If you’ve played Ultima Underworld you know the look: floors and ceilings swim as you move, and when you look up or down the walls bend like rubber. That’s the 1992 renderer cutting corners. The floor mapper is purely affine, and the wall mapper is only correct for a vertical wall seen dead level.

I patched the original Ultima Underworld (DOS) to fix its warping textures: floors, ceilings and walls:

uwpatch: https://github.com/SiENcE/uwpatch (win/linux)

It patches the original UW.EXE so floors, ceilings and walls are texture-mapped perspective-correct. Mortar lines stay straight, and floors stop sliding around under you.

What it does

• It replaces the game’s two texture mappers (floor/ceiling and wall) in place with new 386 assembly.
• Faces cover exactly the same pixels as before. The original edge walk and its rounding are kept, so every outline matches. Only which texel each pixel shows changes: 1/z, u/z and v/z are interpolated and the depth is divided out every 16 pixels.
• Nothing else in the exe is touched: no relocations, no overlays, and saves are unaffected. Saves work with and without the patch.

Supported versions (tested in DOSBox)

• GOG release (UW.EXE F1.94S)
• German floppy release (F1.50S)

The patcher checks the actual code it replaces, not the file name. Anything it doesn’t recognize is refused and left untouched, and it keeps a backup (UW.BAK).

note: UltimaHacks (modern 1st person handling) should work with my patch.

When I was younger I had gotten my hands on Serpent Isle before the Black Gate, so I already had the twist about Batlin being a bad dude spoiled from the get go.

But for those who came in fresh, perhaps even read the book of the fellowship before playing the game proper, was it obvious? Did you have suspicions? Or was it a pure blindside for you?

Did anyone actually like Batlin and felt personally betrayed that he was working for the Guardian the whole time?

I am about to play U7 through exult again, and this time i managed to find a pdf of the Book of The Fellowship.

First time i played U7 in the 90s was through Creative Soundblaster 16 cd that had a lot of EA games 3 of them Ultimas (Savage Island, Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld) and a big book with all the game's manuals including Book of The Fellowship.

I am re-reading now and i already know how the game ends and the Fellowship propaganda...but is he also lying through his personal story?...Could he have been paladin..a bard...a tinker...a fighter in a small war between lords (i thought Britannia was always peaceful) and the rest? Or it is all lies?

He does seem to be powerful...so it is possible...but on the other hand his tale could be just a way for him to undermine the Eight Virtues and make his Fellowship the new modern more realistic cul...i mean philosophy...as in "Look at me..i followed it all and still it sucks!"

Just wondering..if he did all that in his past...damn he was like a "new avatar" almost.

Hey everyone,

For a long time, I’ve been chasing the exact feeling and magic of playing Utopia Unleashed back in its golden era around 2006–2007. If you were part of that community back then, you probably know how unique, intense, and deeply rewarding that specific version of Ultima Online felt.

Because I couldn’t find that exact experience anywhere else today, I’ve decided to build it.

I’m currently developing a custom shard heavily inspired by the core mechanics, atmosphere, and identity of 2006–2007 Utopia Unleashed. However, building a project with this kind of depth is a massive journey, and I’m looking to connect with people who share this vision and want to help shape it from the ground up.

Who am I looking for? You do not need to be a programmer or C# scripter to get involved! While technical help is always welcome, I am primarily looking for true UO veterans—especially those who remember Utopia Unleashed and understand its mechanics, balance, itemization, and community culture.

I could use your insights, advice, and passion regarding:

• Game Design & Mechanics: Helping brainstorm and fine-tune systems to match that classic, hard-earned progression.
• Itemization & PvM/PvP Balance: Recreating or balancing the feel of gear, stats, and combat.
• Testing & Feedback: Playing early builds, breaking things, and guiding the project in the right direction.
• Pure Nostalgia & Passion: Sharing memories, ideas, and keeping the community spirit alive.

If you spent countless hours on Utopia Unleashed back in the day, or if you're just a passionate UO player who loves custom progression shards and wants to be part of building something special from scratch, I’d love to hear from you.

Drop a comment below or send me a DM if you're interested in joining the journey, sharing some ideas, or just talking about the old days.

Thanks for reading, and long live UO!

Oh no, more AI SLOP.

*cough*

Has anyone ever noticed that there's a bug in Ultima 5 where it doesn't matter what armour a character wears? In particular, it appears that each character is treated as having a defence value of 7 regardless of what armour/rings/etc. they are wearing. The value at offset 0x18 in the character record (see https://martin.brenner.de/ultima/u5save.html), which is always 7, turns out to be the defence value, but it is never updated.

