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Announcement - Finished

Sep 16, 2020

All code and content is finished.

Finished.

With a last herculaen effort, I have managed to finish everything. I even found time to add in two features that I had planned to cut, namely expanded conversations and random encounters (though they have been included in a reduced scope only).

All the coding is done, all the content is done, all testing setups are off, and everyting is in its final form.

So, it is a real Beta now. That means that next comes testing. Then debugging. Testing, debugging, testing, debugging etc. How long will that take? Hahahah. I do not plan to make any incremental releases. No Beta versions. So I will need to spend time testing everything, to make sure I have a real final, polished, working game.

After that, release! And what form will that take. Hmm…I’m mulling a mail order release. Keep it old school. 1980s tech. Floppy disks. Hahaha.

Whatever the form it takes, whether a download, mail-order, or family only release, it will be released within this year, as a celebration of the 35th anniversary of the original Ultima IV.

Ultima IV Thirty Fifth Anniversary
35 years! Yay! Ceeeeleeebrate

There will be two more announcements to come shortly, so stay tuned!

edit

I just realised that I published this announcement and the tribute to the 35th anniversary of Ultima IV, on the exact day of its release 35 years ago! I had no idea that this was the exact day of release. Weird.

6 Comments

Fenyx4

YAY FINISHED!!! Can’t believe I am so late on seeing this blog post. This is amazing news.

Floppy would be really, really cool. Although I’d worry that would dramatically shrink the number of people who could play it. :) I just spend a month trying to get a computer from the 80’s up and running again and getting data from an internet capable machine onto floppies which could be read by the machine from the 80s was the hardest part.

But however you decided to distribute it I am in!

(And yay 35th anniversary!)

Cambragol

Better late than never! I am still a little bemused that I managed to finish it. There was a lot to it, and the final ‘content’ push was hard, with a lot of tedious, methodical passes to weed out bugs, etc. working almost entirely in hex editors.

Floppies would be cool, but with the new features and content, I don’t think it cold fit on a floppy anymore. I gutted all the disk related code, making it pretty near impossible to fit everything onto any kind of floppy. There was a HD format for 3.5 inch floppies, but it seems really rare, and not realistic as a release option.

But never say never!

I also once thought to make a ‘Big Box Edtion, the art for which I have already started on, however, without an authentic Denis Loubet cover, it just wouldn’t look right.

And yes, yay to the 35th anniversary! (did you see I posted on the exact day of release, 35 years later? Freakish coincidence.)

Fenyx4

Yeah if it is bigger than 1.44MB then floppy definitely wouldn’t work. You could do what some people are doing and put it on a USB stick for their physical release. But it wouldn’t really be the same…

You could commission Denis Loubet. :) http://www.denisloubet.com/drawmycharacter.htm It gets pricey for a full painting though. Maybe you should start a gofundme to get the art done. :)

Yeah! Same day is a really crazy coincidence. I had a similar crazy coincidence but it was a near miss. I had done a speed run of U4 for the first time which I start on 9-15 and finished on 9-16 27 minutes past midnight. Sadly I didn’t capture the end so I wasn’t able to submit it to speedrun.org.

Cambragol

I had thought to do some kind of kickstarter/gofundme for some feelies(box, maps, books maybe) but bringing in money would take away from the purity of the project I think. I am just doing what I can, for free, with no expectation of any return of any kind. Involving money brings in a lot of baggage with it, and I have seen many a project tainted by that.

I was looking at the alternate Ultima VII box art Denis released as a potential base for Trinity’s ‘box’, as the image is close to the ‘additions’ of the mod (walking on lava in the dark). But I don’t think I would want to do that without his blessing, and it might not fit the mood of an Ultima IV expansion that well (its kindof grim looking)

Cambragol

I’m thinking on it. Got lots of work on ‘feelies’ done. A full color painting for a box would not come cheap though. I would also need lots of small inked drawing for a book/journal/reference cards. It is not impossible, but I am thinking on it.

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