Teudogar And The Alliance With Rome Full Version 14
Zoe Northcutt
Someone who was recently trying to locate the Enhanced Graphics Mod by XiDragon for Ultima V: Lazarus was able to locate it thanks to help from the Ultima Dragons Facebook Chapter. This is not the first time such help was offered by the Ultima community; indeed some of you might remember that Dino's Ultima Page started with a similar story.
As a result, I've added a(n Ultima V: Lazarus) Mods subsection to the Ultima 5 Projects page, with info on this mod and others for Ultima V: Lazarus. I'm also hosting a copy of the Enhanced Graphics Mod since it has all but disappeared from the web.
Three of the longer sections in the U9 Info page have been moved into their own dedicated pages. These are the new Ultima 9 Geography, Ultima 9 Fun, and Ultima 9 Development pages. At this point, there are enough Ultima 9 info pages to warrant them getting their own navigation, which is likely to happen sometime soon.
Earlier this year, Reddit user u/rwgosse posted a number of lovely Ultima maps (see news from 30th May and 18th June). There is now a new map called "Lands of Britannia - Version 2 - Full DM map (non-canon)". It seems to have based on Ultimas 4-7.
Meanwhile, after an eight-month slog, The CRPG Addict has finally beaten Serpent Isle. As can be expected from anyone who has been following his progress, his summary and rating of the game hasn't been too kind.
I've been quite busy over the past few weeks writing my new Menzoberranzan walkthrough, which was published yesterday. However, there have been some updates here in the meantime that I'd like to share:
This Expanded Edition brings 156 pages extra pages [sic], 65 new game reviews, several new articles, a lot of revised content and a glorious cover art gallery! And it goes beyond the usual CRPG canon, exploring more French, Korean & Chinese-only, RPG Maker, Flash and online RPGs!
Fresh from the Ultima Dragons Facebook group is the news that Anthony Salter's "Ultima VII: Revisited" now has a website. You can read about the project there, download the compiled project, or check out its source code at its GitHub repo. I've also added a WebDB2 entry for this project.
Today is the 21st anniversary of Dino's Ultima Page! I just want to say that I'm happy this little site has been around for so long. It makes me sad that many other great Ultima sites are not around any more.
The CRPG Addict is still playing Serpent Isle. In his latest Serpent Isle post, he's been playing for almost 90 hours, and is praying for the game to end. I've added this post to the list at the end of the Serpent Isle Info page.
The Ultima Codex brings news of an Ultima 9 model importer for Blender. As I understand it, it allows 3D models to be exported from Ultima 9 and imported into Blender, making it easy to reuse them in other game engines for Ultima remakes or other projects.
The Myrmidex are not the only bugs in The Savage Empire. In fact, while playing the game, Vulcan Dragon has come across a previously unknown bug while having a conversation with a Disquiqui tribeswoman. Look for the new subsection called "Pulque Logical Error" in the Savage Empire Fun page to learn more about this new discovery.
I've added a new subsection about the Underworld Exporter project to the Ultima Underworld 1 Info page, and also added a new Projects section to the Ultima Underworld 2 Info page referring back to the UW1 page.
There's some news over at The Ultima Codex about a very carefully crafted Easter egg in Serpent Isle. It seems that, under very specific conditions, eating mushrooms makes you fly. Apparently, this is not a new discovery: in the UDIC Facebook Group, someone noted that this was actually discovered 20 years ago and shared in the Exult forum at the time.
And speaking of new things, a new project called u6ish has just been released a couple of days ago in a post on Reddit. It consists of a small-scope remake of part of Ultima 6, consisting of "Lord British's castle from U6, using mostly-original U6 sprites and music, in Godot 4 and C#". Check out the SourceForge project page for screenshots and downloads; its GitLab repo for source code, wiki for documentation, and also a page full of screenshots.
The CRPG Addict keeps making progress through Serpent Isle, as he reports in a fresh post called "Serpent Isle: Shedding Our Skins". I've updated the Serpent Isle info page to list all posts in this series, including the latest.
As The Ultima Codex recently reported, Reddit user u/rwgosse has been posting a series of beautiful maps based on the Ultima universe, the latest being Serpent Isle. The following is a list of the ones available so far:
Although opinions differ about how good a game Ultima 8 is, I think it's safe to say that it's not one of the most loved games in the Ultima series. With so few people that really enjoyed it, and even less that have gone to great lengths to gather information and make interesting discoveries about it, it's somewhat surprising that the game still gets attention to this day.
