News

2004 June 30

EA has just cancelled development of Ultima X Odyssey. Whether you were looking forward to the game or not, it is sad to see EA kill yet another Ultima title, and I think it should be obvious to anyone who had any doubts that the franchise as a retail property is essentially dead.

It is very interesting to me that what should be one of the most compelling and established fantasy CRPG franchises around has been bungled and murdered so often and so well by its current guardian, EA. Ever since Ultima 8 was rushed out the door with bugs, the franchise has been mishandled and undervalued by the suits and non-gamers controlling it. I do not hold Richard Garriot responsible for this decline -- this kind of abuse by the men who hold the purse strings is just the cost of doing business in the game industry these days. After so much time, it could hardly be avoided.

So often we see that creativity, innovation, and depth are not rewarded by the market with success, but with misunderstanding and with hostile distrust. This happened to Origin itself a while ago, as it had with other companies like Black Isle and Looking Glass, and now the Ultima franchise itself seems only fit to re-release as shovelware. Make no mistake about it: EA is only riding their UO cash cow into the ground at this point, and the innovation has stopped.

In light of this, it is very comforting to me to see that the Ultima fan community is as vibrant as ever. Ultima Legacy has become the Britannia that UO should have always been, and continues to bring new ideas and stories to a game whose engine is severely outdated. Ultima Iris is rewriting that engine to bring it up to date to the standards of modern games. Exult has matured to the point where it has surpassed the original Ultima VII in terms of both playability and extensibility. Almost every Ultima game has received or is currently undergoing the remake treatment.

Ultima is not dead. EA has killed a game's development. It has done it several times, actually. But some of us out here still have our heads bowed down over our keyboards, and our fingers are typing furiously. I am proud to see what this community is accomplishing, and I call on those who have interest in it to become involved -- to find a project and help if you can. I don't care if you help me with my project or not. There are plenty of people out there working in what spare time they have to make these games live again. Anything you can contribute to their efforts will be appreciated by all of us.

Finally, I call upon EA to release the original Ultima games to the public domain. The oldest games are over twenty years old now, and they will barely run on modern hardware without the help of a DOS emulator or one of the many reverse-engineered engines created by fans. UO is a parallel storyline to Ultima, and it does not derive from them, so releasing them does not threaten your present money-making IP. Their game assets are not useful for creating a new commercial game. They are not useful in any way to you. They are not valuable to you.

They are of great value to us. They are a part of us. Those of us who are creating these remake engines and fan projects have already paid you for the games many times over at the retail counter since we were small children. Releasing the game assets and binaries to the public domain will allow us to create better homages to the original games. It will generate buzz and publicity for your UO franchise. There is precedent for giving away old games for free upon releasing new games. Many companies do it now on a whim for the publicity they get when they release a new game. Ultima IV is already public domain. You yourselves were going to give Ultima IX away with the purchase of a new game.

You are canceling a project to focus on Ultima Online. Please, EA, release the first six Ultimas to the public domain at the time of your next UO release. There is a serious breach that you have the opportunity to heal with a horde of estranged fans. There is no cost to you. There is no danger to your IP. You have nothing to lose. Though this would be a meaningless gesture in your eyes, it would mean the world to us.

2004 June 29

You may blame the lack of updates around here on both Real Life and Exult.

The "can't move when you start a new game" bug has been addressed. The latest code snapshot has the fix.

2004 April 29

Insomnia pays off again! U3Project now supports scalers. I've ported over the set of scalers that come with xu4, though more can easily be added. Here's a screenshot of Kreed's ubiquitous 2xSaI scaler doing its thing. Details and source for Kreed's scalars can be found on the 2xSaI homepage.

The site has also received a slight facelift. Like everything else around here, the site is sort of a work in progress.

2004 April 28

A very minor update this time, just so nobody starts suspecting that we've all died. I am now linking U3Project to libxml2 for XML support. For now, that means that the game is no longer dependent on its .ini to save its configuration settings. The binary is much bigger, but we are slightly more portable. See CVS for the changes.

In the long term, it means that I will be moving some of the game's hard-coded logic (like the connectivity between maps, monster and weapon attributes, and tileset definitions) out of the game's binary and into user-configurable XML files, similar to what the excellent xu4 already does. Making the game more configurable like this will open the way for some of the more advanced features that will be added later. Eventually, I would like for the engine to be moddable, and for users to be able to create their maps, items, and other content for it.

If anyone has suggestions for other features or questions about the project, please feel free to post them in the forum.

