Ultima 7 Construction Set is coming soon near you...

[foody]

Hello,

I have hired a software developer who knows Ultima 7 inside out and agreed with me as well to work together and make our own Windows GUI ULTIMA 7 Construction Set. The editor will have limitless power and you can make any game from any time and genra using Ultima 7 Engine. There will be no legal issue as the code is 100% is done from scratch, not copied or legal problems the graphics are going to be different and it is an engine connected to the editor tool that allows you to make endless games of Ultima 7 style and it is going to have extra features not done via Ultima 7 itself.

Ones this is completed the program will be bought and downloaded from the website. The editor is for professional people because making Ultima 7 style games is not easy, you have to draw the map, then draw the walls to shape a house, then furniture it, then put doors (if a second floor commences, you repeat), then put NPC and set path, schedule, task for the NPC, etc, then at the end you complete the house by putting a roof on top of it. Can you imagine drawing a dungeon?

Say you have a map 512 X 512, then you take let us say 128 X 128 of that map to draw the dungeon walls, put what you need on the dungeon, completely draw the dungeon, then close the surrounding dungeon instead of walls like the house, mountains as walls, then you cover up the dungeon with mountains as roof. It is going to take at least three to four month just drawing the map using Ultima 7 style.

But it is worth it having an editor like this, finally a real editor. Can you imagine going to your editor and under book editor, you type in what ever content on the book, set the skin of how the book pages look like, etc then putting on the map for a person to double click the book to read it? Real fun :D :D

Each item will have weight and volume.

[Tdarcos]

How does this compare to maps done to run under, say Duke Nukem 3D or Half-Life 2 / Garry's Mod / Counter Strike.

I have two versions of the World Trade Center: one focuses on the ground level and one floor up in the building, but is essentially a stunning and looks like facially complete implementation of the ground floor, it looks so real it's almost heartbreaking.

The second one focuses on teleportation spots to go to the roofs of the two buildings.

I find both of these interersting. Hope it implements this kind of capability as found in both of these maps.

[jjsonick]

Well U7 is an isometric, 2-D deal, so it won't have a lot in common with the feel of a 3D first-person shooter map.

Speaking of that, foody, I discovered IsoWorld is still around, and has been updated to run on modern computers (though it looks like it hasn't been updated for OS X Leopard). It's very similar to an I7 construction set:
http://www.spritec.com/legacy/isoworld.html

I tried it out a long time ago, and it was pretty cool, but had two major problems:

1) Some graphic glitchiness in Windows. I tried it out this time in OS X Tiger and it didn't show this, so maybe they've fixed it.

2) Inexplicably, if you want to make any custom graphics, animation for it -- you have to do that in Macromedia DIRECTOR, and export a Director file of the image or animation, which you then import in Isoworld. This totally sucks and is ridiculous when you're basically dealing with a strip of 2D graphics for any image, which could easily be a damn jpg, gif, etc. This soured me on the program pretty thoroughly.

However, worth a look.

Amusingly, this is a full game developed with it (obviously these folks spent some time in Director):
http://www.spritec.com/bmanscreenshots.htm

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Speaking of which, here's a page from Dan Schmidt, who worked on Ultima Underworld, on some Ultima Underworld bugs:

http://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/21/ultima-underworld-bugs/