Team Archon Working on Ultima VI Project Britannia
WyrdWeb Dragon, Shadow Director and Co-Producer of Project Britannia, has a Dev Diary up on the mod project for Ultima VI: The False Prophet. After detailing current personal projects, WyrdWeb introduces other members of Team Archon’s small but dedicated staff. Team Archon is using Siege Tools in most of its work. There are a couple screen shots including GUI and in game environments that show off their progress and skills with the program. I was very impressed with the look of the one abov
Ultima VI, Remade In Dungeon Siege Perhaps the best known fan-made Ultima project is Exult. The Exult team took apart Ultima VII's game files, wrote an entirely new engine to read the data, and made it compatible with a range of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac. They even managed to revamp the graphics, and it's by far the best way to relive one's memories of the game. (Or, if you've never played Ultima VII, experience the best title in the Ultima series). If you're looking f
5.25" or 3.5" floppy disks CD-ROM (DOS/Towns) cartridge (SNES)
Input methods
Keyboard and Mouse
Ultima VI: The False Prophet, released by Origin Systems in 1990, is the sixth part in the computer role-playing game series of Ultima. It was the last in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy.
Some years after Lord British has returned to power, the Avatar is captured and tied on a sacrificial altar, about to be sacrificed by red demon-like creatures, the gargoyles. The Warriors of Destiny suddenly appear, save the Avatar and collect the sacred text the gargoyle priest was holding. In Castle Britannia, the Avatar learns that the shrines of Virtue were captured by the gargoyles and he embarks on a quest to rescue Britannia from the invaders.
This game ended the use of multiple scales; in earlier games a town, castle, or dungeon would be represented as a single symbol on the world map, which then expanded into a full sub-map when entering the structure. In Ultima VI, the whole game uses a single scale, with towns and other places seamlessly integrated into the main map; dungeons are now also viewed from the same perspective as the rest of the game, rather than the first-person perspective used by Ultima I-V. The game kept the basic tile system and screen layout of the three preceding parts, but altered the look into a much more colourful pseudo-isometric view, to take full advantage of the newly-released VGA graphics cards for PCs.
Non-player characters had their portraits shown when talked to, something that would not have been feasible on the classic 8-bit Apple II. It was originally planned that Ultima VI was to continue on with the Apple II series, and through the much more capable 16-bit Apple IIGS, where its advanced graphics, music and mouse interface would been more than suitable to handle the task. In the end a decision to cancel was made due to the declining market size of the Apple II platform, and marked the first time a chapter in the Ultima series was not available for the Apple II (the platform it originated on). It was one of the first major PC games directly targeted to PC systems equipped with VGA graphics and a mouse, when the big "gaming computer" was still the Commodore Amiga. The game supported sound cards for music as well, which were not yet common when it was released. Other sound effects, such as the clashing of swords, magical zaps, or explosions, were still played through the PC speaker. Amiga version itself was ported from PC and due to a lack of reprogramming it was very slow.
The Ultima VI engine was also used for the Worlds of Ultima spin-off series.
A port of the game for FM Towns platform was made primarily for Japanese market. This CD-ROM-based version included full speech in both English and Japanese. What is interesting about this version is that the voice acting was recorded at Origin, mostly by the people the characters were based on (with Richard Garriott as Lord British, Greg Dykes as Dupre, etc.), though not all personnel could be reached at the time of recording, so some substitutes were used.
Cheats
An ingame cheat for Ultima VI can be accessed by having your avatar talk to Iolo with the following phrases. "Spam <enter>, Spam <enter>, Spam <enter>, Humbug <enter>" Ignore any remarks from him. After the three phrases have been mentioned, a menu will pop up when you can access all the different items in the game.
You can see the end-game sequence by executing the end-of-game executable with four command line parameters:
c:\> end.exe v 1 2 3<enter>
The first parameter is used to select the graphics mode. Either VGA, EGA, CGA or Hercules. (v,e,c,h) The other three tell the application how long you took to finish the game in years, months and days respectively. So this would print 1 year, 2 months and 3 days.
If you had a character with enough strength, you could carry the rowboat in your backpack (items were only restricted by weight, not size), allowing you to travel across water at will.
You could keep Sherry the mouse in your party and give her experience to level up by killing repetitive enemies like dogs and the giant ants. She is only strong enough to hold a lightning wand, but when she is stronger she can use regular weapons and armor like any other character.
It was also possible to "move" a cannon into a bag and then carry the bag with you if you had enough strength. Then you could simply drop it and look in the bag during combat to blast your enemies.
In the IBM-PC/DOS version (at least in version 3.2) you could exploit a software bug and carry items over the maximum carrying weight of a character by first picking up an item with another character and then moving the item to another character's container (bag, backpack, etc.) in inventory. This issue was later fixed and is not possible in the 4.5 version.
Compatibility with modern systems
The DOS-version of Ultima VI runs reliably in a DOSBox environment.
An engine remake project called Nuvie, similar to the goals of xu4, Exult and Pentagram, is in works. Not much of the game functionality is yet implemented.
At one time, the for-pay online gaming service Gametap had added Ultima VI to its library of games; it ran more or less correctly on the platform. Due to licensing issues, however, it was removed on December 11th, 2007.
Fan remakes
There is a current project to recreate Ultima VI using Dungeon Siege engine. Another remake project uses the Exult engine, using graphics from Ultima VII. Ultima 6 Online is an MMO version of Ultima VI.
References
^ GameTap Losing Over 70 Games on Dec. 11 news from 1UP.com
External links
Ultima VI: The False Prophet at MobyGames
The U6 Project, a fan remake based on the Dungeon Siege engine
Nuvie, open source project aiming to recreate the Ultima VI engine
Chuck Bueche · Dr. Cat · Richard Garriott · Herman Miller · Warren Spector · David R. Watson
Characters
Avatar · Companions of Avatar · Lord British · Batlin · The Fellowship · Lord Blackthorn · Guardian · Minax · Mondain · Time Lord · Ventryn · General list · List of characters based on developers
