Check Out “Age of Singularity”, a Unity-Based Re-Creation of “Ultima 6”
I’ve been lax in getting any updates about this exciting-looking project posted to the Codex, for which I apologize…especially to its developer, Eric Adam Hovis (AKA WestingTyler). Age of Singularity first bubbled up in late 2020; Eric mentioned it in a post on the Ultima Dragons Facebook Group and gave a concise summary of what the project’s goals were:
I am trying to re-create Ultima VI in Blender and Unity using Playmaker for scripting and SimpleSQL for getting NPC responses from a SQL database.
A longer description of the project can be found at Eric’s website for it. It’s equal parts manifesto and technical description of the project, and well worth a read; I’m sure he speaks for many of you reading this when he details his frustrations at modern RPGs and their too-static environments.
Now, despite being first teased in 2020, it has only been since 2022 that Eric has been posting regular updates about Age of Singularity to Facebook. These range in subject from his explorations of the technologies he is using to create the game, to his use of AI art generation to prototype character designs. For example, in March of 2022, we got a look at his conversions of Ultima 6’s items into 3D objects:
In November of 2022, Eric showcased some of his efforts to re-create some of the game’s towns:
Recently, his focus has been on the dungeons of the game, which he is making great progress in rendering:
And, of course, he has released several videos about his development progress, the latest of which is visible above.
This is definitely an exciting-looking project. We already had one opportunity to explore the world of Ultima 6 in 3D, of course, but that effort was somewhat limited by the constraints of the Dungeon Siege engine. By using Unity, Eric Adam Hovis will hopefully be able to escape having to deal with similar constraints, and deliver a more faithful re-creation of the best of the Ultima series.
If you’d like to follow the project, be sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel, and also follow the #AgeOfSingularity hashtag on Facebook. At some point, I’ll set up a project entry for Age of Singularity here at the Codex, but I don’t have time to get to that today.
Hey! This is awesome! I appreciate the signal boost for the #AgeOfSingularity project, and this is a great summary of the project and its progress. Now that the basic underworld is complete and interconnected, I’m finishing up the Overworld and hope to show more images and videos of it soon. Once the Overworld has better topology, making it smoother and more performant, i’ll connect the overworld and underworld in Unity, finish up the gables of the buildings to get all the towns functional, then I’ll go through and add all the furniture and props to the world using Ian Albert’s great detailed Ultima VI maps, basically decorating the world like a dollhouse, which will be super fun. Then it’ll be merging and improving the coded systems to get the world walkable with completable goals, at which point I hope to make a build available on itch.io. Thanks to ChatGPT I’m able to code in C# using Visual Studio Code now, allowing even more flexibility than Playmaker once allowed. I’m glad to see people are excited about exploring a classic Britannia in a fresh new way; I’m super excited to be able to play the game myself! Anyway, keep up the great work, and I’ll try to make new updates soon!