Slashing Dragon has released the source code for his crowdfunded Ultima 6-like game engine, OpenArthurianX6, to certain backers thereof:

The source code for OAX6 can now be checked out by campaign backers as defined in their perk level.

It is still early, but even at this stage, a simple game could be created! I hope some of them get to play around with it and come back with suggestions. Of course, as development continues it will become easier (ultimately providing editing tools for this) and more complex games will be able to be created.

His post also includes some basic instructions for creating a game with the engine in its current state; if you backed the game at a sufficient level to have access to the source, you’ll no doubt want to give those a read.

Speaking of the state of the engine, Slash is working hard to ready the first Milestone release thereof. His main focus, it would seem, has been on mobs AI and dialogue, and has put together a video demonstrating improvements thereto:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOBK9_7eAJA

He has also been working on implementing ranged attacks by enemies, which effort presented him with a few challenges:

Making the enemies being able to attack the player with ranged weapons required two things: first was allowing defining initial inventory for mobs (so that they could have ammunition for the weapons).

This was already possible for NPCs, but not for MobTypes. I considered merging this data together but rather decided against it so that you could have NPCs share MobTypes without having to duplicate data. So now you can define initial inventory for both (and it will be added together).

After modifying the “base” mobs tileset to handle two types of soldiers (swordSoldier and xbowSoldier) with different weapons and inventory, I ran into problems with the process of embedding the tileset on the tiled map. It just doesn’t seem possible to update the embedded tileset with modifications (Once embedded it’s copied into the map, and I couldn’t find a way to replace it without deleting the tiles that were already using it).

And recently, he has also been adjusting how the engine handles skyboxes:

Added a mask for the celestial bodies on the skybox, tried first with a sprite mask but then realized a simple rectangular mask would work just as well.

If you want to stay abreast of all of the changes to the OpenArthurianX6 engine, you would do well to follow Slash’s blog.