A Year in Ultima Fan Projects: 2017 in Review
This previous year was a veritable cornucopia of fan projects both large and small. With so many fan projects, it is hard to keep up with what each project did this year and if there were any notable releases. Below is a round-up of the various fan projects that were specifically for Ultima and not just inspired by the Ultima games. The count of projects reached 28 for this year, and that does not include the 15 inspired by Ultima projects.
So without further preamble, here are the Ultima Fan Projects for 2017:
This minecraft project inspired by Ultima Online, seeks to provide a player-driven world of Britannia. This year the project has seen notable progress with multiple areas of Britannia reaching completion including Lord’s British’s Castle and Britain and Trinsic. Work also continued with underlying systems for their servers as well.
Custom Ultima Dragons Keyboard
During the second half of 2017, Zedex Dragon created an UDIC theme keyboard template both in 87-key and 101-key variants. These are available for order from WASD keyboards.
The Outer_-_Gamer presented his Unity project, which seeks to remake Ultima VII as a first-person RPG. The project presented some notable progress earlier in 2017. Britannia is completed built with several systems including combat and water implemented. There is even a video showcasing the remake’s intro, which appears to be a playable segment of their remake rather than the traditional FMV sequence of the original. There has been no word regarding the project since the middle of this 2017, but it is likely Outer_-_Game will return to this project in the future.
In 2017, Exult did not receive a proper release. Bug fixes and improvements continue with the engine. Marzo has written much of the code necessary to get the original extended version of the Serpent Isle intro video incorporated into Exult; only some computer issues delay adding to code to the Exult Codebase. The iOS branch also saw continued development becoming more and more playable.
There was a spark of progress at the beginning of the year, but the project went quiet. It should be noted that while the goal of patching Ultima IX is not limited by technology or tools, the main portion of the project is tied to progress with New Project Britannia.
Speaking personally as the head of Forgotten World, real-life time constraints in 2017 disrupted regular progress on the patching side. Furthermore, work on New Project Britannia has been limited to the time constraints of all of its staff.
Early in 2017, Hex provided a massive, poster-sized re-creation of the Ultima 5 box art.
Jason Walton’s Ultima VI Remastered Soundtrack
At end of the 2016, Jason Walton posted to his youtube channel his remastered version of the Ultima VI soundtrack. This remastered album has been posted to Sound-Cloud by RoosterCastille with permission for better access by fans.
The browser-based Ultima VIII demake, one of many projects worked on by Slashing Dragon, received some additional support for cutscenes and browser support upgrades during January of 2017.
Nuvie saw incremental development of some scripting logic as well as bugfixes and minor improvements over the past year. Most of this work was directed toward Martian Dreams specific elements and features. One major piece of news during the middle of the year was the addition of a tileset import and export feature was added to allow for custom tilesets to be used in the game.
Pieces of 8-Bit Ultima Music Remixes
Early in 2018, five Ultima songs were discovered to have been faithfully recreated with modern musical technology by Pieces of 8-bit.
RelExpo’s Ultima Online Soundboard
For those with Android phones and that love Ultima Online’s sound effects and music, RelExpo created a soundboard app (released late 2017) that allows users to play with the tunes and effects from Ultima Online on their Android devices.
This project is a standalone campaign for Divinity Original Sin 2, which started up fairly late in 2017. It seeks to create within two years a short (10-12 hour) campaign set mostly on Verity Isle in the lead-up to Ultima V. Windmere picked up some team members and they were able to implement an Ultima-style character creation system.
Voyager Dragons’ Ultima 3 upgrade project continued its progress in 2017. In addition to bug fixing certain issues with his 3.2 patch, he introduced a “Start a new game” option to the main menu of Ultima 3. Voyager Dragon also announced last year, the Sosaria mod – an attempt to bring the world maps of Ultima 2 and 3 in-line with the Lands of Lord British from Ultima 1. His focus thus far is on altering Ultima 3’s map first before moving onto Ultima 2’s map. The 3.3 patch with the Sosaria Mod included reached beta testing in early 2017. The patch, however, did not receive a full release last year due to several issues found during testing – most notable of these were installation/setup difficulties and the Fawn region requiring some improvements. Available time was, of course, the limitation to addressing these issues during 2017.
Dino Dragon’s recreation of the Ultima 1 engine compatible with modern systems received new life in 2017. The most recent iteration of this fan project/learning environment is using C++ and SDL2 to provide a solid coding base for compatible on Windows systems. An early demo was released in January and work continued on the project into April.
Dan Duda’s python remake of Ultima 3 had notable process early in 2017. By March, the remake has several game commands (ie game actions), moongates and whirlpool travel, sound control, Dawn disappearing with the phases, and a rudimentary combat system. Recently, Dan Duda has returned to continue development.