2004 April 20

Steve has got basic combat mechanics working! When you enter combat with the current build, the monsters will properly charge at you and strike. The combat logic is based on the source for the GameBoy Color version of the game, which we consider to be accurate to the original game since it is based on the original game's disassembled code. There is still more work to do, but it is gratifying to see the last remaining feature before the game is fully playable coming together at last.

We will probably be doing a milestone release for the game when it is fully playable. At that stage we will consider the game to officially be in beta. There will probably not be another binary release until that time, unless anyone really wants one. Of course, you can get the source and all the game assets from SourceForge CVS and compile it yourself now. I wholeheartedly encourage it.

And just for fun, here's a pair of screenshots: Sosaria in 3D, since I realized that I haven't shown any 3D screenshots from the great outdoors, and my feeble first attempt to get the Ultima III for the GameBoy Color bonus maps working in U3Project. As you can see, we're still... working on it.

2004 April 16

Two new tilesets today: adaptations of the Sharp X68000 version of Ultima IV (which does not look nearly as good as the U5 tileset) and of the IBM version of Ultima V. These are quite easy to add. There are a few more that I'd like to see added to the project: the original Apple II U3 tileset, the Atari ST/Amiga U3 tileset, the (eek!) NES U3 tileset, and the Macintosh U3 tileset. As far as I know, that represents the tilesets from just about every official release of the game. The tileset from the Gameboy Color version might also be a neat bonus, just to complete the collection.

If anyone has a tileset that they would like to see in the game, go ahead and send it to us, using the links provided below. You can put a tileset together yourself, using the examples provided in our /graphics directory in CVS.

Here are screenshots of the IBM Ultima V tileset in action and of the 3D view of Lord British's store rooms, showing off the revamped texture mapping that now allows floors and all wall faces to be fully textured (although texture mapping is only turned on for the walls in this screenshot).

2004 April 15

Thanks to Steve, the U3Project source is now available on SourceForge under the GPL, if you're into that sort of thing. I am.

Work is continuing on the graphics engine. I've added a new tileset for the game: an adaptation of the tileset from the Sharp X68000 version of Ultima V. Here's a screenshot. Notice that the characters on the map are transparent when using this tileset, so you can see what everyone is standing on, instead of seeing the black squares that are the game's legacy from its Apple II days.

2004 March 31

Our project is now live on SourceForge, though there is very little to see there at the moment. Once we have our recent changes all nicely merged into one codebase we'll get the code into CVS and you'll be able to download it and do whatever you like with it.

The game is now up and running in SDL with some bugs. Hopefully, we'll get those worked out quickly. The 3D stuff is about done at this point, or at least it surpasses the original game enough that it's releaseable and we'll continue to tweak it going forward. Probably the biggest thing we still have to finish for the 3D view is texture-mapped parallelograms, but since SDL supports OpenGL, we may just use that. I'd like the software-based 3D to remain at least as an optional play mode, since requiring OpenGL will reduce the game's portability, especially to smaller platforms.

Finally, here's a shot of a dungeon in 3D. Cross off one more item on the to do list.

2004 March 29

Work is continuing on the 3D view. Here's a sneak peek at Lord British's Throne Room.

The dungeons are working as well in first person mode, but they're frankly not as interesting since they're just a bunch of twisty passages all alike.

2004 March 28

For your viewing pleasure, I present the Isle of Fire, in stunning 3D. You can see Exodus' castle there on the left, surrounded by some frighteningly orange X's, with some half-height foilage away in the background on the far shore.

I've started working on the 3D perspective view, so you can play in the dungeons in all their 3D glory, or explore the world map in first person until the novelty wears off. This is of course all done in software for now. Now once I can track down a good algorithm for drawing clipped parallelograms, I can add some proper occulsion, so this won't look like such a wireframe mess.

2004 March 27

So... It's been a couple of years since this site was updated. Sorry about that. The short version is that this project took a long hiatus. However, it is once again active.

A few items of business: first of all, the first test version of the game has been released. You can find a link to the download and additional details about what's in this release below. Scroll down a bit. There it is.

Secondly, I'd like to welcome a new volunteer to the project, Steve Mariotti of Nihilistic Software, who will be helping with programming. Steve has set up a SourceForge project for us, and we will be re-christening this project quite soon under the GPL. You may have already noticed a slight name change, as the project goals now go beyond simple Windows compatibility. We will be modifying the game to run under SDL, which will give us better support on various platforms.

Thirdly... Go download the test version already!