2010-10-25 Exciting Times for Ultima

Hello Forgotten World followers and Ultima IX fans,

These are indeed exciting times for the Ultima community with recent updates by Exult and Pentagram, the continued progress by the Titans of Ether on Redemption, and the full release of the Ultima VI project; not to mention the other numerous developments in Ultima in recent weeks.  Certainly, our own contribution yesterday adds to this mighty list.

Due to a recent burst of efforts by the team, we have started a steady progress toward understanding the nature of Ultima IX’s triggers (a very important aspect in Ultima IX) and how they are implemented inside the game.  In fact, our current methods and tools for analysis of triggers and other aspects of the game’s files have proven to be massively effective in our decoding process.

Still there is one area of our toolkit that could use improvement and that is our World Editor.  As can be seen in the recent new Magincia screenshot, the core of the editor is there, but there remains some performance issues, missing features (like editing of some of each object’s parameters and the ability to add new objects to the gameworld), and reincorporation of fixed object rendering (which is a well known format).  Unfortunately, our primary programmer remains effectively inactive due to nonfatal health issues.  We therefore have a major hole in our development team and encourage anybody with some fundamental c++ skills and an interest in Ultima to join our team.  The team is easy going, we are very considerate of real life issues that come up from time to time, and there are no deadlines put on any member (well except myself maybe).  Just believe me, when I say you will most definitely not regret joining.

Oh about the poll, I know it doesn’t work.  It wasn’t configured properly at the start, and I do not have the access permissions to fix it presently.  Anyway, if there is an Ultima IX bug you would like to see taken care of then you can comment at the news post at Ultima Aiera or at our forum at the Titans of Ether.

– Iceblade