Grumdrig’s map viewer of Ultima 4 and Ultima 5’s world maps (and underworld map) was released in 2017. You navigate the maps primarily by way of an avatar who is limited by terrain. The project is seemingly complete.
Ultima IX: Redemption “Libre Edition”
This project started shortly after the release of the Redemption files early in 2017. This project seeks to provide a less copyright fraught version of the Redemption file release. This primarily entails adding the Creative Commons license to the materials and gathering permissions from various former staff members of the Titans of Ether who created various assets with the intention that those assets be released as part of the Ultima IX Redemption full project release, and not as free assets for more general use.
This dungeon map viewer project by Fenyx4 is a tool for the Codex of Ultima Wisdom wiki to support display of various Ultima’s dungeon maps. In November of 2017, this viewer was released as a stand-alone utility. Only Ultima 4 dungeon maps are supported.
This project by Malena seeks to create a “look but don’t touch” server based on the Ultima Online maps. It was first announced in April 2017 and by February of this year, a number of areas of the map were completed including Trinsic, Dagger Isle, Player Housing, Britain, Vesper, and more. Malena has reached half way through her development plan.
Ultima VI – Nitpicker’s Delight Patch
This patch was released in June 2017 after working on a German translation project. This patch fixed a number of continuity “errors” and other nitpicking issues as presented on Hacki’s nitpicking website for Ultima VI.
Ultima VII German Translation and Ultima VI German Translation
Begun in 2015, this project is a translation patch that would add a full German translation onto the English version of Ultima VII currently available. This patch was released in September of 2017 and now includes a translation for Forge of Virtue in addition to a better translation of the game into German without game-breaking bugs that were present in the original German release.
The Ultima VI German translation project saw continue progress in 2017, with their fourth beta release of the German translation patch in May of 2017 and a final release in September of that year.
This remake of Ultima VI in Exult lead by Zygon Dragon does not often release developmental progress, but there was a big update in April 2017. Several notable elements of the remake were noted as being completed including several plot-critical dungeons and multiple NPC conversation trees. In total, nearly half of the game has been completed from a plot perspective. Additionally, an original side plot and scripting for the Balloon were worked upon prior to April.
This Tabletop RPG from the early 2000s was inspired by Ultima Online mechanics and set after in the era after the Ascension of the Avatar. The materials to play and gamemaster this ruleset have been reposted online in a concise website in 2017. The ruleset also received some tweaks and updates from its original incarnation. A forum for discussion was also added, but has not received much attention.
After a release of a standalone server and client at the end of 2016, CUO saw various bug fixes throughout 2017. At the end of the year, the project was fully released as open source and various videos were released detailing the differences to be found in CUO, the first of which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lLlufPJOO4.
Cakeforge released images of his work crafting paper dolls of the Avatar and Dupre including separate pieces of armor and weapons. A template to create your own Dupre paper doll was also released.
This project by Hank Morgan to convert Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 as well as system shock 1 levels into Unity saw continued development this year. This project, which streamlines the remake process was already well on its way to provide a complete Ultima Underworld 1 remake in Unity at the beginning of the year. Version 1.02 was released at the beginning of September with UUW1 fully supported, UUW2 only partially supported and still somewhat incomplete in many respects. It has since then gone through several additional releases adding more features and a more complete playing experience.
The UUltima project is a unity project to perform a one-to-one conversion of Ultima 1 into Unity. This project started in March of 2017 and the latest update was late April. Player character generation and an event log were completed along with work on UI, keyboard interaction, and player status/attribute systems.
VisElEchNon’s Composite Map of Britannia
VisElEchNon released a series of Britannia maps made as a composite of Ultimas 4, 5, and 6. Each map represents a different presentation of the composite map: Terrain Only and versions with Runic or English fonts on the map in both PNG and JPG and a variety of resolutions.
There was a lot of good development this past year both in variety, depth, and breadth. There were so many projects in fact, that the inspired by works had to be separated into a second post, which will hopefully be released by next week.
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First Age of Update
Thank you Shattered Moon for the Classic Ultima Online Update.
Revenge of the Update
Links to project pages were added to the entries.
Classic Ultima Online – After a release of a standalone server and client at the end of 2016, CUO saw various bug fixes throughout 2017. At the end of the year, the project was fully released as open source and various videos were released detailing the differences to be found in CUO, the first of which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lLlufPJOO4.
Nice list! Note that I didn’t do “The Ultima IV/V Map Explorer”, I just let know WtF about it 🙂 It was made by “Grumdrig”
Also, I guess OpenArthurian will show up in the inspired projects 🙂