Any Ultima Fan Projects Need Help? And If So…What Kind?
A few days ago, I got an email from Cear Dragon. It would seem that Ultima 6 Online has reached a fairly mature, stable state, because Cear is looking for a little more action:
While I wait…I figured I’d see if you knew anyone who needed some help. I am starving to help get Ultima out there. Do you know of any Ultima fan projects out there that need help on any level? Waiting for UFE beta to start is going to kill me.
So…I’ll just put the question to the audience here. Any of you fan project developers need some help with something?
Not really. I just need time for myself to be able to work on it. And 3D models. Everyone always needs 3D models
Exult has something old but new that could need some work. The autonotes that fill the notebook (‘n’ in Exult) with text when a game flag is set. Currently most flags are in the style of ‘MEET_PATTERSON’ and need some fleshing out 😉
I *just* added the autonotes to Exults bundled files and made an option to toggle them.
I still need to write some documentation for that and then wanted to ask wtf for some promotion here anyway 😉
And your skills are what exactly?
I haven’t heard much from any of the big Ultima remakes or fan projects in some time. There are some that have been in works for years and years (Ultima IX: Redemption in particular has been in varying states of progress since 1999 I believe).
It would be nice to see the community come together to finish a few of the projects.
There have been some successes. Lazarus is finished. Exult is in a stable state. The U6 Project is completely playable, just not quite finished. Nuvie is humming along. Pentagram is very playable. There’s graphic/music patches for Ultima 2 – 5. These volunteer projects take time, but there have been some successes.
Not really sure what’s happening with Redemption these days, though.
I think they’re in the middle of transitioning to OpenMW.
And I think a lot of the team (Zini, for sure, possibly others) have basically jumped on board with OpenMW to get it to a stable state, suitable for Redemption.
OpenMW is a project that really excites me, and they’re moving forward at a great pace. But they’re likely still a year off from a fully playable engine that replicates everything Morrowind does.
Redemption has gone through tons of change and re-invention over the years. I’m just curious if it will ever see the light of day, and if not, it will be a shame because of how much effort has gone into it over so many years.
There is a lot to do in the backtoroots project: a bit of graphics, decoding the original format, bug detection and fixing in the ultima4 and 5 ports. We could even see how ultima 3 can be supported 🙂
We’re still in need of someone who can help update the U6 portraits and pixel artists to help out with shapes for the U6 Exult mod.