Updating my Ultima website – lots of project news!
As some good Readers may be aware, I run several websites, not the least of which is Ultima: Aiera, my Ultima project archive site. It’s basically an aggregator for news related to the various projects out there on the great big Internet that have something to do with Ultima. And whether that’s a patch for an existing Ultima title or a remake of an Ultima game using a new (and fancier) game engine, Aiera exists to keep track of everything I can find “out there”.
I’ve been working on updating Aiera all day, so there won’t be anything else done today in the way of blogging. But that’s okay — an article I read in Wired magazine this morning suggested that mixing up one’s content every now and again was a sure-fire technique to spruce up the blog. So I expect thousands of readers now.
Yeah, right!
However, one thing I do want it to get my various blogs a bit better-integrated with each other, and because Time Immortal is kind of the master domain for each of these that means that anything that gets posted to those “other” sites from now on will be mirrored back to here.
So…news from Aiera today.
I was contacted a while back (an inexcusably long while back, as it happens — my apologies!) by a fellow named Zen, who passed along a bit of an addon module for Dungeon Keeper based on the first level of the Abyss in Ultima Underworld.
As Zen doesn’t have a website to host the project at for himself, he has made it available to the world via Aiera, and I have (finally!!) created a project entry for it. Check thou it out, O Reader, if you’ve still got those Dungeon Keeper discs tucked away in a drawer or closet!
Also, I have added a download for the Ultima 6 Project’s Milestone 5 release to that project’s entry, so if you haven’t grabbed it from somewhere else already, you can now get it there as well.
Other news, courtesy of Dino’s Ultima Page:
Ultima V: Lazarus
Cheerful Dragon has released version 1.29 of his various mods and bugfixes for this remake of Ultima 5. These can be downloaded either at the previous forum link, or via the project entry at Aiera.
Seven Towers Exult Mods
Marzo has released updates to his mods for Exult, for both The Black Gate (Keyring) and Serpent Isle (Fixes). The latest revisions of both can be downloaded through their respective project entries at Aiera:
Ultima: Iris
Apparently, the project’s developers took home first prize at the Dusmania 10 hobby game development meeting in Frankfurt, Germany. Congrats!
Ultima 5 for TI Calculators
Ranman has released version 1.01 of his port of Ultima 5 to the Texas Instruments calculator. The up-to-date download can be found via the project entry.
Exult
This Ultima 7 remake has been updated recently — or, rather, the unstable 1.4 version has been updated, as has Exult Studio and its accompanying tools. The Exult team’s plugins for GiMP have also been updated this month, and the whole mess of things can be downloaded via the project entry.
EUO
This Ultima-inspired game has seen the release of version 0.16 of its rudimentary 3D client, which can be downloaded via the project entry at Aiera.
Ultima Restoration
This comprehensive multi-project has released screenshots of the Kilrathi space station from their remake of Ultima 1. With this completed, they now have all the cities, dungeons, and space stations fully mapped in the game — which, if I do say so myself, is damn good progress!
They’ve also added links to a good couple-dozen Neverwinter Nights modules that I’m going to have to sort through in short order, so…well, it’s nice to know in advance what I’ll be up to for at least part of next week.
Also, the Wing Commander CIC team are attempting to back up what remains of the Origin Systems data library. They are looking for people with experience with this sort of thing, so if you’re one of those people who lives and breathes in backup tapes, you might want to check their project out.
I started blogging back in 2004 -- in May, if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Not that I remember the exact day. To be honest, I didn't take it that seriously then; it was a fun distraction, but nothing more.
That all changed, I think, once the Danish cartoons were published, and the assault on the right to freedom of expression became very visible. With the recent issues in Canada concerning the "human rights" commissions, the gravity of the matter has only increased, and my interest in blogging has increased right along with it.
I used to blog at a domain called Time Immortal, but it seemed to be the right time for a change -- there's been a lot of that in my life of late. Hence this blog: a fresh start, and proof positive that I won't shut up even if I get shut down once in a while.
