Ultima Return: Abandoning NWN2, Switching to Unity
Well, this is interesting:
So I'll just berak the news here : #Ultima Return is officially switching to the #Unity engine! More details soon !
— Sergorn Dragon (@UltimaReturn) February 10, 2014
In all honesty, Ultima Return has been stalled for a while, and a large part of that has been a result of the inherent limitations of Neverwinter Nights 2. While the project will lose some of the work done for it, a lot of the art will be portable, and it’s likely that the worldbuilding will move ahead at a better pace. Especially if I’m able to master the use of e.g. this asset kit, which would allow for the creation of towns where buildings have interiors on the same map as exteriors…an Ultima staple, arguably.
Awesome. Unity looks pretty sweet. Does that mean it will be cross-platform as well?
While it’s obviously way too early to say with certainty that this will be the case, Unity does ostensibly allow for “one-click” publishing to multiple platforms, so there is a reasonable chance that UR would be able to support Windows, OS X, and Linux.
But maybe let us get a bit of a start on development before we make any firm commitments to that sort of thing.
This is great news. You may remember some of my grumblings about “engine” choice -way- back on Aiera. Unity is a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary RPG that supports modding. It’s not the Holy Grail, but a damn sight better than dead, OS-dependent games supporting modding.
In celebration, if there are any assets (future or current) I can share that would do this project some good I’d be willing do so under the CC BY-NC-SA license. That basically means do whatever you want (modify, redistribute), as long as it’s not commercial and is licensed the same if distributed. I use Blender, but it can export to other formats if you can’t import directly.