Ultima 8 in Minecraft (And Also Neverwinter Nights)
Well, isn’t this just fitting? It’s the month in which the 20th anniversary of Ultima 8 falls, and there are two new Ultima 8-related fan projects to post news about.
Or, well…one new project and one old, no-longer-being-worked-on project, if you want to get technical about it. You see, back in 2010, Koden-KM was hard at work on a Neverwinter Nights-based remake of Ultima 8, but he never completed that project and stopped work on it after building…most of the exterior areas of Pagan, and a small selection of interiors as well.
You can find that project, with a download of the NWN module for it, either at its GitHub repository (linked just previously) or at the project entry for it here.
More recently, however, Koden-KM has been working on a remake of Ultima 8 for Minecraft’s Adventure Mode. At present, there isn’t much to show for this new effort apart from a handful of screenshots (which you can also see at its new project entry here, as well as at GitHub), but he seems to be making decent progress thus far. He even intends to include The Lost Vale in this remake, based on the plot documents that came to light a while ago.
One wonders if he’ll be able to implement the “tiny Avatar” feature of that particular lost piece of software?
I’d say a simple switch on the wall that closes the small hole but then opens a hole eight times larger, or something, and allows you to progress would be workable. Maybe then create everything eight times larger than normal in the “tinytar” areas?
I think i’ll go with making some duplicate looking but much larger versions of those areas so the player feels tiny. Depends how large those areas will be at normal size and if Mojang adds a shrink effect by the time i get up to building The Lost Vale.
I am planning to make the Pagan Minecraft map available for download when each milestone area is built. NPC’s and monster spawning will not be added until the world is complete though.
I am trying to keep the map as close to the original as possible. The Docks and Tenebrae area are taking a bit longer than usual to build because I want the map to be a single open world space with no teleporting to each area at the entry/exit gateways. As most of you know the space between the docks and Tenebrae areas do not align exactly as the walls suggest. East and West Tenebrae are longer areas. I don’t want to cut the Docks forest area short, so i’m going to have some garden/forest space there to fill out the gap between the Docks and central Tenebrae.
I am planning to make an optional resource pack later to make the textures closer to Pagan’s, but also making it look recognisable with the native texture pack.
I will try to make a way to climb onto all the houses like original Pagan allowed. That world freedom was one of the main things that got me hooked. Climbing in Minecraft can be done with vines, ladders and some carefully placed blocks. I hope one day Mojang adds a climbing feature similar to Pagan’s.
I will update the start location on that NWN project to set it back to Devon’s camp site at the Docks and fix the Argentrock Isle entry/exit to make exploring the world possible.
I think i stopped work on this project due to the NWN game being older and less available.