Ophidian Dragon has resumed posting in his blog after three weeks of inactivity. The latest post is essentially a review of Ultima 1.

Since it was last mentioned here, Ophidian Dragon's blog ("Blogging Ultima") has seen a couple of updates. The first update talks about the future of the blog (and possibly future blogs by Ophidian Dragon) since Ophidian Dragon's trip through Ultima ended back in February. The more recent update is about the crossbow that Ophidian Dragon received from Lord British, and also contains a review of Akalabeth.

Meanwhile, back in March, GrahfZilla decided to quit on his Ultima blog which was similar to Ophidian Dragon's blog. His main reason is a lack of interest, which he explained in a pretty long final post.

La Legende d' Ultima has been updated a couple of times this year. The first update consists of a happy new year wish, and also announces the Ultima 6 Project's fourth milestone, which was released back in January. The more recent post, posted just a few days ago, celebrates the 10th birthday of the site. Sergorn Dragon has created a sort of history of La Legende d' Ultima to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Not exactly Ultima-related, but the Ultima 6 Project is promoting a charity to which potential U6P donors can donate instead.

Withstand the Fury Dragon at Aiera posted a link to an article by David Wong about "The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey". It's a really good read, I assure you. The last page in particular is about what Ultima fans have been complaining about (in other games) for years: "Better graphics do not equal innovation and/or creativity".

EUO has turned 5 years old. To celebrate the special occasion, number of special events were held in game servers. New newbie island was also added to help new players get started.

• 5x xp on the reg server for the weekend April 5 and 6
• prizes & giveaways
• DM'd events
• eggnog & goblin master brew
• more bosses, more mega-bosses - hell, just more of everything!

I've also made a brand new interactive tutorial map called 'Newbie Island' - so if you thought EUO was in the too-hard basket before, you should give it another whirl now. I promise it will be somewhat demystified.

Corwin at RPGWatch has published the Ultima 6 Project's latest press release written by U6 Team Member Aletys. The Press Release reveals further details about new cities and places of note in the upcoming U6P fifth milestone, including the Nicodemus' keep and Penumbra's work room. It also includes call for help as the team is still looking for additional World Builders, 3D modelers, writers, 2D artists (portraits/textures, etc.) and music creators. Be sure to check it out.

Nicodemus has posted an update to his Worldbuilding Dev Diary. The update is mostly about Jhelom and it's new list field, the Pit, an area where fighters of Jhelom go to hone their combat skills. The update also features five new screenshots.

Iris2 build 2020 has been released.

There is a new xu4 daily snapshot available for Mac users.

Ranman has posted couple of updates about progress he has made with Ultima V for Ti Calculators. In his first update he lists some of the special item capabilities he has implemented and his second update deals with killing NPC's, guard behaviour and picking locks.

Last month, Joshua Lawrence contacted me and Withstand the Fury Dragon (who has already posted about it) about a new version of the Adventure Creation Kit (3.0) that was released by Chris Hopkins. In Joshua's own words:

It has a number of big advances, including experience levels, bmp skinning of the main play-screen and dialogs, and more detailed day/night cycles that can be tied to, for instance, moongate appearances.

Most importantly [...], it now includes an 'Ultima Kit' you can use to build your adventures - it includes tiles from Ultima V and a bunch of Ultima-world objects, including the aforementioned moongates. The 'Demo2' adventure shows off the Ultima graphics, the time cycling (including two moons in the sky), Ultima music, and the moongates.

The ACK site has been moved to Joshua's main Mozomedia site; visitors can use shorter URLs to access the ACK site or the download page.

There are 6 new versions of Stones at the Stones Archive. Thanks goes to Peter Haytko for letting me know.

Those of you who enjoyed the work of Santiago Zapata (who has written several Roguelikes including DrashRL) will be pleased to know that he has just spawned a new creation. Santiago has just released a new game called MegamanRL, for the 7DRL challenge.

German 1.1 patch for Ultima V : Lazarus has been released. Along fixing number of cosmetic mistakes (typos, untranslated labels, etc.) the patch has number of bug fix mods integrated into to it :

• bugfix_Global_Game_Speed_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_Bantral_Jeholm_ship_payment_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_Landar_goldensilk_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_MasterHawkins_discount_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_Reaper_loot_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_Shannon_Duel_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_Spellsystem_fixes
• bugfix_Lazarus_Toshi_partydialoge_fix
• bugfix_Lazarus_Widow_Hahna_schedule_fix
• doomFix
• lazarus_localisation_+_lorescrolls_fix
• mod_judgedryden_jail_dialogue_change
• Ozzy's Comfortability mod - Quick pocketwatch

Tiberius, the Project Director of Ultima V : Lazarus, has made an announcement at Lazarus forums that he has been employed by Big Huge Games as a Senior Game Designer working on their brand new RPG. He will be working with Ken Rolston (of Oblivion and Morrowind fame). Tiberius had become unemployed recently as his previous employer, Iron Lore Entertainment, closed its doors at the end of February after being unable to secure funding for its next project.

Closed beta test of Ranman's Ultima V for Ti Calculators has begun and no more testers are needed at this time. Ranman estimates that the beta test will take about a month if no major bugs are encountered. System requirements at start of the test are TI-89, TI-89 Titanium, TI-92+ or V200 Calculator with 160Kb RAM and 260Kb Flash free.

Sage has once again updated his developer's diary at Titans of Ether forums. In his latest post he talks about subplots.

News from Dragon Press :

Having run for almost 8 years , the Ultima Online freeshard Ultima Legacy is finally making the transition from Sphere to RunUO and will receive major overhaul. It will also have brand new Serpent Isle map. While development is well underway they are looking people to help them in the C# scripting department.

New fan fiction, "Serpent Isle: Snippets of Elora's Journey" by Shadow of Light Dragon has been added to Dragon Press.

And finally the Ultima 7 fan comics by Damien Barban have gone missing. If anyone knows where they are currently hosted please let Shadow of Light Dragon at Dragon Press know.

At Project Britannia site, Zephyr posted some details about U6 Project team plans for next milestone release :

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're also looking for world builders :

There's a great deal of excitement surrounding this release throughout the team, but there's still a long way to go - and they're looking for help from anyone who has some experience with building challenging dungeons in the Dungeon Siege engine (DS1).

Nicodemus, one of the world builders of Ultima 6 Project, has posted a Worldbuilding Dev Diary, telling about his work while a he's been member of the team. The diary also contains 5 new screenshots of Paws and Skara Brae.

U6 Project team has also posted profile of team's new portrait and concept artist, Alex Gonzales, at project website. Be sure to grab the nice U6P wallpaper he kindly made available and also visit his online portfolio to see the other artwork he has created.

According to Ranman, with the last major milestone in the Ultima V for Ti Calculators development now reached, beta testing of the game will commence March 16th, 2008.

He also posted an update on progress and what remains to be done :

Update:

• "Acknowledgments" menu option complete. Credits and copyrights to Lord British, Origin Systems, & Electronic Arts.
• "Introduction" menu option complete. The full Ultima V introduction complete with scaled down pics from the original game.
• "Create New Character " menu option complete. Answer critical questions to determine the initial stats of your avatar.

And with that, the last major milestone has been reached!

Still on the to do list :

• Add the "End Message"
• Add weapons and armor special abilities
• Tie up remaining loose ends
• General cleanup

Game engine - 61.8Kb
Progress - 98.5%

Ranman has also posted gif animations of character creation and introduction & acknowledgements.

At Titans of Ether forums, Sage has updated his developer's diary and Corv has posted new screenshots of Paws and New Magincia in Insider, a members only section of the forums.

Lost Sosaria downloads have been updated and site itself has recived new layout.

In his blog, Blogging Ultima, Ophidian Dragon has completed his year long playthru of the entire Ultima game series.

Work in progress version of Worlds of Ultima : Lost Sosaria module for Neverwinter Nights has been released. Also problem with broken/corrupted downloads users may have experienced downloading the files earlier should also be fixed.

EUO3D 0.14 has been released. The new version fixes the minimise bug and integrates all changes from moa 0.82.

Ranman has posted an update on his progress with Ultima V for Ti Calculators :

Corv has posted rather large update at Titans of Ether. The update includes 27 new screenshots, 5 new music tracks (of 130 track soundtrack!!!) as well as update to Redemption status page and team roster where Direhaggis and Zini have been promoted to team Co-Directors.

Serpent Isle Fixes and Black Gate Keyring mod at Seven Towers have been updated to be compatible with latest Exult snapshots. SIFixes has also received feature that allows player to ask Shamino to set the time format of watch to 24-hour time or back if they change their mind

EUO3D 0.13 has been released. The new version adds support for md2 models, adds possible fix for flashing intro screen and integrates all changes from moa 0.81 patch.

