It’s been about three and a half weeks since I wrote about Loresong’s browser-based Ultima 7 MMO, which he’s building from the original game data with help from OpenAI’s Astra model. At the time, it was six hours old and running locally on his home server. Loresong has kept busy since, and the updates on X have been coming thick and fast.

First up was combat. On October 5, four more hours of work produced a crude PvP system for what he’s now calling Ultima 7 Online. He says the server can support “2000+ concurrent clients (although probably not all standing in one place)”. He also lists quests, dungeon instances, levelling, groups and “character vanity” as on the way. One idea was dropped, though: 8-direction facing “turned out to be wildly complex,” so the original four directions stay for now.

Character design started that same evening, and in the most Ultima way possible. Loresong wants everything you equip to show up on your character in the world, not just on the paperdoll in the inventory gump, so that players in an MMO can tell each other apart.

His first step was to re-create the Avatar nude as a foundation, noting that “the size of his genitals, while hilarious, was not intentional…” Coming so soon after the “Quest of the Nudist” phase of Camilo DelCódigo’s isometric Ultima IX, I have to ask: what is it with naked Avatars lately? (Though, I guess “lately” is maybe not the best word to use there; Serpent Isle is over 30 years old at this point.)

By October 17, dynamic character clothing was working with every item in Serpent Isle and all of Exult’s custom additions, and it supports dyes and custom alterations too. In between, Loresong also borrowed the Ultima VI intro music for his title screen, because “it just hits harder and is the best of the series.” I won’t argue.

Then came the atmosphere. “I’m not trying to remaster Ultima 7,” he wrote on October 23. Still, he felt the ambient audio and weather had dated enough to hurt immersion, so he added volumetric fog and clouds, better ambient audio, improved particle effects and time-of-day lighting. It’s an interesting parallel to Max’s Britannia Relit, reached by a completely different route. A day/night cycle with volumetric weather followed a few hours later. After that, he says he probably won’t change much more visually, because “too much change risks losing the charm and soul of the original.”

The most interesting change may be a subtle one. As Loresong explained:

Ultima VII ran in 256-color VGA, where each pixel is a palette index with no alpha channel and no hardware blending. In the early 90s they used a translucency lookup table to re-color pixels, blending them with whatever was behind something (allowing for “invisible” party members, for example). It could not do smooth, dynamic opacity on-the-fly, however. This is something we take for granted as trivial and easy. By cross-fading animation frames I blend them instead of cell-to-cell animation, making effects like ocean waves and water fountains much more smooth and organic without needing additional art.

Anyone who has watched Ultima VII‘s surf flick from frame to frame will see why this matters. The animations stay true to the original, but they stop looking choppy. It also needs no new art.

Since then, things have moved from the demo stage toward a working game. On October 24, the live server was being tested with 700 simulated concurrent clients, with work under way on interfaces, combat, performance, NPC behaviour, loot and the economy. Loresong has also shown his first attempt at 8-directional movement and replacement sprites. He wasn’t happy with it, but he thinks the game “needs this badly to appeal to a modern audience.” Once his pipeline is sorted, he expects GPT Astra to produce every monster and NPC “in an hour or two.” The music, though, is getting no such treatment. “I’m generally a fan of AI but I don’t like AI music,” he says, so he remastered all of Ultima 7‘s music himself, “because I have a budget of zero for this project.”

And as if one Origin classic weren’t enough, Loresong had some spare Astra compute last week, so he had it rebuild Wing Commander: Privateer in three.js. He’d like to turn that into an MMO too, once Ultima 7 Online is up and running.