I’ve switched the focus of my development efforts a little bit, and am (for the time being) working on implementing interior areas and furniture in Black Dragon City, the capital city of Sosaria in Lost Sosaria. And there’s 8 new screenshots over on the project website demonstrating the fruits of those efforts.

I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff in Lost Sosaria proper, but the site design was getting on my nerves (am I ever happy?), so I opted to shift to something I found to be a little more…pleasing. And old-timey.

Also, I’ve changed the gallery component there away from Coppermine, and over to something a little more Wordpress-integrated. Among other things, it adds some nice AJAX magic to image-viewing, but also allows me to display gallery sections here on the site without having to redirect the Reader to a gallery sub-site.

NWN 1.69 was just released; this is the final patch BioWare plans to release for the game. It introduced a bunch of new tilesets and graphics changes, so some of the tilesets I’m using will be adapting to those changes in the near future; look for such changes to be reflected here on the site as they happen.

I just got this in my inbox this morning. It’s a notice from NWN developer and Ultima fan Saduj that a new Ultima website — a combination of links to other Ultima projects and a series of Ultima-related projects all its own — has come online.

After 5 years of NWN development for the Origin universe we have gone public and began releasing screenshots of current projects and NWN content for designers to use.

Restoration Forum:
ultimarestoration.darkbb.com/index.htm

NWN Team Portfolio:
nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Portfolios.Detail&id=159845&id=4016

All Team Submissions:
nwvault.ign.com

It’s a short message, and it actually doesn’t communicate enough, methinks. Though the description is brief, the project itself is massive (and will mean a good deal of work for me on the site here!).

Because it’s not only a collection of utilities for Neverwinter Nights developers who want to make Ultima-themed modules (although it is that too, and I’ll be borrowing more than a few of their innovations for Lost Sosaria!). It is also a collection of NWN-based remakes of Ultima titles, including:

• Ultima 1
• Ultima 7
• Ultima 8
• Savage Empire
• Martian Dreams

The projects all look spectacular, and many of them have more than a few screenshots up for the good Reader to look at.

This is, I cannot understate, a massive undertaking by a dedicated team of Ultima fans, and I for one look forward to both using, and later enjoying, the fruits of their labours. As yet, only the various Ultima-related utilities are available for download, and I haven’t yet had time to create project entries at the site here to cover the multitude of projects. But rest assured that I will be doing so as soon as I find a moment!

Update: For the time being, I have created one omnibus project entry for Ultima Restoration. As the various remakes progress in their devleopment arcs, I will branch off each into its own project entry.

There’s been a fair bit of news in the Ultima community these last few days, and Petrell over at Dino’s Ultima Page has gotten the scoop on much of it.

Ultima V for TI Calculators

Ranman has announced that his remake of Ultima 5 has reached its last major milestone, with only the end message and the addition of some weapons and special abilities left to be implemented. Beta testing of the project will begin on Palm Sunday — March 16th, 2008.

Update: Beta testing has begun. If you were one of the people that signed up to test this project, the relevant forum topic is here.

Ultima IX: Redemption

Although no new updates have been made to the main website of this Ultima 9 remake, one of the developers — Sage — has posted new entries to his development diary, while project leader Corv has leaked some screenshots of Paws and New Magincia to a members-only area of the project’s discussion forums.

Ultima 6 Project

There has been lots of news from this exciting project (Ultima 6 was always my favourite Ultima). Firstly, project leader Zephyr gave an outline of the next milestone release over at the Project Britannia website:

The U6 team is very much hard at work putting together their next release, which in terms of content will likely dwarf anything you have yet seen. No promises, but the intention is to get the entire overworld more or less completed, with most of it playable and accessible.

They are also looking for world-builders with experience crafting dungeons in Dungeon Siege.

Additionally, world-builder Nicodemus has posted a development diary in which he discusses the work he’s been doing. And just for fun, he’s thrown in five screenshots of Paws and Skara Brae.

Finally, over at the main project website, it has been announced that Alex Gonzales has joined the team as a portrait/concept artist, and he’s released a new wallpaper for your desktop enjoyment.

Now, what other news is out there?