Ranman's Ultima V for Ti Calculators is moving steadily towards completion. Special capabilities of the Crown Jewels have been implemented and Ranman has completed the final scrub of the NPC transcripts. He'll still need to at least go thru Shop transcripts and add ability to leave party members to inns to allow getting rid of less useful party members but the list of things to do is steadily getting shorter.

News from UltimaDot :

CVG has published and article about the ways player can kill Lord British in various Ultima games.

Richard Garriott was recently interviewed by N. Evan Van Zelfden at Gamasutra.

NCSoft's Garriott Talks Games As 'Pulp', Art

As part of a wide-ranging Gamasutra interview published today, Ultima and Tabula Rasa creator Richard Garriott has been discussing games as art, suggesting many games are 'pulp fiction', but that his favourites touch the player emotionally.

At the Lost Sosaria website, WtFD has posted news of his plans of uploading the work-in-progress module for the project within next week. He also plans to release updates to the module at (ir)regular intervals. This is done so that visitors can download and test the module at any point and to leave feedback as it progresses.

Well, WtFD at Aiera beat me to most of these news but anyway :

The Titans of Ether team is looking for World Builders and Writers.

We are looking for 1 or 2 enthusiastic people to help us create NPC's for a few of the cities of virtue, dungeons, the wilderness, and perhaps even locations in the Ether itself. We want an active commitment from folk who are willing to stick with the team until at least alpha testing. For anyone interested, please contact me via PM. Thank you!

There also new developers diary up, this time by Sage, one of the teams dialogue writers.

Ranman posted couple of new gif animations from his Ultima V for Ti Calculators. First shows what happens if Avatar is caught by the guards in Lord Blackthorn's castle and second what happens if entire party succumbs to death.

EUO, the Ultima-like online RPG, is being converted to 3D. More info can be found in EUO3D topic in games forum and the brave can even give the early alpha builds a go.

Realms of Ultima released New Magincia Prefab. It still lacks building interiors and caves but the island itself is fully explorable.

In his blog, Ophidian Dragon has finished Runes of Virtue 2 and is on his second day of playing Ultima IX : Ascension.

Ultima 6 Project Milestone 4 has been released.

Written by Jesse 'Zephyr' Strachman
Saturday, 19 January 2008

It is with much pleasure that I announce the release of Team Archon's next milestone of the Ultima 6 Project, Milestone 4 for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac).

Some things to look forward to in this release:

• New areas to explore ( Buccaneer's Cave, Wrong, Empath Abbey and Minoc)
• New game intro which draws from the original classic game
• Enhancements to existing areas
• New plot details and other subtle refinements

Numerous enhancements to the core gameplay such as:

• A prototype of a customizable journal system so you can take notes on your journey
• The ";" key now gives you extra information, such as reagent counts, projectile counts, etc.
• New "Gameplay Settings" from the Options menu
• Many more tunings and tweaks to the core Project Britannia systems ( for the nitty gritty details, check the change log)

If you want to mirror this 375MB download, please feel free to do so and post the link in our forums so we can update this news article with your mirror. At the moment, here is/are the only location(s) from which you can download M4 are :

• The Ultima 6 Project
• Project Britannia

This is not a final release of these sections of the game, but we feel that they are reasonably polished enough for public consumption (read: scrutiny). If you find problems with the release, want to give us kudos, or (heaven forbid) want to tell us what you really think, as always you can find us lurking about in our forums. That is, when we're not busily scratching away at building Milestone 5.

Also Corwin at RPGWatch has had change to interview the co-lead producer of the U6 Project Jesse 'Zephyr' Strachman.

Recently, I had the opportunity to ask the co-lead producer of the U6 Project Jesse 'Zephyr' Strachman a series of questions as they're working hard towards the release of their next milestone. After the tremendous success a couple of years ago of U5-Lazarus, there has been growing interest in this second remake using the Dungeon Siege engine.

Elsewhere in Ultima community:

Spyder at The Titans of Ether has yet again posted screenshots of another piece of Moonglowian architecture made by him. This time they show some kind of large manor house with four towers and roofed balcony.

Forgotten World Project has released one of the music pieces written by team composer Sounddreamer. It's called "Time Travel".

According to latest news at Ultima IX : Infinity Eternal website, the project and the team are still alive and kicking. Although things in real life, like MartinLoki having a baby and Thepal getting married and started teaching last year (Congratulations for both!), have slowed the project down, significant progress has been made over the past two months. He also posted a WIP screenshot of Valorian Isles. As a side note for those who might be interested : the team still looking for World-builders, Writers (Dialogue/books/quest), Music Composers, 3D and 2D Artists, Face Creators (in Oblivion) and Scripters to fill their ranks.

Ranman continues to make steady progress with Ultima V for Ti Calculators. According to him the game will be finished before the end of February -- by direction of his wife. Changes since last update:

• Ultima V has a new look, a new colour scheme that provide for easier reading of menus and stats. Screenies coming soon.
• Leveling up & down and their effects.
• Magic points, their recovery and magic point levels for different classes.
• Enemies can now cast spells too.
• Frigate sails, effect of wind on sailing and rowing when against wind or when there's none.
• The final quest of the Shrine of the Codex has been implemented.
• Pit traps are now working.
• More game Engine and data optimization.

In his blog, Blogging Ultima, Ophidian Dragon has finished Pagan in just 6 days. He's also pretty much done with Runes of Virtue 2 as he prepares to enter games final dungeon, The Stygian Abyss.

Gordon McNutt has posted release schedule for Nazghul 1.0. According to it, the Nazghul 1.0 is set to be released on May 26th, exactly five years from the day the project was registered on SourceForge.

Iris2 Testshard map has been updated and has been Testshard has been named Iris:4 Kingdoms.

Additional news from Aiera:

• Jaesun's Serpent Isle for NWN2 is on hold until further notice due to massive flooding around Jaesun's home few weeks ago.
• In the mean time Jaesun will be helping with another new NWN2 Ultima project, Realms of Ultima.
• Matt Johnston has informed WtFD that main map of his Ultima VII Mod is mostly done and he has started tinkering with usecode.
• Direhaggis has informed WtFD that plan for Redemption demo has been scrapped and development team now concentrates all its efforts on getting the game out by the end of the year.

Forgotten World team is looking for World Builders to join their ranks:

The development of our world editor is progressing fairly. The rendering part is mostly done and we are getting to a point where we can actually start designing the user interface. This is where we need your help!

If you are:

• an experienced user of world building software
• willing to help us design the user interface of our world editor
• interested in the Ultima series and in creating maps for the game
• patient, communicative and team-oriented
• experienced with programming (perhaps even with wxWidgets) as a plus

then let us know and join us! Contact information can be found on the team page!

WtFD has updated Worlds of Ultima : Lost Sosaria site with dozen new screenshots

Spyder continues to post screenshots of Moonglowian architecture in Moonglow developer's diary. This time he has added shots of an Observatory and (possibly) a Blacksmith's shop.

First things first... Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (from me too... since the last update was by Petrell). Withstand the Fury Dragon at Aiera sure did a better job than me at wishing everybody all the best for the festive season.

Ophidian Dragon, still Blogging Ultima, has been playing Ultima 8 and has made good progress. He almost finished the Fire part, which is close enough to finishing the game.

The team at Forgotten World mentioned that their project has appeared in a German magazine:

In their January issue (02/2008), the German "PC Action" game magazine writes about Forgotten World. In the "Maps & Mods" section there's an article on our project, so if you can get German magazines where you live, go and grab a copy if you like!

It's been quite awhile since I last posted here and I apology for it. I was caught in series of unfortunate events that I had no control over.

But lets get to the news :

German Version of Ultima V: Lazarus has finally been released just in time for Christmas for all the German ultima fans enjoyment.

Ranman has been making steady progress with his Ultima V for Ti Calculators. Game is now about 94% complete, just 1% away from planned beta stage.

Here’s short summary what’s been completed since last update:

• Lord Blackthorn cut scene
• Stargazing with telescope
• Summoning the Shadowlords, their movement between towns and the effects of their presence in the towns
• Quit & Save and resuming game
• Shrine of Spirituality
• Getting food (both virtuous and villainous ways), food consumption of party members and party starvation
• Effects of hostile terrain, gaining negative status conditions (poison, sleep) and curing them
• Navigating with skiff and frigate, sea combat (including capturing hostile ships) and ship sinking
• Many other tweaks and fixes

Inspired by Ophidian Dragon's Ultima Marathon, Master Katarn played thru entire Ultima series over the summer and has been posting his thoughts of each game over the past months in Ultima V: Lazarus forums.

Iris 2 Build 1648 has been released and Iris2-Testshard has been updated to version 0.4.

Forgotten World team have posted a screenshot of Britain viewed from within their new OGRE based world editor.

Spyder, a 3D-modeller in Titans of Ether team has added quite few new screenshots to Moonglow developers diary showing various pieces of Moonglowian architecture. Latest addition is the magical walls of Moonglow (and alternate stone version of same wall).

