Ideal Dragon has posted another progress update for his Exult-based remake of Ultima 8 to the Ultima Dragons Discord server:

• Stardrop has been patiently working on some tools that will make dialog a hell of a lot easier for us.
• Agentorangeguy has been building a totally new tool for building geography in Exult that will allow us to build maps faster and more efficiently than ever before, and doing it directly without having to pass our map data through a layer of tools first.
• The wonderful GWChapman has now joined the team and will be assisting with occasional NPC sprites.
• Son has recently finished a revision of the work-in-progress Shaana sprite. It’s not ready to be shown publicly yet.
• I have built some new scripts for Aseprite for converting and redrawing sprites more efficiently and in better quality than prior, utilizing Aseprite & some newer scaling & rotation algorithms to full effect.
• I have also been working on completing the last core architecture sprite sets (for walls, etc). We’re in the home stretch with architecture art now, and soon the art creation will move back towards sprites and furniture.
• I spent 4 days straight this week working on a sprite of a wooden column from the original Pagan. But hey, at least it looks good now.
• Stardrop and I have been slowly and very carefully planning and mapping out a very specific major cut content area. Nothing to announce on this front, but boy, it’s a big deal area.

There aren’t any new screenshots to show off this time around, alas. But do note that last bullet point; one wonders if it might be an attempt to implement what we know about the plot of The Lost Vale? While not technically cut content — since it was, in fact, an unreleased expansion — it’s certainly a “big deal” as far as previously-unseen content for the game goes. That said, there is a lot of other cut content that could potentially be restored in this remake, so it will be interesting to see just what Ideal Dragon and Stardrop are planning in this regard.