Lost Sosaria

I have overhauled the appearance of the Lost Sosaria website. That’s the beauty of Wordpress — it’s very easy to switch site templates and configure them to meet your needs.

Project Britannia

The britannia_art.dsres file has been updated to include thread as an item, in four different colours for variety, and to include a special “connector” node useful for connecting basements to the main world map without the use of a doorway. The britannia_logic.dsres file has been updated as well to allow for these changes, along with a host of other modifications.

The files can be downloaded either via the Project Britannia development wiki or through the project entry here at Aiera.

Ultima Legacy

This Ultima Online-based project was, at least in part, the inspiration behind Ultima IX: Redemption, at least initially. Darkheart Dragon founded the project in 2000 and set it up as a private Ultima Online freeshard with an eye towards telling a story that simultaneously remained faithful to the Ultima tradition and yet advanced the world of Britannia in a different direction from where Ultima 9 took it.

And now, Ultima Legacy is getting a massive update, as developer Alexandra informed me this morning:

Ultima Legacy has recently decided to switch engines from Sphere to RunUO,
and as such is undergoing a lot of revision, including a new map dedicated
to Serpent Isle.

We also have a new website up devoted solely to the revisions we’re
undertaking at ultimalegacy.net.

They’ve already released some screenshots and art samples, O Reader, and I encourage you to go and check it out. It’s not every day that a project gets a full-scale revamping like this!

That last item reminds me: about a week ago, someone by the pseudonym of Bikki contacted me about a Serpent Isle/UO project he (?) was revisiting. I sent a reply to him with a couple of follow-up questions.

Bikki, if you’re reading this, check your email! Or, alternatively, send me a better email address to contact you at. I’m very curious about your project!

There have been over 8,000 downloads from the site since February 26th, 2008. Just…wow.

Here’s the top 5. I think at least two of these will occupy the top slots for quite a while.

Most Downloaded Files

• [drain file 202 url Ultima 9 Unofficial Patch 1.19] ([drain file 202 size]) - 3322 downloads
• [drain file 208 url Ultima 9 Power Tools] ([drain file 208 size]) - 3108 downloads
• [drain file 200 url Ultima 9 Official Patch 1.18] ([drain file 200 size]) - 146 downloads
• [drain file 199 url Ultima 9 Combined Patch] ([drain file 199 size]) - 78 downloads
• [drain file 389 url Ultima V: Lazarus v1.2 (Windows)] ([drain file 389 size]) - 42 downloads

Man, some people out there love them some Ultima 9 patches, don’t they? Of particular interest is the Ultima 9 Power Tools, a useful configuration utility for optimizing the game’s performance and configuration settings.

Produced by: Withstand the Fury Dragon
Website: Worlds of Ultima: Lost Sosaria
Downloads:
* [drain file 509 url Lost Sosaria (module)] ([drain file 509 size])
* [drain file 503 url Castle Expanded v4 (hak pak)] ([drain file 503 size])
* [drain file 504 url CEP2 No Tilesets (hak pak)] ([drain file 504 size])
* [drain file 505 url No Cobble CRF (hak pak)] ([drain file 505 size])
* [drain file 506 url Rocky Mountains v11.1 (hak pak)] ([drain file 506 size])
* [drain file 507 url Seasonal Forest v9 (hak pak)] ([drain file 507 size])
* [drain file 508 url Ultima Music (hak pak, music)] ([drain file 508 size])
* [drain file 502 url ERF files (erf)] ([drain file 502 size])
* [drain file 510 url CEP2 TLK file (tlk)] ([drain file 510 size])

Worlds of Ultima: Lost Sosaria is a Neverwinter Nights module that tells the story of those companions of the Avatar who were missing without explanation after Ultima 7, as well as several other key characters from The Black Gate.

Pursuing Fellowship agents deep into the bowels of Britannia and the ruins of the Great Stygian Abyss, the companion Sentri leads his party of former friends and companions of the Avatar into an unknown part of the world: Lost Sosaria, one of the continents of Old Sosaria left missing after the death of the Wizard Mondain.

This project suspended development for a goodly while between 2005 and the present, and in fact Withstand the Fury Dragon has had to restart the module from scratch. However, he has revised his development plan, and feels confident that he can still deliver a good game with a large game world, this time using much more elegant tilesets.