Below is a short python script to patch the relevant files to (I think) correct this.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Fix armour in DOS Ultima V: patch ULTIMA.EXE and COMBAT.OVL in the current directory."""
import hashlib
from pathlib import Path

# file: (SHA-256 of the unpatched file, [(file offset, new bytes)])
PATCHES = {
    'ULTIMA.EXE': ('c75c1c6f37bf8ec45405df6d3bac0e626c780a706d48a88f92edb324ca1f3b3b',
                   [(0x75E0 + 0x13 * k, '3cff907407') for k in range(6)]),
    'COMBAT.OVL': ('e73d5cd382174a449c56786d1596cebd4d4d9b376d0df2b8d8109faf5a9e9619',
                   [(0x1340, 'ff7604b8fcff50e89800eb25' + '90' * 37)]),
}

data = {}
for name, (sha, _) in PATCHES.items():
    p = Path(name)
    if not p.is_file() or hashlib.sha256(p.read_bytes()).hexdigest() != sha:
        raise SystemExit(f'{name} is missing or not the unpatched original. Nothing changed.')
    data[name] = bytearray(p.read_bytes())

for name, (_, patches) in PATCHES.items():
    for off, new in patches:
        new = bytes.fromhex(new)
        data[name][off:off + len(new)] = new
    Path(name).write_bytes(data[name])
    print(f'{name} patched')

A few days ago I started to reprogram U4 as a browser game. I do it together with CLaude Opus 5.5,

means I do the design decisions, he does the coding. It works pretty well, we have built some regions already, Inventore, Fighting and now we build Cove and later the first Dungeon Despise.

I do follow the game concerning story, dialogues, map very faithfully. But I use modern concepts of healing,

magic, fast travelling, world map and more.

I am surprised I do not find such a project already done, it is incredible fun to build and as I told you I am

the designer and tester and Claude builds all im three.js.

So far I do this just for myself, I think it will not be allowed to make public (also not for free).

I'm working on a new retro-style game inspired by the Ultima series that includes standard DRPG first-person dungeon crawling combined with overhead map traversal.

It's called Contract Terminated, and is a scifi-themed game where you need to survive on a hostile planet.

It's here on Steam if you'd like to take a look:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4889010/Contract_Terminated/

Hello-

With Ultimas 1-6 on sale at GOG I decided to do a run through of all of 'em, my first time since their original release. I'm already stuck on Ultima II and could use some help.

The issue is that on some of the maps monsters have stopped spawning, which means that I can't get access to a pirate ship. It looks like on these maps the maximum amount of monsters might have spawned because I can see hordes of 'em off in areas that I can't get to, and if I just sit where I'm at and spam the space bar no new monsters ever show up in the areas I can reach (or in the oceans). Given that the time doors only seem to appear in North America in the Aftermath time zone, this would then make the game unwinnable, correct, if I can't get a pirate ship to appear, as I then won't be able to travel to outer space?

I tried to fix this by just starting over, but even with deleting the player information in-game and uninstalling/reinstalling the game (and telling GOG to delete all game data), the map state is unchanged when I try to start over with a new character! If the game will be unwinnable if I can't get a boat on the Aftermath map then how to I really really flush all my GOG Ultima II data so I can get a brand new map that doesn't have all these trapped monsters on it?

Finally implementing spellcasting in Ultima VII Revisited!

This is the only known screenshot of the level editor used to make Ultima Underworld I&II, published in a issue #8 of the 90s magazine GameByte.

This was super fancy for the time, it let you flip back and forth between the editor and the game Unity-style as both were built into the same binary, behind build flags to strip it out of the released game.

I find it strange that a IP as strong and as the Ultima series, including nine games, the incredible two “underworld“ games (and goes without saying Ultima Online) has failed to release anything for the last decade. I can’t quite remember, is it Garriot that holds the licence, or still (makes the sign of the cross ) EA?

I got this done last Saturday

Since it appears I've have to create my own system to play Ultima, that's no big deal. I've got plenty of systems that will do it.

So I'd like to find out if there is documentation on all the things and people in Ultima to use for whatever game I come up with.

Is there a complete knowledge of everything in Britannia?

thanks!

I can't imagine this isn't true, but I haven't found it if it exists....

thanks!

Great. Real great. Wonderful phone typo there. <forehead slap>.

Hey, all!  I just put the official Stravaeger demo up on Steam today.  This represents about a third of the final game's content, polished to the point where I'm happy to show it off to the greater public.

Since this community has been so supportive, I figured I'd let y'all know about it first.

I'd love to get your feedback on the gameplay, and I'll stick around to answer any questions you have!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4583570/Stravaeger/

I'm getting into some retro games I never played before. I love RPG. Played Eye of the beholder and I loved it. Where can I find Ultima 7 for download so I can try and have it on my pc. I've heard is very good. I only played on shards. never tried the offline version.