And short summary of additional news from Aiera:

• WtFD's own Ultima inspired project, The Lost Sosaria, now has it's own forum
• Sam Matthews is apparently still working on Exult3D and has posted links to slightly newer versions of his work under pseudonym Gunnar.
• WtFD has talked with Marzo and Wizardry Dragon about The Feudal Lands and they assure that work is still being done although very slowly.
• Project Britannia files have again been updated
• Jaesun working on Serpent Isle for NWN2 has finished the Moonshade Catacombs and uploaded sample music.
• Chris Hopkins has updated his Adventure Creation Kit to version 2.3

Oh and before I forget : Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone!

Ophidian Dragon, in his quest to blog Ultima, has finally finished Serpent Isle.

A short post has recently appeared on the Lazarus website about the downloads page, where several links have been updated.

The Pentagram website has been updated with a short progress report:

Despite the lack of updates to the website, work on Pentagram has been progressing. Among other things, combat music now works, avatar attack speed has been improved, many rendering order problems are fixed, and falling and throwing are now working much better. The Pentagram main menu has also been improved, and now supports loading savegames directly.

Tribun Dragon brings news from the Codex of Editable Wisdom:

"The Codex celebrates over 1000 articles right now, and has grown to the most complete eneclopeida for Ultima by now. We by now cover all of the aspects, but work is far from finished, as we plan to expand greatly on the NPCs and Magic Spells."

Forgotten World is now using the OGRE engine for its world editor, and has published a screenshot of Buccaneer's Den to show it in action.

Ultima VII Babylon is an Italian translation of Ultima VII - The Black Gate that was recently finished.

Project Britannia announces a major update to the Siege Tools.

At Seven Towers, the Exult Intrinsic Reference and the UCC Scripting tutorial have been updated.

Kultan, one of the Titans of Ether, has written a new dev diary. You will, of course, need an account in their forum to see it.

Nazghul/Haxima 0.6.0 have been released in source form. Old save games are not compatible with the new version.

Ophidian Dragon is still playing Serpent Isle and writing about it in Blogging Ultima. Most recently, he has visited the northern icelands.

The Ashes: Two Worlds Collide website somehow no longer seems to display news any more.

The rest is news from Aiera:

• Withstand the Fury Dragon got married.
• In a topic at the Exult forum, a patch importing Black Gate shapes into Serpent Isle has appeared.
• There is a remake of Serpent Isle for NWN2 I hadn't discovered till now. Unlike most other projects, the website is updated regularly, and I'll be tracking it for news from now on.
• Aiera now has its own domain.
• Lost Sosaria has been moved to the Aiera domain and has a new team member.
• Apparently the Ultima V for TI Calculators is 92% complete. There are some new screenshots to see.

At Seven Towers, the Black Gate Keyring mod has seen a few updates to correct some bugs.

Meanwhile, a quick update has been posted at Nazghul telling us that a release is likely by the end of this month.

Hawkwind at Forgotten World emailed me about a "render shot using Ultima 9's textures/models and Blender" that the team put on the screenshots page.

Also thanks to Natreg for notifying me about the existence of a second Ultima blog called "My journey through Ultima" by Grahfzilla.

Chris at The Artful Gamer contacted me about an interview with Stephen Emond he wrote recently. Stephen Emond, otherwise known as Commander Falcon, has been working on his book, Ultima: The Ultimate Collector's Guide, for the past few years. With the book nearing completion, a copy was auctioned in a fundraising event organised by the University of Texas at Britannia Manor (Lord British's home). Chris from The Artful Gamer wrote a very interesting interview with Stephen Emond about the book and Stephen's background and meeting with Ultima developers. It seems that the book will also be published soon.

According to La Legende d' Ultima (who in turn got the news from Wing Commander CIC), John Watson has passed away. John Watson was involved with several Origin projects, mostly Ultima and Wing Commander. A permanent memorial page has been set up listing the games he was involved with, and memories written by those who knew him.

At Seven Towers, two mods (BG Keyring and SI Fixes) have been updated.

Ophidian Dragon, still Blogging Ultima after finishing Ultima Underworld 2, is now playing Serpent Isle.

The Titans of Ether website has been updated twice. Kultan, a dialogue writer, has joined the Titans. Also, a dev diary entry about Moonglow development (part 1) has been written. It is part of the forum and accessible only to registered users.

Other updates courtesy of Aiera:

• There are some new screenshots of Ultima 5 for TI Calculators. Ranman also informed us through Aiera that the project is 89% complete.
• Aiera has uploaded the latest snapshots from Pentagram, Iris, Project Britannia and Exult for the PSP.
• Withstand the Fury Dragon resumed development on Lost Sosaria.
• The EUO website has been redesigned.
• Back in June, the U3 Project website saw a few updates, mostly technical stuff.
• The following projects' websites are no longer online: UCR, Eriadain, Ultima Underworld for PocketPC, Infinity Eternal.
• Darkshard from the deceased Ultima 3 Online is selling the project's maps.
• Razimus, who was formerly leading the Blackrock Engine project (for an online Ultima 7), proposed continuation of the project under the name Blackrock Undead.

Last but not least, Dino's Ultima Page has moved to a new location. The old shiftedphase site will remain online for a while until everyone updates their bookmarks, but will no longer be updated.

SB-X at Nuvie posted the first update in a year (exactly). Progress has been mainly as far as the engine core is concerned, and now a scripting engine is being used. Several spells are working, features have been added, and bugs have been fixed. Check out the Nuvie website for details on what's new!

Nikolai Faaland made an Ultima 7 Web Map "using Exult's map output feature", to quote him. Check it out!

Ophidian Dragon is currently playing Ultima Underworld 2.

Thanks Paulon for pointing out that there is now an Exult PSP port.

Also, a while ago (sorry for taking so long), Martin Metzler pointed out an article about Richard Garriott's home, Britannia Manor:

an article about Richard Garriott and his house Britannia Manor... of course the article is in german.

Taken on the same visit to Richard Garriott were the following two pictures posted in the GameStar blog by the editor who visited him.

2 days ago, Dino's Ultima Page celebrated its fifth anniversary.

Ophidian Dragon has finished Runes of Virtue.

The 5th anniversary of Dino's Ultima Page is fast approaching. Recently I bought a domain (Null Neuron - my site is the 'Gigi' one) which I'm sharing with some friends. Eventually I will move all my sites there, including this Ultima site. I suppose the URL will be http://gigi.nullneuron.net/ultima/, so I suggest you make a bookmark for later. I won't move the sites there yet, to leave some time for migration and to let everyone update their bookmarks, but eventually they're all moving. I've been on shiftedphase for 4 and a half years now, and I have to thank Eric (Edbgon) for the webspace.

This week I started work with a local IT company, meaning that even in summer I won't have much time for Dino's Ultima Page. Sorry...

At Aiera, Withstand the Fury Dragon informs the Ultima community that he will be away for a while (23rd July to 11th August), and anyone who would like to post news in his stead should contact him.

At Seven Towers, a bug with The Black Gate Keyring mod has been fixed.

New Windows build (Build 1286) of Iris2, the fan made 3D client for Ultima Online Freeshards, has been released. They have also added new Roadmap as all milestones listed in the Old Roadmap have been completed.

Efry has been working on providing CGA/VGA support for Nuvie and posted few screenshots in the project forum.

WtFD at Ultima: Aiera will be participating in the 21st World Scout Jamboree between 23rd of July and 11th of August and needs someone to help maintain the site during his absence. If you're interested, please let him know via the contact form.

Acording to Ophidian Dragon's blog Blogging Ultima, he had his computer die on him but is now back playing thru the Ultima series. He's currently playing Game Boy's Ultima: Runes of Virtue.

Ophidian Dragon has finished Ultima 7: The Black Gate. His next step will be to play Ultima: Runes of Virtue.

The latest news at La Legende d' Ultima appears to be quite interesting. My French is a bit rusty, but from what I've understood, there's a chance that EA will be working on a single-player Ultima CRPG.

Seven Towers' latest news reports that the NPC spellcasting reagent bug in the Black Gate Keyring mod has been fixed.

UV:Lazarus team member J the Yellow was present in an IGDA picnic held at Richard Garriott's property near Lake Austin. He wrote short event report and posted photos he took while there.

U6Project team has posted profile of team's dialogue writer, content manager and QA tester, WyrdWeb.

Phillip "Lanica" George has added virtual keyboard to his Exult Pocket PC port to make game playable on keyboardless Pocket PCs. He has also released 4 screenshots of exult on Pocket PC.

WtFD has overcome the problems with his computer and has resumed work on new areas of Lost Sosaria. He also posted 21 new screenshots.

Sorry for being a bit absent lately, but now I'm back. Thanks Petrell for catching up with the majority of news we've missed so far.

