Game News Ultima 3.5 Pax Britannia and Ultima VI Nuvie News

[Crooked Bee]

Tags: NUVIE; Ultima 3.5; Ultima VI: The False Prophet

According to this blog entry at Ultima Aiera, Ultima VI Nuvie is about to go full-screen:

...the Nuvie team is starting to develop what is probably the most sought after feature of all time, a full-screen mode similar to what was seen in the SNES version of Ultima VI. It’s still very much a work in progress, and a lot of features such as conversations are not yet supported full-screen, but they’ve already added a new spellbook GUMP which I think looks great.

In other news, the fan-made Ultima 3.5: Pax Britannia project has been updated with images of all the in-game towns (Britain, Cove, Buccaneer’s Den, Fawn, Jhelom, Lord British’s Castle, Minoc, Montor, Moon, Paws, Skara Brae, Trinsic, Vesper and Yew), as well as the tileset, a hybrid of Ultima 3, Ultima 4, and Ultima 5's tilesets.

Pax Britannia, as its creator [Andrew Owen] describes it, is an Ultima fan game set between Ultima 3 and Ultima 4, which will presumably tell the story of Britannia’s unification and the breakaway of Fawn, the two Montors, and Moon. Your character in the game, summoned by Lord British as a diplomatic agent to drive the unification of Britannia forward, may be from Earth…but will not be the Stranger of the previous three games, or the Avatar of the games following.

In a Facebook comment, Andrew Owen has described the engine he's going for:

I’m writing the engine for an 8-bit (Z80-based) computer that never had a version of Ultima released for it back in the day. It has 128K of RAM, a 256×192 pixel display (with two colours per cell – although I have a software workaround for that which extends it to 8×1 attributes in the view window), and no standard disk system (so I plan to do the whole thing as single load from tape). It has no video chip, so the screen is stored in main RAM. Oh and the extra RAM is paged in banks of 16K (hence the 128×128 map limit). I’ve solved the problem of the display size by reducing the view window to 9×9 (as per U6) and using a 6×8 font. You might well ask why I don’t do it on something more modern, but I enjoy the challenge. On the flip side there are emulators for the target machine available for just about any device you care to name (it should look lovely on the Nintendo DS).​

No downloads available so far, though. Fingers crossed.

Source: Ultima Aiera
Related links:
Nuvie Changelog
Ultima 3.5 Pax Britannia Project Page

 

[Luzur]

hmmm, Ultima 3.5 is relevant to my interests.

 

[St. Toxic]

hmmm, Ultima 3.5 is relevant to my interests.

 

[Luzur]

it is for PC, right?

 

[Crooked Bee]

it is for PC, right?

Yes, don't worry about the Nintendo DS comment. It just means it will be emulatable on DS, not that it's the target platform.

 

[Tripicus]

Ultima 6 was my entry point into the series, and the larger screen would be a welcome addition to revisiting that nostalgia. I don't recall there being any maze like features that relied on a limited size view port, so it shouldn't break the game.

From looking at the site, there seems to be some notes on improved AI, so I wonder if there are plans to improve all the monster AI and combat?

 

[Fatty]

mmmmmm....Ultima

Ultima 6 with a larger viewing area? Huge win. Ultima 6 was practically migraine inducing with that uber zoomed in view. Didn't stop me from playing it though.

Another tile-based Ultima game? Love it. Make moar.

 

[mondblut]

Why no love for ENIAC? The world desperately needs a version of Ultima for ENIAC!

 

[Elzair]

Sweet!

 

[Bruma Hobo]

I’ve solved the problem of the display size by reducing the view window to 9×9 (as per U6)