Sir John works fast, Dragons and Dragonettes. What is more, in his efforts to produce a German translation for Ultima 6, he has pursued and worked with the other developers to improve extant Ultima 6 editing tools. For example, he worked with Paul Gilbert to get some improvements made to U6Edit:

As I mentioned before, kind Paul G. has spent quite some more time and effort to improve his most handy u6edit tool and got the picture import to be working finally.

Accordingly I was now able to replace some of the original graphics, and – I have to admit – it is not entirely without pride, that the intro screen now has a German and updated logo. I hope not to be stepping on anyone’s toes with my decision to use the colours of the original box art instead of the somewhat dated bright-blue colours of the original “Ultima” logo.

Hope you like it

You can check out the revamped, translated logo above. It looks pretty sharp, I think.

And as if that weren’t cool enough, Sir John also found someone who was able to get Nodling Dragon’s U6 Encode utility to compile properly, which opened up a world of possibilities for the translation effort:

Due to the invaluable help from SkaZZ from Dementia Traduxiones, I was able to have all items in the game translated.

Here the difficulty wasn’t the translation itself – this was long done – but the required encoding of the source file, which wasn’t possible until SkaZZ fixed the source of the u6encode tool from Nodling Dragon. What he did exactly is far beyond me, but it works now and I’m still doing a happy dance

As such, Sir John has released an initial version of his translation patch for download, which can be obtained either from his site or the new project entry I have just put together here. Here’s what has been translated thus far:

– all introducing sequences
– all graphics
– all books
– all systembarks possible
– all items
– conversations with everybody in the throne room

And do also check out his main site; the front page of it has been converted into a comprehensive guide as to how to translate Ultima 6 to your native tongue.