Ophidian Dragon has almost finished Ultima 7.

Recent news from La Legende d' Ultima includes news of a 3D client for Ultima Online (Kingdom Reborn), the U6P M3 release, a new forum, and a new domain.

At Seven Towers, Marzo Sette Torres Junior updated the Exult Intrinsic Reference, and fixed a few bugs in the Black Gate Keyring mod.

The Exult team has posted news:

Yes, we have done a lot of work in the past year:

• Our newest member, Phillip George, has succeeded in porting Exult to the PocketPC.
• Marzo has been actively working on his Keyring mod, in particular, improving Exult and Exult Studio to support further mod development.
• Many bug fixes, such as Marzo's recent implementation of missing weather effects in Serpent Isle. See the ChangeLog for the complete list.
• Support for the "Hq2x" and "Hq3x" screen scalers.

News at Forgotten World inform us that Story Writer/Editor position they announced just two weeks ago has been filled. They are still looking for Texture artists, Programmers (especially C++) and Composers though.

Withstand the Fury Dragon has completed the changes that he had to make due to change of Tilesets in his project, The Worlds of Ultima : Lost Sosaria, and resumed work on new areas. Unfortunately he seem to have also ran into computer trouble. Hopefully it can be resolved.

WtFD also added additional tools he has found to Ultima : Aiera.

Render Dragon has resumed work on U3Project after almost three years of absence. His more immediate goals include:

• Move project source from CVN repository to SVN repository
• Convert project to Visual C++ 2005
• Dropping DirectX in favour of SDL (making project portable)
• Completing combat mechanics
• Reworking command handlers
• Fixing bugs
• Getting U3Project.com to point to the site again and perhaps converting site to WordPress

The first two are done and WAV playback is now handled by the SDL. Next task is getting graphics engine ported.
(Thanks for WtFD over at Aiera for noticing this)

I apologise for my sudden and unexpected disappearance. Series of unfortunate RL incidents rendered me unable to post news during the past one and half months. Unfortunately Dino also got busy with his end of semester exams (that ended just few days ago) so he too has been unable to post news at the main page. But here's summary of what's been happening in the Ultima community between now and the last update (hopefully I got most of them) :

Richard Garriott was recently interviewed by The Escapist. In the interview Garriott talks about his past, his present, his plans for the future and why he thinks most games just aren't good enough.

The Ultima 6 Project has released its third milestone. It features number of new areas to explore (Spider Cave, Buccaneer's Den, Yew, Paws, and Continental Britannia), improvements to areas introduced in previous milestones (Swamp Cave, Sewers, Britain, Cove) as well as numerous enchantments to core gameplay. The Gargoyles, both winged and wingless are also now present in the intro.

Titans of Ether have posted a video of the Ship model the player will be able to sail around in Redemption. They’ve also put up New Developer’s Diary by teams lead dialogue writer and editor, Direhaggis, revealing additional details about status of the main plot and town of Britain.

Forgotten World team have found out that Ultima IX : Ascension actually supports higher textures than ones used in game and have added two new screenshots as demonstration. They’re also planning to make changes to the plot of U9A and are looking for someone very familiar with the Ultima lore to help them in the effort. For more details refer their updated FAQ page.

Since last update about Ophidian Dragon’s Blogging Ultima, he has finished Ultima Underworlds and is well on his way to finish Ultima 7 : The Black Gate. He just took 3 day side trip to Isle of Fire added by the Forge of Virtue expansion and should finish the main plot few days unless he gets sidetracked by the few areas he has not yet explored. He also added screenshots he had previously left out due to lack of time.

For past months the Pentagram team has made further improvements to pathfinding, Avatar movement, item manipulation and missile trajectories

Dark Key, the project to recreate U7 and SI in the UO engine seem to have perished.

Ranman aka. David Randall has resumed work on Ultima 5 for Ti Calculators that was put to halt due to birth his son, Garrett. He already did major reorganization to the general data format and to the shoppe talk functionality squeezing out additional 6kb from game engine that is now down to 50kb! Combat and magic still need to be implemented before first release is made.

Lanica has managed to port Exult to Pocket PC. While many issues still remain to be solved to make it playable, making it just run is major achievement in and by itself.

Scythifuge continues to work on Savage Empires Total Convertion for Exult and has posted number of new screenshots in Exult Forum featuring many new items and graphics he has draw for his project.

New and newly found Ultima fan sites :

Julie's Savage Empire Blog - A new blog where Julie talks about various things about her favourite Ultima game – The Worlds of Ultima : Savage Empire.

Hipolito's Ultima IV : The Little Shepherd - Tells a hilarious story of Shepherd Sausalito's (mis)adventures in Britannia.

Matthew Johnston's Ultima VII Mod - Another Total Conversion mod being developed for Exult.

Gruck posted a topic in my discussion area with a link to an article in which Richard Garriott writes about his recent zero-gravity adventure with Professor Stephen Hawking.

Ophidian Dragon has finished Martian Dreams, in 5 days just like The Savage Empire, though there was a bit more gameplay to it.

As Withstand the Fury Dragon posted on Aiera, there exists a mod guide for Ultima V: Lazarus by Sylore which lists the mods and provides important information about them, such as whether they conflict with other mods.

I've changed the favicon for Dino's Ultima Page... I put a favicon of the wandering warlock from Ultima 1. It's a bit more Ultima-related than the old flaming letter 'D' on a black background, and also has a transparent background. It's also a bit of a change since I've used the same favicon for around 4 years now. If anyone wants the old favicon I still have it.

Since the last mention here, Ophidian Dragon has finished The Savage Empire, in 5 days as I had predicted. His blog has also caught the attention of Stephen Beeman, who left a comment in response to Ophidian's last day playing The Savage Empire. Ophidian Dragon has now moved on to Martian Dreams.

A certain Joshua Lawrence contacted both Withstand the Fury Dragon and myself about the Adventure Creation Kit, a tool by Chris Hopkins used to make Ultima IV/V-style RPGs. Joshua is maintaining a website about the Adventure Creation Kit.

23 new screenshots of Lost Sosaria have been released, and there is also some information about the city of Gauntlet which has been built.

Aiera has also posted news about Lost Sosaria and the Adventure Creation Kit, and one of the Project Britannia files it hosts has been updated.

Ophidian Dragon's quest has taken him to some of the most interesting places of The Savage Empire. In the volcanic lands, he has finished the quests of the Jukari and Haakur. He has found the hideout of the Urali, defeated Darden, and rescued Aiela, but has not yet managed to free Fabozz. Ophidian also used Aiela's crystal and descended into the long-abandoned Underground City of the Kotl.

Ophidian Dragon has started playing The Savage Empire, but does not appear to be too impressed about it. So far he has finished the Disquiqui and Yolaru quests (and possibly another since he mentions having finished three), but is stuck on the two quests involving boulders.

Aiera has updated some of its hosted files, particularly concerning Exult, Iris and Project Britannia. An entry for an old remake of The Complete Ultima 7 has also been added to the now-renamed Cemetery.

Also news gathered from Aiera, it appears that Razimus' project to recreate Ultima 7 in Ultima Online (which has been named "The Dark Key", by the way) has released some artwork.

La Legende d' Ultima has some news regarding its recent downtime, and spam problems with the forum there.

Infinity Eternal has recruited a new dialogue writer, Theron.

Dr. Matt Barton, an assistant professor of English at St. Cloud State in Minnesota, has researched CRPG history and has written a lengthy three part article (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about CRPG evolution from early student programmed CRPGs of mainframe computers at the late 70's universities all the way to modern CRPGs of today. Must read for Ultima fans and CRPG enthusiastics or anyone interested in computer game history.

According to a post by Resle, Ashes engine development has slowed to a crawl due to real life circumstances. It's still too early for demo but he does plan to release more gameplay movies hopefully by the end of the month. He also lists features planned for next build.

The next build is going to feature:
- Finished, polished combat
- Finished, polished dialogues
- Reworked GUI (more practical, but arguably less nice to see - I.E.: no "live" paperdoll npc)
- Particle system
- beta magic
- beta fully scheduled NPCs
- beta menu

And thanks to Olly, lots of new graphics.

Ophidian Dragon has finished Ultima 6. He also wrote a walkthrough by which it may be possible to complete U6 without killing a single being. It's untested though.

Check out the Files section of the discussion area for the latest world map (with fixed tiles) and tileset.

I also added some more information to the Ultima 1 info page yesterday.

Ophidian Dragon has managed to build a balloon and reach the Temple of Singularity in the Gargoyle Lands. He now has to visit the Gargoyle Shrines.

Yesterday, in the Files section of my Ultima discussion area, I uploaded the first public release of my Ultima 1 tool (map viewer, for now). You can't do much other than roam around the map and save a computer-generated world map to disk. A sample map is also among the files, and I have also started a topic with instructions on how to use it. What I did not write there is that you will also need SDL.dll. You might also notice a few small bugs in the program, some of which have already been fixed (but the latest version is not online).

