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Aiera temporarily down

18th November 2008 by Dino

Aiera is offline for a few days until Withstand the Fury Dragon sets up with a new host. Don't worry, the site will be back very soon.

The latest update at The Ultima Legend is about Garriott's retirement from NCSoft.

Nazghul/Haxima 0.6.1 has been released.

A progress update of the last 15 months has been posted on the Exult website. Most of the updates were made by Marzo Sette Torres Junior.

Richard Garriott leaves NCSoft

12th November 2008 by Dino

An article (pointed out by Mageguru) on shacknews reports that Richard Garriott has left NCSoft. The primary source for this information is "an open letter from General British", which was posted on the Tabula Rasa website.

Having gone to space and returned, Garriott speaks of the experience having "sparked some new interests", and he has left NCSoft to pursue them.

Back to decoding Ultima 1... or not?

7th November 2008 by Dino

Over the past few days I restarted the project I was working on a year and a half ago - that of building a basic engine for Ultima 1. The original project was written in C, and wasn't very well-structured, so I was reluctant to get back to it. The project had nonetheless reached map viewer stage.

At this point I have a better-structured program written in C++. It's still at the tile viewer stage, but it will take little effort to make a map viewer out of it since it's already work in progress.

I am going to have to take a break from this little trip to the past, because of University. My attitude to this new project is the same as that I had for the old one: I don't promise it will ever get anywhere, and where it's got to is already far better than nothing. It has served to populate the Ultima 1 Guide with technical info anyway.

Anyone who would like to play with the code or extend it is welcome to contact me. Natreg is also giving a little hand with technical info, and I will soon be updating the information in the Ultima 1 Guide to reflect the latest information I have about the file formats.

Now for some news from the web...

After almost two months of silence, Ophidian Dragon posted a review of Ultima 5 in his Blogging Ultima page.

Withstand the Fury Dragon at Aiera posted about the new Feudal Lands website, which I thought had disappeared from the web until today.