Game News Ultima 6 Project reaches Milestone 5

[DarkUnderlord]

Tags: Ultima 6 Project

<a href="http://rpgwatch.com/show/article?articleid=94&ref=0&id=36">Head on over yonder to RPGWatch to read about the Ultima 6 Project's latest update</a>.
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<blockquote>The Ultima 6 Project Milestone 5 (M5) release is now available for download. You will find the download links on both the Ultima 6 Project site (http://www.u6project.com/), and on the on the Project Britannia site (http://www.projectbritannia.com/index.php). There will be a new forum on the Project Britannia site specifically for players to discuss M5, give feedback to the team & exchange hints.
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Most of the overworld is now complete, with most of it playable and accessible. Ships are available, so you will be able to sail to the islands in Britannia’s world. Since last month’s report, Trinsic, Lycaeum and Serpent's Hold have been completed, and their NPCs have been placed into their towns. You will find new quests to pursue, and have some interesting new areas to explore.</blockquote>
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If you're wondering what the <a href="http://u6project.com/">Ultima 6 Project is</a>:
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<blockquote>The Ultima 6 Project was formed in 2001 by Sliding Dragon to develop a remake of Origin's Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. Soon assembled under the banner Archon, the team members, who hail from all over the globe, have set about recreating the world of Britannia, adding an enhanced storyline to bolster intraseries continuity and building on the Ultima legacy in a way that will please fans new and old.</blockquote>
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Fascinating.

 

[Saxon1974]

Im looking forward to this when its finished. I loved Ultima Lazarus the remake of Ultima 5 using the same engine I believe.

 

[Keldryn]

Im looking forward to this when its finished. I loved Ultima Lazarus the remake of Ultima 5 using the same engine I believe.

Yes, Lazarus also used the Dungeon Siege engine, and the two projects share the basic world construction for Britannia. The town and dungeon layouts differ between both games, but the major landmasses are shared. I was one of the worldbuilders for Lazarus (I built Verity Isle/Moonglow, Dungeon Shame, the Isle of the Avatar, and some miscellaneous sea/island regions around the map borders). Glad you liked it!

 

[Saxon1974]

Im looking forward to this when its finished. I loved Ultima Lazarus the remake of Ultima 5 using the same engine I believe.

Yes, Lazarus also used the Dungeon Siege engine, and the two projects share the basic world construction for Britannia. The town and dungeon layouts differ between both games, but the major landmasses are shared. I was one of the worldbuilders for Lazarus (I built Verity Isle/Moonglow, Dungeon Shame, the Isle of the Avatar, and some miscellaneous sea/island regions around the map borders). Glad you liked it!

Honestly I was amazed at how good Lazarus was, especially for a volunteer project. I think it is my favorite RPG in the last 6 or 7 years including major titles.

Any of you forming a company to make games?

 

[match000]

Is the scheduling system better than Oblivion's ? It can't be hard to beat the P.o.s. scheduling of Oblivion, but Lazarus is developed by non-paid volunteers so if it does beat Olivion's that would be awesome.

 

[Keldryn]

Honestly I was amazed at how good Lazarus was, especially for a volunteer project. I think it is my favorite RPG in the last 6 or 7 years including major titles.

I still think the most amazing thing about Lazarus is that it was actually completed. That is extraordinarily rare for a volunteer project, and it is primarily due to the devotion of Ian "Tiberius" Frazier, the project leader. He conceived of the project when previews for Dungeon Siege were coming out and Chris Taylor was talking about the Siege Editor and how it could be used. The initial paper designs for Lazarus were mostly done before Dungeon Siege even hit the shelves, and it was pretty close to five years from its inception when Lazarus was finally released.

Ian kept that project going through sheer force of will, despite the fact that not only was he not making money off the project, it was actually costing him some money. I have to admit that I almost got axed from the team at one point because I couldn't meet my commitments; work and events in my personal life unfortunately made a volunteer project a low priority, and I eventually took over updating and maintaining the web site rather than dropping out altogether. And that's generally what happens with these type of projects. After it was done, a lot of the team members involved with Lazarus seemed to agree that they couldn't do such a project again on a volunteer basis. I was in-between jobs when I joined the project and a long-term relationship was just ending. When I started a new relationship and a new full-time job, my level of involvement with the project wasn't sustainable.