Meanwhile, Ophidian Dragon has fetched the Vortex Cube and traversed Hythloth. He is now in the Gargoyle Lands and will need to assist both humans and gargoyles to complete his quest.

Ophidian Dragon, currently around half-way through Ultima 6 after nine days, has finished both the Clues quest and the Map Pieces quest. His next step will be to follow Sin'Vraal's advice and work his way through Hythloth.

At Lost Sosaria, eleven new screenshots have been released.

A quick news update:

• La Legende d' Ultima is back online after being down for a while. No new news though.
• Titans of Ether: Direhaggis' recent forum newspost has been moved to the main page; nothing new though.
• Ophidian Dragon has been dungeoneering over the past few days. His quest for the map pieces has taken him to Shame, Wrong, Despise and Destard among other places.
• Lost Sosaria: a tileset used by the project has been updated and will be tested soon.
• Several files at Aiera have been updated.

Some news from the Ultima community on Easter Sunday:

• Sixteen new screenshots of Lost Sosaria have been released.
• Withstand the Fury Dragon posted some heartfelt well-wishings at both Lost Sosaria and Aiera.
• Voyager Dragon at Ultima: The Reconstruction posted a quick update to let us know that he's still alive.
• Thepal at Infinity Eternal did pretty much the same.
• The latest progress of Ophidian Dragon's journey has taken him to the hideout of Phoenix deep below Castle British, and to the wreckage of the ship "Empire". He also joined the Thieves' Guild and the guild in Minoc, and cleansed the Shrine of Sacrifice.

I am pleased to report that my free-time Ultima 1 project has progressed from tile viewer to map viewer. Today I implemented basic scaling of tiles and also made the map viewer. There are four new screenshots at the discussion area of Dino's Ultima Page. Of course there are a few little bugs, like towns are appearing as signs and dungeons are appearing as towns, but that won't be too hard to fix.

I have very little spare time and therefore work on this Ultima 1 project is almost at a halt (until I have more time). This doesn't concern me much because I never claimed I'd have achieved anything with it. Maybe one day it will evolve into an Ultima 1 engine like Exult is for Ultima 7; maybe it will be moddable and even playable online... or maybe not. I simply don't promise anything with this little project, and for me any progress is more than I originally expected.

Ophidian Dragon has resumed his journey through the Ultima series after a couple of days away because of an interview. His blog entry for Ultima 6, Day 4 tells if his venturing into Dungeon Deceit, and his picking up Sherry the mouse as a tiny (!) addition to his party.

Following their release of Iris2, a trailer of Iris2 is available from the Ultima Iris website.

A pre-Easter update has been posted at Lost Sosaria. This news gives a short progress report and also includes a map of the Lands of the Dark Unknown.

There are a number of updates at Aiera concerning various remakes and mods. New Lazarus mods were spotted; Ultima Iris has released the first public build of Iris2, and several joke remakes were added. Check Aiera for details!

Exult mods Avatar Pack, Black Gate Keyring and Serpent Isle Fixes have been updated at Seven Towers.

Avatar Pack
version: 0.10.01
- Improved installation instructions.
- Added two new avatars: the bucket-headed avatar of U8 and U9 (both male and female versions) and a long raven-hair male avatar (XXXX).
- Retouched several avatars.

Black Isle Keyring
version: 0.11.10
- New title screen for Keyring mod.
- Modified avatar bodies to be shape 1098.
- Merged updates from the Avatar Pack.
version: 0.11.09a
- Improved installation instructions.

Serpent Isle Fixes
version: 0.15.05
- Added SI Fixes title screen.
version: 0.15.04a
- Improved installation instructions.

Ultima 4 : Virtue of Humility has been updated to version 7.0401.

Changes :
- Paying gold greater than or equal to what the Herb Lady wants, increases Honesty (Before it was Gold>cost)
- Iolo's class changed to a Bard
- Fixed Flicker, this time for good I hope. Y/ell sync to remove it if it does return
- Was told about /Z/tats removing game flicker as well..
- Fixed delay pause on load and changed resolution to 1024x768

Direhaggis posted a short progress update on Redemption at Titans of Ether forums. To sum it up : main plot about halfway done, 30 chapters in total, approx 60-80 hours of gameplay, chapters 1-6 scripted and implemented, 7-12 now being worked on, blacksmithing models and implements almost finished and some of the digitally painted 2D cutscenes finished.

I'm surprised, very surprised that no website in the Ultima community posted some stupid comment for April Fool's Day yesterday. It was a tradition. Not one that I liked, but at least it was a sign of life. Ultima fans must be in hibernation...

Meanwhile Ophidian Dragon, in his Ultima marathon, has been making some progress with Ultima 6. He cleansed a few shrines, stumbled upon the gypsies outside Trinsic, and tried to solve the Quenton murder. The next thing to do is a trip to the library.

Frilly Wumpus posted a lengthy article on the Project Britannia website about Ultima and the remakes. Inspired by a part of the article at the end which pinpoints the lack of communication between development teams, Withstand the Fury Dragon reiterated by posting another article about connecting developers at Aiera. The bottom line is that a lot of time and hassle could be saved if there were a single place for Ultima developers (from various projects) to discuss things and share resources. I offered the new discussion area at Dino's Ultima Page to serve as such a place.

In other news, Aiera has seen some updates to the site itself, which include a new "Joke Remakes" section. There is also a post by Thepal from Infinity Eternal about a demo.

Those who are following Ophidian Dragon's quest to play all the Ultima games (Blogging Ultima) will know that he has finished Ultima 5, and started playing Ultima 6. I must admit that having gone through Dungeon Doom without companions is quite an impressive feat. Ophidian Dragon has also caught the attention of some PC gaming sites.

For those of you who have enjoyed plundering Lord British's castle in the Ultima games, here is an interesting bit of news: the real-life Lord British was robbed by a group of teenagers, who stole and/or drank $5000 worth of alcohol, partied on site, and left behind their digital camera full of photos of themselves.

In today's entry to Blogging Ultima, Ophidian Dragon has stumbled upon a number of useful items, completed all the shrine quests, and reached Dungeon Doom.

As Aiera has reported, Lost Sosaria now sports a new development diary as well as 15 new screenshots.

As regards my progress with reverse engineering Ultima 1 (you can find some files at the discussion area), I've implemented a basic tile viewer (that I might eventually extend into a map viewer, and possibly even beyond), and have made significant progress with decoding the savegame file format. As well as finding out where your current transport is saved, I've also found out that a good amount of the file (at least half of it) is used to save objects that appear on the map, such as monsters and transports. I have partially figured out the way they are stored. While the files I uploaded have not yet been updated to reflect my latest discoveries, anyone interested in the details is welcome to contact me.

Some interesting news from Aiera: Ophidian Dragon is playing each Ultima game in sequence, and is blogging his progress.

Ultima: The Reconstruction has been updated three times since the last mention here. The updates are about Exult translation projects, Akalabeth remakes, and the graphics enhancement mod for Ultima V: Lazarus.

Note also that I've added a new 'forum' to Dino's Ultima Page. This is not really a forum but rather a Google discussion group. I figured it was the best idea with regards a place of discussion since the forums I've written, tried or seen are worth little against spam. I am beginning to add my files relevant to reverse engineering Ultima 1 to this group, though the discussion group may be used for any Ultima-related discussion. I am adding my U1 files there temporarily because they are obviously a work in progress; I may eventually create a webpage or a website for Ultima reverse engineering.

Voyager Dragon at Ultima: The Reconstruction appears to be bringing his site back to date slowly but steadily by adding one or two projects every day. Over the past two days, project entries relevant to Lost Sosaria, The Feudal Lands and Ashes have been added or updated.

Recently I've been toying with the idea of 'reverse engineering' some old game, to learn a bit about both the file formats of old games and the reverse engineering process itself. Now reverse engineering is a vast subject, and something like Exult is more akin to it. For now I've been content with trying to decode the savegame format of Ultima 1.

I chose Ultima 1 for a variety of reasons. One is that it's a very old game, and is thus simple enough to decode (learn to walk before you can run). Another is that no documentation seems to exist about the file formats of Ultima 1, although Xenerkes Dragon seems to have cracked them before me. So far I know the general layout of the savegame files, and I can tamper with just about anything in the stats and inventory. I've also located locations where coordinates, the player name, and a move count are saved.

Something very interesting to note is that at a specific location (FF 10, FF 10) you are taken to a bizarre place which I'm calling 'La La Land' [screenshot]. This doesn't seem to be a mess you encounter at very large out-of-range coordinates, because if you vary the coordinates by one, you end up in the sea in the normal world.

Now for some news from the Ultima community...

