Ultima VI Project - v1.1 Public Beta Release
 

Archon sends news a public beta of the v1.1 update for the Ultima 6 Project is now available:
More information.

I soooooooo wish I could get this to work on my Win7 64-bit machine…

Ehm, I must have been imagining something. I thought this was released looong ago? I know that they started with V - but I thought VI followed soon after?

"Archon sends news a public beta of the v1.1 update for the Ultima 6 Project is now available"…

Ehm, point being?

MY point is that I thought it was available a long time ago. Well, the 1.0 version - that is.

I still don't get why they are using the DS1 engine when they have so much talent, quality of this would be so much better with another engine, and people wouldn't need to buy some old obscure game to be able to play it.

It said above that this was started in 2001 and Dungeon Siege was released in 2002 so at the time this project started Dungeon Siege wasn't even released yet.

PS. Like what Thaurin suggested that the project was released awhile ago but they kept developing it so that they could release a patch.

DS or U6P? I'm running 7x64 and had DS running (haven't reloaded U6P since I moved to x64 though).

They didn't start with V, V was a different project. VI 1.0 was released about 3 years ago, but there were a lot of things that needed fixing.

Because fan projects of this scale take forever. I agree that its too bad that all the Project Britannia mods didn't use some open source 3-D engine instead, but I'm not sure what was available when work began in 2001 that they could have used. Unfortunately, their work doesn't seem portable to anything that is available now.

I think, like NWN, they released the toolset prior to the game being released.

I meant that V was their first Ultima in the DS engine, right?

As for VI 1.0 - that makes sense then. Well, except that it's taken 3 years to increment the version to .1 ;)

I thought my memory was playing tricks on me :)

Yeah. IIRC, a bunch of people started working on Ultima for DS, but there was disagreement about which game to remake. I guess more people wanted to do V than VI, so a few broke off and started VI. I think when V was done some of the people from it worked on VI.

We used to have a poster here that worked on VI (maybe both), maybe she can illuminate us.

I think there are only a handful of people still working on it so its not surprising.

Even if it's just one - I'd say 3 years from 1.0 - 1.1 is quite rare.

That said, there's obviously a reason for that and it's hardly important.

Well from what I read during the development of it, they fixed a LOT of bugs, plus replaced/enhanced the mapping and a few other things. It sounded like a lot of work.

I've never been able to get DS1 (with its expansion) to run on my Win7 64 Bit machine properly. The game will run, but the graphics are all messed up and corrupted looking and I get like 1 or 2 frames per second.

With U6P installed I get the exact same result as running the vanilla DS1 game.

Are you using an nvidia card? I remember there was some weird setting you had to do in the config file to get it to run in Win7 on an nvidia card.

Well, let me see if I can answer some of your questions.

When the team started working on U6P, DS was the best choice for a number of reasons, including that it supported multiple party members, which apparently a lot of other engines did not.

As far as the length of time that it it took between 1.0.1 and 1.1, it's actually been a bit under 2-1/2 years, and yes that is a long time. That was due to a number of factors, including that we have lost team members since then, and time available to work on the project became very limited for some critical team members (no one else can do what they do).

We also decided to take the time to go back and improve a number of items. That included, among others, the dungeon maps and some performance and stability issues that took quite a bit of time and effort to track down.

As far as running on Windows 7, we've got team members running on both 32 and 64 bit versions. I personally have been running on Windows 7 64-bit for about 6 months. There are a number of posts on our forum on how to do so, & I'll include some links here:

http://www.projectbritannia.com/foru…p?topic=1534.0
http://www.projectbritannia.com/foru…p?topic=1922.0
http://www.projectbritannia.com/foru…p?topic=1625.0
http://www.projectbritannia.com/foru…hp?topic=264.0

I personally had a bear of a time getting DS to run in Windows 7, but was eventually able to do so. Most of our team members have had no problems. My memory is that I finally had to either upgrade the graphics card driver or roll back to an older one. Sorry, but I'm not remembering which at the moment, though I think it was the latter (I have an NVIDIA card).

You need to run in administrative mode, and I know a few folks have had to turn off UAC, but that's not been the general rule. And some folks have found it works better if you install DS (and U6P) outside of either of the Program Files folders (say in a C:\Games folder), but others haven't had to do that.

Bottom line is that most people seem to be able to get it up & running without much problem, once they're pointed in the right direction. And, we do give help on our forums to those having problems with it.

We do hope you try the game, and that you have as much fun with it as we have. :)

Yes I am using an NVIDIA card. But with that piece of info, maybe I can google myself a solution. Thank you!

Hey don't forget that this has been a totally volunteer effort and yes, several people (including myself) were involved with both projects. This game is AWESOME!!

There are some specific settings you have to set in the DSVidioConfig tool. They're in one of the posts in the links above.

Thanks, Corwin! Of course, it helps to have good material to work with.

Are there any gameplay videos?

Not at this point. We have talked about it, but I don't know whether or not we'll do one.