Lazarus is probably one of the most ambitious volunteer projects I've seen, in terms of scale. At one point, Lazarus and U6 Project were both doing their own things, and then the project leads got together and decided to co-operate on building "Project Britannia" that would give a basic world map and underlying game systems (scheduling, etc) for both projects and any other Ultima fan projects.

Any of you forming a company to make games?

Unfortunately not; founding a new company/studio is extremely risky and difficult in this day and age, even if you have a good-sized portfolio of published titles to your name and a big wad of cash. I'd love to start a company making more RP-focused games, but a stable income is a priority. :D

Several of us have gone on to jobs in the industry though:

Ian "Tiberius" Frazier got a designer job at Iron Lore and worked on Titan Quest, after which he got promoted to a lead designer and producer on whichever unannounced title they were working on when they shut down. He landed a senior designer position with Big Huge Games a few months ago to work on a new unannounced RPG with Ken Rolston (yes, of Morrowind/Oblivion fame/infamy).

Our lead world-builder, Scott “Claymore Dragon” Tengelin, has been working as a designer at Gas-Powered Games on Space Siege for a while now.

One of our writers, Gil “Gileathane” MacLean works as a designer for IR Gurus in Australia. Another of our writers was pursuing a position with Bioware, but I'm not sure if she got in or not.

I worked for almost a year at EA Canada as a software engineer for computer-assisted testing, which was dull but a good foot in the door of the industry. I landed a game designer role with Rockstar Vancouver (the team that created Bully) in December of last year. Can't talk about what I'm working on, as it hasn't been announced.

I'm sure every game designer dreams of founding/running his own studio to make his favourite type of game, but it's just a pipe dream for most of us.

 

[Jaesun]

I worked for almost a year at EA Canada as a software engineer for computer-assisted testing, which was dull but a good foot in the door of the industry. I landed a game designer role with Rockstar Vancouver (the team that created Bully) in December of last year. Can't talk about what I'm working on, as it hasn't been announced.

OMG Developer tag STAT!

I agree, it was amazing that Lazarus actually got completed. And it was well worth it, I loved it.

Glad to hear some on the team were able to move into the game industry.

 

[Keldryn]

Is the scheduling system better than Oblivion's ? It can't be hard to beat the P.o.s. scheduling of Oblivion, but Lazarus is developed by non-paid volunteers so if it does beat Olivion's that would be awesome.

The Dungeon Siege engine was never designed to handle NPC scheduling, and it proved quite tricky to get it into Lazarus. The project/technical lead for U6P was the one who wrote the code to run the scheduling system. Thankfully, the Siege Engine does allow you to write DLLs and link them into your mods. The scheduling was somewhat of a hack into a game engine that wasn't designed to accomodate it though, and is very script-heavy.

And that's always a balancing act. Scripted "AI" routines, such as daily schedules, patrolling, and the like tend to look better, but they are also very predictable and look mostly the same every time. Oblivion's "Radiant" AI is definitely on the right track, but it was not unexpectedly buggy, given that it was their first time using it. A couple more games with it, and it will probably start to look pretty good and be able to handle things that more script-heavy systems can't do. But it won't get there if developers don't use it.

We ended up doing a lot of stuff that the DS engine wasn't designed to handle. While it boasted about "seamless" worlds with no transitions, if you load the base game's regions into the editor, you'll see that there are relatively limited paths with just enough terrain built to fill your line of sight, and then there's nothing. Every square inch of Lazarus' Britannia was hand-built and there are no such gaps in the world, even if the player can't walk there (there aren't many spots, other than some surfaces along the sides of "mountains"). The game engine chokes on streaming that much continuous terrain.

The Lazarus Dialogue Engine was modded into the game and works much like the dialogue system in Ultima VII. That one caused the programmers less grief than other systems. The ship travel was the biggest hack that caused some of the greatest headaches and is probably the least-polished part of the game.