Petrell has managed to locate the Virtue of Humility website, which was thought lost when its domain, www.wizardportal.com, stopped working. The project has seen a couple of updates since the loss of the domain:

U4 version 7.0317

• May have fixed flicker by adding code to Y/ell command - try the Y/ell command and type in sync. If not, try looking at Z/tats and see if that works.

U4 version 7.0308

• Fixed delay on startup
• Changed game resolution to 1024x768 due to many video cards not supporting 800x600 on widescreen LCD

Lost Sosaria, which was recently brought back into the light, is now seeking to recruit some new team members.

In a recent discussion at Aiera, the fate of the Web Directory on Dino's Ultima Page has been revealed. Everything remake-related (including resources that survived the demise of particular projects) will be moved to Aiera where they belong, while the Web Directory will handle other Ultima sites.

I've been working on updating Dino's Ultima Page again. Here's what I've done today:

• Cleaned up and improved the news script. The news script used by this site was written 3 or 4 years ago when I was beginning to learn PHP. As such its code was unfriendly and inefficient. I've improved it greatly; although the script still has to deal with a 600KB news file, at least now it will work a bit faster.
• Removed the About Site and FAQ pages, which were devoid of useful information, and updated the Contact page with some frequently asked questions.
• Cleaned up the spam in the U8 Opinions page.
• Removed the Feedback section from the navigation. Contact was moved under Main; Forum and Guestbook will not likely be back in the near future.
• Updated the Site Map to reflect these changes.
• Fixed errors in the XML news file.

DOSBox 0.70 has been released. This can be useful to play some Ultimas that may not run under modern operating systems, especially Ultima 8.

Today's update for Ultima: The Reconstruction is about Ultima-based engines, namely the Dragon Engine and Nazghul.

In yesterday's update to Aiera, Withstand the Fury Dragon mentions that he has added an Orphanage (dead remakes with released content) and a Cemetary (dead remakes with no released content) as new sections to Aiera. WtFD is also offering webspace (which he has in abundance) to anyone needing webspace for an Ultima project website.

Aiera has been updated again today, where several remakes have been added to the site.

As many of you probably noticed, just about every part of Dino's Ultima Page except the news has been collecting dust and cobwebs. There is much work to do but it has to start somewhere, so today I went over the info pages for Ultima 1 to 3 and did a little cleanup, removing dead links and adding new links. There are still some dead links and the pages are far from complete, but it's better than nothing.

I have many plans for Dino's Ultima Page, among which are a redesign, adding more guides, restoring the Feedback section, completing the guides I started and never finished, bring the Lost Vale fanfiction nearer to its original form, somehow change the web directory, and several other ideas. Considering the news file is nearing a size of 600KB with the weight of almost five years of news, I will also have to do something about this before Dino's Ultima Page starts loading with the speed of a snail. However, as usual, it all boils down to one problem: time.

The Lost Sosaria site, fresh from relaunch, has been updated with some screenshots of Castle Black Dragon.

Over the past few days, Voyager Dragon has been working hard to bring his site, Ultima: The Reconstruction, back up to date. On the 17th, Voyager removed some cancelled projects and added a few new ones. Other updates are about the Avatar Pack for Exult, the Ultima 6 Project and Project Britannia, Ultima 3 for Mac OS X, and a brief history of Ultima: Escape for Mount Drash followed by a mention of the recently-discovered DrashRL by Santiago Zapata.

WtFD at Aiera has posted news informing that LairWare has released Ultima III 2.0 for Mac OS X. Game features improved graphics but also contains number of classic tile sets from various platforms. The demo version's only limitation is that you can't visit the land of Ambrosia. Registering costs 15$.

WtFD has also restored Lost Sosaria but apparently work on the project has to be restarted from scratch due to loss of both primary and backup copies of original Lost Sosaria. But at the same time he assures that he has learned a lot since he began the work on the Lost Sosaria and the NWN custom content community has had time to mature has released tons of custom content he plans to take advantage of. Also he has shrunk the game are to more reasonable size from 2000(!) to around 350-400 areas and now focuses only on one continent. Have to tip my hat for this guy and wish him luck on his endevours!

Infinity Eternal composer Jeremy LaMantia has released some of the music he has been working on. Released music includes two virtue themes, one for valor and one for compassion, and theme for town of Vesper.

Thepal has upgraded the Infinity Eternal site and posted a progress update :

I decided that the website needed an upgrade, so I threw this one together.

As for the progress, it goes along at a steady pace. The Wiki is taking slightly longer than I anticipated, probably because I've just started a new job and therefore am working a lot. Life doesn't seem to want to let this project progress quickly.

The good news is that two people have contacted me about joining the team. Jeremy LaMantia is a talented composer who has already written eight different themes that I've heard.

MartinLoki is a world-builder who is hard at work creating the heightmap for Britannia. If you're wondering about the size of this game, picture Britannia in Ultima 7. Then double it. Then double it again. Then multiply it by around 100. Ok... that might be a slight exaggeration. But it is huge. Those of you that have played Oblivion, we're aiming for around four times the size of Cyrodiil. For some real world figures, we're talking 8 miles by 8 miles (13km x 13km). Which is 64 square miles (165 square kilometres). And that's not including the other worlds you can visit as well. This will be Britannia like it has never been seen before.

Now's the time to contact us about joining the team. If you think you can help, let me know at thepal at etherealsoftware dot com dot au.

In other news, we once again have a forum, so feel free to drop by and fill it with posts.

Zephyr posted an update at Project Britannia site about the status of the Ultima 6 Project :

Just a quick update to let everyone know we're still alive. Sorry that we have not kept the news up to date. The U6 Project has primarily been working on their content, and they are finishing up what they're calling M3 Part 1 as we speak. No timeframe has been announced, but most of the content is in place and is being tested.

Frilly Wumpus has been busy working with WyrdWeb on revamping the Project Britannia conversation system to use what's known as Usecode. This is a more complex and extremely flexible way of editing NPC conversations. This will allow a whole host of new quest concepts to be implemented, plus a bunch of new, fun features.

The U6 Project still looking for people conversant with the Siege Editor to help us finish up their content. That is their main blocking item. All the technology is in place; they just need people to help finish building the world. They also still need portrait artists.

Stay tuned! We are very much still alive and kicking.

Also Frilly Wumpus made an addition to the previous news topic that Gileathane Dragon, a writer and QA for Lazarus, has recently joined U6P and is currently getting familiar with the toolset and will be helping out where needed in dialogue, quests, and when he's comfortable with his skills, world building.

Iris Team have abandoned development of Ultima Iris and have started project from scratch using Ogre 3D engine. Iris2 (also known as Iris-Ogre) has already been in development for 6 months and release is planned for the end of the month.

Exult mod, the Black Gate Keyring, has been updated with new SI-style avatar portraits and sprites and new "angry" portrait for Laurianna glows. The new Avatar portraits and and sprites are also available in Avatar Pack. Both Mods can be downloaded from Seven Towers.

After several months of silence, Voyager Dragon has returned to update his site, Ultima: The Reconstruction. In particular he mentions the release of Lazarus, and he also added a page for Online Remakes.

One of the online remakes is a new project, and was first seen in a comment to Aiera's latest news post. Called UO to U7, this new project aims to rebuild Ultima 7 using the Ultima Online engine.

The people at Forgotten World have posted a quick update to report that they have decoded several instructions of the Ultima 9 script format, and are capable of creating teleporters to any location of the maps.

Frilly Wumpus has posted a quick update in Project Britannia forums on how the project is progressing:

- The new areas planned for U6P Milestone 3 include Yew, Buc's Den, Spider Cave and possibly Paws
- Three new people have joined the team : Quentico (World Building and QA), WyrdWeb (Writing and QA) and KooK Dragon (QA)
There have been many improvements and enchantments to core Project Britannia systems including but not limited to :
- Enhancements to the conversation system to support some of the complex conversations in U6P
- Implemented "usecode" system that allows performing more complex actions inside conversations, banters, and dynamic right+click menus on items.
- A totally revamped banter system to allow building of complex banters reminiscent of some of the Bioware classics.
- Many, many tunings and bug fixes.

Frilly Wumpus also posted that new and improved beta tools and tutorials have been released and are available at Project Britannia Wiki.

Latest news entry by WtFD in Ultima: Aiera site informs that all site content from the old site have been fully restored. WtFD also mentions that he plans to restart work on Lost Sosaria.

Following Aiera's redesign, the site has been updated several times over the past few days. Withstand the Fury Dragon has been adding new information pages and updating the files it hosts. The old site is still up and may be used for files that are missing from the new site. Withstand the Fury Dragon also posted a TODO list for the site to show what he plans to do for Aiera.

Remember JP Morris' IT-HE Software site? Well, this is not really an Ultima-related update, since the new page added is about Deus Ex (Deus Ex: The Fourth Coming), but those who have played the game may enjoy this new section.

