Exult 1.4 Updated

October 22, 2008

ultima.gif

The bleeding-edge version of — the engine for more operating systems and platforms than one cares to list — has been updated as of October 9th. and have similarly been updated, and all can be downloaded from the project website.

Or from the project entry at .

 
ultima.gif

There’s still no new news posted on the project’s main website, but — the engine that enables (both parts: and ) to run on virtually every OS imaginable — has been updated. Exult 1.4, the “unstable, beta” build of the engine, was updated earlier this month, as were and .

Major changes in this release include correction of a few problems associated with creating a new game from within Exult Studio, a code change to prevent dead NPCs from taking additional damage, a tweak to the proximity-based wake-up feature of NPCs, and a few other code corrections.

I have added downloads for all three updated programs, plus an updated copy of the Exult source code, to the project entry at .

 

I see that Dino’s Ultima Page has posted some news concerning a couple of new file releases from different projects. Notably, Ranman’s Ultima V for TI Calculators has released a beta version of that port for the TI-92 and V200 calculators. This download has already been added to the project entry at .

Also, the full version of a patch translating Ultima 7 to Spanish has been released. Following up on this lead led me to translation patches for , , and about which I had previously been unaware, and these have all been added to Aiera.

Additionally, the Ultima 6 Project Development Tools Package has been released, which enables the user to edit and compile conversations, edit game objects, edit game logic, and provides a host of other functions as well. It can be downloaded from the website, or from the entry at Aiera.

Other Ultima-related news I found whilst wandering through the Internet today includes:

Aklabeth

The web home of this remake of seems to be offline. I hope it’s just a temporary thing.

Ultima Underworld for Pocket PC

Conversely, this port of Ultima Underworld to the seems to be back online again. Nice to see. That means that I get to move this project out of the cemetery!

Exult

This port of and Serpent Isle to…well…pretty much every operating system one could dare to think of…doesn’t look as though it’s been updated, by its website. But I noticed that the and PocketPC snapshots were updated earlier this month, as was the snapshot for . All of these can be downloaded through the project entry. The chief modification seems to concern a bug with multiracial Avatars.

Ultima: Iris

This 3D frontend for Ultima Online has been updated recently, to build version 2365. and Windows source, and the Windows installer, can all be downloaded via the project entry, or at the project website.

Finally, I was contacted by Yannick “Alcibiade” Kirschhoffer regarding a new piece of Ultima-related material he has produced. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

I’ve been huge fan of the second Ultima trilogy. In 2003, I began work on writing guitar arrangements of most of this era’s music. I did the score almost entirely, and some of U4 and U5 too. Then I compiled these in a songbook that I illustrated with artwork and quotes from the games.

It is available for download in PDF format at www.alcibiade.org

This is a handy little creation, beautifully arranged and attractively compiled into one volume. I’ve added a project entryfor it under the category of “General Utility”, and it can be downloaded from there as well.

Well done, Yannick!

As some good Readers may be aware, I run several websites, not the least of which is Ultima: Aiera, my project archive site. It’s basically an aggregator for news related to the various projects out there on the great big that have something to do with Ultima. And whether that’s a patch for an existing Ultima title or a remake of an Ultima game using a new (and fancier) game engine, Aiera exists to keep track of everything I can find “out there”.

I’ve been working on updating Aiera all day, so there won’t be anything else done today in the way of blogging. But that’s okay — an article I read in Wired magazine this morning suggested that mixing up one’s content every now and again was a sure-fire technique to spruce up the blog. So I expect thousands of readers now.

Yeah, right!

However, one thing I do want it to get my various blogs a bit better-integrated with each other, and because is kind of the master domain for each of these that means that anything that gets posted to those “other” sites from now on will be mirrored back to here.

So…news from Aiera today.

I was contacted a while back (an inexcusably long while back, as it happens — my apologies!) by a fellow named Zen, who passed along a bit of an addon module for based on the first level of the Abyss in .

As Zen doesn’t have a website to host the project at for himself, he has made it available to the world via , and I have (finally!!) created a project entry for it. Check thou it out, O Reader, if you’ve still got those Dungeon Keeper discs tucked away in a drawer or closet!

Also, I have added a download for the ’s Milestone 5 release to that project’s entry, so if you haven’t grabbed it from somewhere else already, you can now get it there as well.

Other news, courtesy of Dino’s Ultima Page:

Ultima V: Lazarus

Cheerful Dragon has released version 1.29 of his various mods and bugfixes for this remake of . These can be downloaded either at the previous forum link, or via the project entry at Aiera.

Seven Towers Exult Mods

Marzo has released updates to his mods for , for both (Keyring) and (Fixes). The latest revisions of both can be downloaded through their respective project entries at Aiera:

Ultima: Iris

Apparently, the project’s developers took home first prize at the Dusmania 10 hobby game development meeting in , . Congrats!

Ultima 5 for TI Calculators

Ranman has released version 1.01 of his port of Ultima 5 to the calculator. The up-to-date download can be found via the project entry.

Exult

This remake has been updated recently — or, rather, the unstable 1.4 version has been updated, as has and its accompanying tools. The Exult team’s plugins for GiMP have also been updated this month, and the whole mess of things can be downloaded via the project entry.

EUO

This Ultima-inspired game has seen the release of version 0.16 of its rudimentary 3D client, which can be downloaded via the project entry at Aiera.

Ultima Restoration

This comprehensive multi-project has released screenshots of the Kilrathi space station from their remake of . With this completed, they now have all the cities, dungeons, and space stations fully mapped in the game — which, if I do say so myself, is damn good progress!

They’ve also added links to a good couple-dozen modules that I’m going to have to sort through in short order, so…well, it’s nice to know in advance what I’ll be up to for at least part of next week.

Also, the Wing Commander CIC team are attempting to back up what remains of the Origin Systems data library. They are looking for people with experience with this sort of thing, so if you’re one of those people who lives and breathes in backup tapes, you might want to check their project out.