AI is bloody difficult to program yet we're very good at noticing behaviours that don't look natural. I work with our AI programmer nearly every day to figure out how I can best get them behaving naturally and believably without having to take heavy-handed scripting control of everything (which is really easy to break).

 

[Keldryn]

OMG Developer tag STAT!

Do we have one of those?

I agree, it was amazing that Lazarus actually got completed. And it was well worth it, I loved it.

I still haven't actually played very far into the game... It's a rather lengthy game and, in the tradition of many Ultima games, can be brutally difficult at the start if you go the wrong way, get poisoned, or run out of food.

What's really cool is that Tiberius gave all of the team members a chance to get a cloth version of the in-game map. It's awesome, he gave them to us at his cost (I think he ended up losing a bit of money on it too), and the guys who printed it said they'd never do it again. So it's probably a true collector's item.

The fact that Lazarus seems to get mostly praise from RPG Codex makes me happy, as that is no small feat.

Glad to hear some on the team were able to move into the game industry.

Thanks! We're going to change it from the inside...

 

[Saxon1974]

Good stuff Keldryn thanks for sharing.

I agree as well that it was impressive that it was completed. I was amazed playing through the game the level of detail and dialog in the game with it being a volunteer project. Kudos to the team for getting it out.

Honestly, I think if this game would have been marketed (Hyped) even with the dated engine and graphics it could have sold really well to the hard core audience, I really think it was that good.

I guess that is what comes from people doing something out of a passion for their creation, instead of just trying to make something that will appeal to the broadest audience to sell as many copies as possible.

Cheers

 

[Keldryn]

I agree as well that it was impressive that it was completed. I was amazed playing through the game the level of detail and dialog in the game with it being a volunteer project. Kudos to the team for getting it out.

We did have a *lot* of dialogue in that game... I remember near the end of production, that was where we were really behind. Ultima VII and Serpent Isle were obviously the models, but I think the Lazarus team may have even outdone those two games (in terms of NPCs and dialogue). At one point, character portraits had been axed except for the Avatar, the companions, and a few important NPCs. Thankfully, we were able to do the portraits a lot faster than anticipated, and we ended up getting unique portraits for every NPC in the game.

Honestly, I think if this game would have been marketed (Hyped) even with the dated engine and graphics it could have sold really well to the hard core audience, I really think it was that good.

I think that it ended up being a moderately high-profile fan project; we did get a brief writeup in PC Gamer magazine, and we exceeded 50,000 downloads fairly quickly. The engine was cutting-edge when we started. However, a computer that ran the basic game well was easily brought to its knees with our game loaded -- the engine just wasn't designed to handle the terrain and object density that we were pushing through it. For a game that felt very much like a Diablo clone, it's amazing how versatile its engine proved to be.

I guess that is what comes from people doing something out of a passion for their creation, instead of just trying to make something that will appeal to the broadest audience to sell as many copies as possible.

I've never met a game designer who wasn't passionate about making games. We're all hard-core gamers (or former hard-core gamers that would still be if we were single and in our early twenties), and we all have very strong opinions about what makes a good game. Most designers don't get to choose the game they get to work on, which can sometimes sap some of that passion if one lets it, or if it's a really bad fit (for example, if I had to design a sports or racing game). But we all love playing games and want to make the best game that we can. Nobody on the development team just wants to make something that will appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to sell the most units. Maybe it happens on some development teams, but I think it's more of a corporate-level attitude -- and it certainly wouldn't fly at our studio. If someone doesn't care about the quality of the game, they're out of here in short order.

There probably is a part of every designer that wants their game to appeal to a broader audience; not because it means more copies were sold and more money was made but simply because the game represents 2 or more years of blood, sweat, tears, and inspiration, and they are proud of their creations and want everybody to experience it.

 

[match000]

because the game represents 2 or more years of blood, sweat, tears, and inspiration, and they are proud of their creations and want everybody to experience it.

And I am about to try out Lazarus for the first time . But not until my project ends, which is in about 2 weeks. If I try it out now, I may never finish my work project.. o_O""