Vividos has announced the discontinuation of the Underworld Adventures Project :

Project discontinued

I'm sorry to say that the current status of the Underworld Adventures project is "inactive". I didn't find enough time in the last few months and years to productively work on the project. Another thing that slowed me down a bit is the fact that it should be possible without much work to get Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 to run on Windows XP and later (via the proper settings), using DosBox under non-Windows operating systems, or with using VMware (Player) to emulate the old operating systems.

Nevertheless Underworld Adventures was a fun project and I learned much about open source development, licenses, people, doing script and graphics programming. Hope you enjoyed trying the early versions of Underworld Adventures!

Withstand the Fury Dragon has returned. While away he switched jobs four times, got himself engaged (Poor chap. My condolences ;-p.) and has had more than his share of computer problems. Now that he's back he plans to upgrade Aiera site to, among other enhancements, allow the developers to submit news by email.

The Ultima Digital Music Archive at Dor-lomin: The Realm of Hurin has been updated with Ultima Online music. Thanks goes to Peter Haytko for reporting this piece of news.

The latest Ultima information collecting effort is The Codex of Editable Wisdom. This wiki was once dedicated to Ultima V: Lazarus, but had died, and is now being extended to Ultima in general. Anyone willing and able to contribute information is encouraged to do so.

Santiago Zapata has created an arena-like game called Drash Roguelike, which borrows elements from several Ultimas. For example, there is the background story of Ultima: Escape From Mount Drash; the graphics are from Ultima 4 and there is music from Ultima 8. Basically you are thrown in an arena and must fight your way out. It can be quite a fun game.

In other news, the Titans of Ether are seeking to recruit 3D designers and worldbuilders.

Nazghul 0.5.6 has been released. Version fixes a crash when dying upon exit from a cave and various other minor bugs.

Thepal has posted news on Ultima IX - Infinity Eternal site informing that he's soon ready to start assembling a team for the project. But first he'll be creating Wiki based Encyclopedia of Britannia where he plans to add the most complete collection of information on Britannia and the worlds it has been in contact with, as well as everything he has done thus far for Infinity Eternal. It'll be for the teams use only and Thepal estimates that it'll take another month to complete.

Anyone interested in helping can already contact him but the wiki won't be available until it is closer to completion.

Contrary to the activity level that has become the norm lately, there has been a good amount of news from Ultima websites over the past couple of weeks.

Ultima IV Multiplayer is changing web host, and warns that the forums are down and some links may not work.

The Ultima 6 Project has released some screenshots of the work of Riptzen, a worldbuilder on their team.

News from the Seven Towers website: there have been several fixes to the Black Gate Keyring mod.

A couple of updates from the Titans of Ether give a little idea about what's going on, as well as provide 4 new tunes to listen to.

The Dragon Press, silent for a long while, has been updated with some new content, namely Ovo's "Dead Ends" and the completion of Shadow of Light Dragon's "The Black Ankh".

A short update to the Pentagram page introduces Brian Tietz, the newest member of the Pentagram team, who improved pathfinding in Pentagram. Some fixes are also mentioned.

So Christmas has passed... I hope you enjoyed the Christmas lunch based on torax... er... turkey and that Santa Claus brought you several wonderful toys.

The Forgotten World team also thought it fitting to provide a nice little Christmas present, and released two new screenshots showing off their self-written terrain editor.

Ashes : Two Worlds Collide team has been interviewed by Stefa RPG. Team also released 7 new screenshots.

Nazghul 0.5.5 has been released. Major changes include multiple saved games; more meaningful use of character stats; basic character creation; and new dungeons, quests, NPC types, and characters. Unfortunately only compiled version available is for Arch Linux; rest of us have to compile it from source or wait until compiled versions are released for our platform.

David Randall has finished the tileset for his Port of Ultima 5 for Ti Calculators and posted 2 screenshots in project forums to allow comparison between TiCalc and PC versions.

According to Gordon McNutt's blog, the release of next version of Nazghul is planned for December 22. The new version will feature, among other things, a new quest aimed at the early game.

Marzo Sette Torres Junior, a member of the Exult team, has just launched his new website: Seven Towers. In this new site one can find two of his Exult mods, as well as some documentation for the Usecode C used by Exult. Note also that this new site has been added among the Specific Info Sites in my Ultima Web Directory.

My list of Exult mods, ever growing, has been updated.

According to what he wrote on his website, La Legende d' Ultima, Sergorn seems to be pretty disappointed with Gothic 3. He added a review of the game to his website, as well as a gallery.

Forgotten World team have managed to make normally invisible objects that are used to trigger scripts, items and monsters in the game world visible. 4 new screenshots were added to give us a peek at what this feature does.

They've have also figured a way to add music to U9A and are now looking for talented composer to join their ranks

ShadowMoses has posted an update on the status of Ashes: Two Worlds Collide stating that while the project has been dormant for a while due to commitments imposed by real life(tm), the project is very much alive; and to prove it he posted a progress report:

...I finished importing all the creatures, monsters, critters (or whatever you like to call them) into the game. In total there are over 40 variations from chickens to stone golems and some will include sub-classes such as -shamen , -ranger and -warrior.

On top of this the men of the Ashes world have been joined by women and we're not sure whether this is a direct result or not but some of the men have at the same time become fatter while others more muscular... and inevitably children have arrived too, both boys and girls. Family dynamics are finally starting to show!

NPC's are also much more skilled these days, they can for example operate a grindstone and sharpen their swords, cook in the kitchen, repair their houses, farm their lands and even go to church. NPC's aren't fully developed however. they still have much too learn.

ShadowMoses also states that while they can't show the stuff now due to project being between builds, he hopes to have something to show by christmas.

Hubert Maier has ported Nazghul to AmigaOS4 (PPC).

A new Ultima 4 Multiplayer shard is available at http://www.demarco.com/ultima/.

An Economy and Sales update for Ultima 6 Online has just been released. Trade dialogues have been implemented, and you can mark items as not for sale to prevent selling them by mistake.

Hawkwind from the Forgotten Worlds project reports that their team has managed to decode the file format for the models used in Ultima 9. They have released a new 'screenshot' with the following description:

"After spending a lot of time on decoding the file formats, we finally managed to unravel the file format for the models used in U9. The picture below shows a render scene from blender, a 3d modeling program using the models and textures from Ultima IX Ascension. We are using a self-written Python script to import models to blender where we can pose and modify them."

The Forgotten Worlds project has also extended its team openings.

Forgotten World team have managed decode Ultima IX Ascension model file format and are now looking for 3D-modellers and texture artist (in addition to talented programmers mentioned earlier) to join their ranks. They also announced the openings in various Ultima forums including Ultima 5 : Lazarus, Exult and Titans of Ether

-Direhaggis- posted a small status update shedding some light on the current state of development of the Ultima IX : Redemption.

RPGWatch have posted a lengthy interview with Lazarus Team Lead Ian "Tiberius" Frazier.

Many cRPG players see Ultima IV through to VII as a revolutionary period. The work to bring Ultima V to life with a modern engine - Dungeon Siege of all things - must surely be one of the most ambitious mod projects ever undertaken and successfully completed. If you haven't played U5: Lazarus, you owe it to yourself to experience this amazing work that really does succeed in recreating the atmosphere and soul of Ultima. Jesse Rink interviewed project lead Ian "Tiberius" Frazier to provide this in-depth retrospective on the project.

From the most recent news at UltimaDot, it appears that the entire RPGDot team has left the Jolt-owned RPGDot to start a new, independent site called RPGWatch. This probably means that we won't be seeing Ultima-related news at either of the two sites for a good while.

The latest news at La Legende d' Ultima is about Gothic 3, the U6P Milestone 2, and the Lazarus French release.

The Second Milestone of The Ultima 6 Project has been released and is now available for download at http://www.u6project.com/.

One of the latest features at Gamasutra which Hoki-Aamrel the Cherry-Red Dragon kindly emailed me about was the Gamasutra Quantum Leap Awards, which explores some of the best RPGs ever in the quest to find the one RPG that made the biggest 'quantum leap' in the history of RPG gaming.

While the Ultima series did not make it among the top five, this was really because so many of the Ultima games were voted for that no one game got enough votes to rival other RPGs. The Ultima series received an 'honorable mention' and one can read several interesting commentaries about some of the best installments in the series.

Matt Hutaff, of the Ultima 6 Project, announced that the release of Milestone 2 is very near. It should be released this weekend if everything goes as planned. This new release features Cove, Britain and a new dungeon.

Meanwhile Corv, leader of the Titans of Ether, posted about the continuing forum and provider problems, and also wants to recruit a 3D artist and a dialogue writer.

Unfortunately I have not completed my Savage Empire guide, but I am releasing it anyway. Since I am about to start University and it's not likely that I'll have much time to work on it, there's no reason to keep it hidden, considering a big part of it is finished. If I resume work on it I'll post an update.

