the development process (sneaky little bastard). Had we found it earlier, we might have considered using a different engine.

But OpenMW will also make things easier and even speed up the development once we can use it. For example with MW the plan for exterior shadows was to use vertex paint on the terrain, which takes a lot of effort and so far has been done only in a few areas. But it looks like OpenMW will have dynamic shadows, which means we can skip this task altogether. Will save us several men-months of worldbuilder time.

And don’t get me started on the whole scripting system! Having one that doesn’t throw up if you just look at it unfriendly enough, will bring a major productivity boost.

And there, Dragons and Dragonettes, we have an answer to the question of why there has been so much silence from the project of late: they have evidently been tripped up by a very critical and annoying bug in Morrowind, one that has hampered their efforts so much that, had they known about it before embarking on the project, they would have contemplated changing engines. So it would seem that they have paused work on the project for a bit, until such time as they can transition it to OpenMW.

Which…well, I wish them luck! Switching engines, even just to jump to a re-implementation of the same engine, is a major setback, and I for one hope they are able to weather it!