Brad Hannah posted an update in the Ultima Dragons Facebook group a couple of days ago that made me sit up a little straighter: Ultima V Redux — his long-running remake of Ultima 5, now using the Go-based Ebiten engine after dropping the earlier Unity-based version — is essentially “function for function complete”. He is into play and scenario testing now, hunting bugs and incongruities against the original.

A quick refresher if you have been away from the project: Brad’s aim has been to keep the charm of Ultima 5 while cleaning up the UI and graphics and making life easier for people who no longer have a paper manual on the desk. We last covered the Ebiten pivot here and some early reimplementation milestones here; the project entry still lives at our Ultima 5 portal.

Brad highlighted a handful of the features he is showing in short videos attached to the post (which I won’t attempt to embed here):

1. You can now be in the dungeon in near darkness, allowing you to see a little bit, but not able to interact well with environment unless you light a torch.
2. There is a hotkey Ctrl+R that pops up Runic alphabet for easier translation – we don’t all have paper manuals anymore right?
3. Optional “smooth movement” prevents jarring movements and instead glides the Avatar between spaces.
4. A new Quest Journal can be accessed using Shift+J. It includes automated tracking of key game details like Shadowlords, words of power, mantras, shrines etc. BUT it also allows you to easily capture important hints and info from NPCs directly in the conversation or afterwards in the “Last Conversation” tab.
5. You can load and save from 1 of 8 save slots. Permitting some safe testing and exploration. Of course you can stick to one if you prefer 😉
6. Improved lighting accounts for sunlight when indoors, or lack thereof – but also a dithering effect that removes that hard cut off of light and no light.
7. Significant work on the user interface. You may notice far few blue borders and sticking to a simpler thinner white border consistently.
8. Game is still entirely keyboard driven, no mouse component, so getting around is very fast.

His intent, he says, is to leave room for the classic pen-and-paper approach while still giving players without manuals a fighting chance. He expects another month or so of polish before it is ready for wider playtesting — and admits that every time he plays it, he finds more he wants to improve.

Before you get too excited about a public-facing download: this is a testing milestone, not a release announcement. That said, “function for function complete” is always a welcome thing to hear from a fan remake of this scope. You’d do well to watch for Brad’s next updates in the Dragons group (and here, once something playable lands). Project background and GitHub links can be found at the project entry.