Ultima IV : Virtue of Humility has been updated. The update fixes possible crash that could occur during rune creation.

Forgotten World Team is looking for talented coders to join their ranks and help them with the project.

The French version of Ultima V: Lazarus has been released. You can get it from their downloads page.

Some words from The Red Mage about his project, Ultima 8 Revisited:

Ultima VIII using the NWN engine is back on schedule. After several personal set backs the project is in full speed ahead.

In fact The Red Mage has already released a demo of the remake. Meanwhile The Red Mage is looking for talented people who would like to help and are members of the Bioware/NWN community. Such people should visit the project's guild website.

Last night I finished the walkthrough in the Savage Empire guide. Today I upgraded the guide to XHTML 1.1, which means it uses a more recent standard than the rest of Dino's Ultima Page. While the walkthrough was the largest page in the guide, I still have to work on some of the other pages, such as Items, Bestiary and Places. The Dialogue page is the only one that will be partially finished when the guide is released, because it will take a while to collect all dialogues and implement them in PHP. At this rate I might release the guide in about a week. I hope not to take longer than 2 weeks, because in 2 weeks' time I start University, which means I will no longer have time to work on the guide.

The page dedicated to the Ultima 5 for TI Calculators has been updated to reflect some of the latest features of the remake.

It looks like The Red Mage, who had released a demo of Ultima 8 for Neverwinter Nights and later cancelled his project to give space to the Exile remake, has resumed his effort after Exile's demise. The project has its own website, which is currently empty, but if you check back later, there should be some new material. You can also check out the project's NWVault page, where a couple of files are already available. Note that I have updated this project's entry in my web directory.

As a followup to the last newspost's info about EA releasing Ultima 7 for the PSP, Gruck pointed out a blog entry that will probably kill all excitement. It's extremely likely that the PSP version of Ultima 7 will be the dismal SNES version.

La Legende d' Ultima has added a page dedicated to Ultima V: Lazarus, featuring a map of Britannia, a screenshot gallery, a downloads page (currently empty) and quite a bit of info. Also, in the news on La Legende d' Ultima, Sergorn notes that the French version of Lazarus should be available by the end of September.

Has it really been three years since the last hidden thing in Ultima 8 was found? Looks like it, but it's not over. Heiko Fischer provided me with a treat for the "Objects Hidden Behind Walls" section. He found a hidden key blank that can open several doors all over Tenebrae. Check out said section for more information and screenshots.

The Savage Empire Guide is progressing nicely. Although I haven't worked on it today, yesterday I made great progress in the walkthrough and also finished implementing all cutscenes in the guide. That's right; you will be able to view the cutscenes as they are in the game, online, when the guide is released.

In other news, it seems that EA will be re-releasing Ultima for the Playstation Portable (PSP). According to a PDF document that Steve Sander pointed out, Ultima 7: The Black Gate will be one of 14 'old' games to be released for the PSP by EA.

You might have noticed that the forum here has been temporarily closed because it was being inundated with spam. I am currently working on an update to the forum script, and until then, the forum will remain closed. All topics have been backed up and nothing will be lost.

Another thing of note is that I have finally resumed work on the unreleased Savage Empure Guide, after a year-long break. I have found a way of loading images directly from the tileset, which saves a lot of work because I don't have to stay copying images, pasting them into a new file, and setting transparencies.

David Randall, who is developing the Ultima 5 for TI Calculators remake, posted in the old Ultima news topic that he has just finished the cutscene that comes up when the whole party dies and Lord British resurrects it. The next step is the "Hole Up & Camp" Cutscene.

La Legende d' Ultima has undergone a maintenance update, which includes updates to the Ultima 8 (particularly regarding the Lost Vale), Arthurian Legends, Ultima Underworld, Gothic 2, and Other Universes pages.

Also, an update to Ultima 6 Online has been released, where horses have been added, weapon damage has been changed, dialogue has been improved, several new places to live have been added, and several bugs have been fixed.

Project Britannia team will be releasing unstable builds for public testing as they work toward projects 3rd milestone. Feature list provided by Frilly Wumpus is rather impressive. For information of build status and downloads visit Britannia Wiki.

The members of The Feudal Lands development team have been working hard toward their first stable public release. Their goal is to get it released within a week.

Anyone who still checks the forum probably already noticed the large amounts of spam that have been plaguing it for a while. I am working on an upgrade to the forum script, but I will need people to help me test it before I can use the new script. Later this week there will be a public beta test where everyone can poke around the new script and report any flaws. Anyone interested in taking part should contact me by email. It won't take too much of your time, and your contribution will be vital in improving the forum and keeping spam at bay. You can also try out the new features, such as account registration, on the forum before I actually release the script to the public.

La Legende d' Ultima, which has been silent for months, has a couple of new newsposts. They speak of Ultima Online and of the Lost Vale box that surfaced a while ago.

According to latest update posted by David Randal in the Ultima News topic, the Ultima 5 for TI Calculators is 82.5% complete. Latest completed features include :

- Summoning and killing the Shadowlords is working.
- All shrine quests are complete.
- Finding Lord British's items is complete.
- Using all special stones is working.
- Falling into the Underworld is working.

Ultima 6 Online has been updated. While main focus of the update is bug fixing and balancing, it does include number of new features including horses, 'returnbody' command for returning players dead body to place of his death and improvements to 'look' command. For full list of changes visit U6O Forums

The Nuvie project is still alive, as is confirmed by news that appeared on their website a few days ago. After almost a year of silence, making many people think the popular project had some sudden demise, there is now a list of what has changed in Nuvie, on the Nuvie website. There is also a new section in the navigation with a link to the Changelog, and links to very organised Progress pages for each game.

Take a look at the Ultima News topic. David Randall, author of the Ultima 5 for TI Calculators remake, has been hard at work on the Shrines quests and the Codex, as some new animated gif demos he posted in that topic demonstrate.

According to Ultima 6 Online page next update is coming on August 19th.

Ultima IV Multiplayer developer Johnny Wood has been employed by Midway Games and had to move to Austin, Texas and thus have not had any time to dedicate to the project. Fortunately he should be again soon. In the meantime he has been able to enlist Steve Conley to help him in with the project and Steve has already managed to port both the server and the client to Linux and Solaris and is now working on scripting support and stronger database integration. They also plan on scripting all of the Ultima IV specific parts of the game so that the engine itself can be used to easily create early Ultima style mods.

Titans of Ether site is down once more due to technical difficulties. While waiting the site to come back you can still visit their forums.

According to Nazghul Devblog having fixed all reported bugs in project CVS, Gordon McNutt is now focusing on introducing number of new features into the engine. Currently they include character creation, text coloration, mini sprites in UI and NPC's as light sources.

A couple of months ago, an audio interview with Zephyr from the Ultima 6 Project was added to the IKickPuppies site. Now, the same site has released a new audio interview with Tiberius from Lazarus. You can get both interviews from the audio page at the IKickPuppies site.

Zephyr from the Ultima 6 Project posted a screenshot showing that there will be gargoyles in the Milestone 2 release.

Zephyr from the The Ultima 6 Project team has posted an update stating that they won't be able to release the Milestone 2 at end of July as planned and no new date will be set, instead it'll be "done when it's done." He did give a quick rundown of what has been done and what is left to do :

* The town of Cove is fully populated, and is somewhat expanded over the original U6.
* Britain is nearly fully populated. Most of the houses are furnished. We still need to finish the museum, the town hall, the mint, and the conservatory.
* NPC shopkeepers need to have shop inventories populated.
* NPC houses need to be stocked with items that are interesting (such as things you might be able to steal, etc.).
* A few of the NPCs that live in and around Britain are not going to make it in to M2.
* The drawbridge for the castle works. Niko recently completed the last piece of it, which I still have to get in-game.
* The "getting out of the castle" quest is not yet implemented.
* Some additional plot points need to be revised.
* A brand-new encounter will take place in Cove. No work has been done with this.
* Lots of in-game unit testing will need to happen before we can play-test.
* One of the dungeons needs to be fully stocked. This dungeon is roughly 2/3 stocked at this time.
* Guards need to be added to all three of the major locations: Castle Britannia, Britain and Cove.
* About 2/3 of the NPC portraits for Britain need to be completed.

Zephyr also reiterated teams need for additional portrait artists and world builders good with the Siege Editor. Those interested should make a post in their forums.

David Randall, the author of Ultima 5 remake for TI-calculators, posted two new gif animations in the Ultima News topic showing new features that he has implemented : clocks can be looked at to check what time it is in game, musical instruments can played and troll's now lurk beneath bridges of Britannia and may demand toll from innocent travellers and passer-by's. Two additional gif's can be found in his Ultima 5 topic in TI-Freakware forum, one showing random enemy generator in action and the other showing how torches can now be used to increase viewing distance in dark areas and crystal ball to view the mini-map.

Titans of Ether site and forum are now back online a