And yet, here we are. gibberishh, who earlier this year contributed the fantastic Ultima 8 Annotated Maps, has just finished a brand new Ultima 8 walkthrough [PDF], which is now hosted here at Dino's Ultima Page. Aside from its considerable level of detail, this walkthrough also brings to light a couple of interesting discoveries, including the fact that (contrary to popular belief) you can cast Withstand Death multiple times, and the solution to the Skull of Quakes lever puzzle.
Dino's Ultima Page hosts three fanfictions. The two which I wrote, The Return as well as the unfinished Tale of the Mystics, have just been migrated to use the seventh design of Dino's Ultima Page. They were the last parts of the site still on the fifth design, which is the old grey theme.
This migration not only makes them look a lot better as well as consistent with the rest of the site, but provides other benefits that I've gradually been rolling out across the site since I started working on the seventh design three years ago. These include mobile-friendly navigation, metadata that helps search engine visibility as well as social media sharing, and better image galleries. As part of this migration, I had to sacrifice both fanfictions' original title graphics, as well as The Return's navigation (which was never necessary, given that it's a single page).
As for the third fanfiction - The Lost Vale, which was written by Amazing Dragon, and whose recovery was the basis for the original launch of Dino's Ultima Page - I've upgraded its main page from XHTML 1.0 Strict to HTML 5, and fixed HTML validation errors in the process. I still have to do the same for the other pages in this fanfiction, which use a combination of HTML 4.01 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict, so you can tell how ancient they are.Easter Update9th April 2023 by Dino Happy Easter!
The CRPG Addict is still progressing through Serpent Isle, albeit a little more slowly lately. I've added his latest Serpent Isle post, "Serpent Isle: Scorch'd, not Killed", to the Serpent Isle info page together with all the previous ones.
I've been working on making Dino's Ultima Page more friendly to social media by adding preview images for when pages are shared on social media. I've replaced the social media image that was used for the home and news pages, and this is now used in all pages using the new layout (i.e. everywhere except the U1 and U8 Guides, and the fanfictions) that don't have their own social media image. The individual info pages and guides now have their own social media images too, meaning only the fanfictions are left without.
The Pictures section has been removed from the U9 info page, since its contents were already available in the U9 Gallery. This gallery also benefits from larger thumbnails, as I've enlarged the remaining ones that were still tiny.
Other small updates have been made to the Credits page, several WebDB2 entries, and the 20th anniversary banner which is now also displayed in guides (except for U1 and U8, which have their own layout).
Last week, Michael Brian Norris of the MS-DOS Project released a new video review of Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, the latest in his Ultima Retrospective series. I've added a link to this in the Savage Empire Opinions page, and also to the Savage Empire Fun page, given that the Gold Falls bug seemed to have been triggered at one point.
I wrote the Ultima 1 Map Viewer in my Ultima 1 Guide back in 2015. It's a fun way to roam Sosasia as it is in Ultima 1, but I admittedly did a poor job with it at the time. So now I've rewritten it to reflect some of the work I did later on Ultima 1 Revenge. You can now enjoy a much better map viewer with the following updates:
I also made some updates to other parts of Dino's Ultima Page, including:
- I added a link to Ultima IV Remastered to the Ultima 4 Info page.
- I added a link to a gallery with surviving screenshots of Ultima IV: The Dawn of Virtue to the Ultima IV: The Dawn of Virtue WebDB2 entry.
- I added a link to The CRPG Addict's Ultima 2 playthrough to the Ultima 2 Info page.
- The Serpent Isle Info page is up to date with the latest posts from The CRPG Addict's ongoing playthrough of the game.
- A couple of other security and housekeeping updates.
I've also made several updates to the Walkthroughs section of the Serpent Isle Info page, organising the walkthroughs by whether they cover Serpent Isle, The Silver Seed, or both; and also added links to several others.
The recently added Ultima 8 Walkthrough page is home to more than just my own incomplete walkthrough. It has several links to other people's walkthroughs and playthroughs of Ultima 8. I've added links to Sergorn Dragon's Ultima 8 playthrough to the Playthroughs section. I also added several links to the Other Walkthroughs section, and reorganised several existing ones.
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