Ultima 5 anyone?

Hi there. After giving up on the unreliable Civ4 I decided to take a couple of steps back to a more reliable past. Civ 2.

Ultima 5 is a very old game, one of the first I played ever. I was little more than about 6 years old at the time, It was a favourite of mine.

So I made a scenario based on it.

I did one many years ago but using civ2 original graphics and sound rather than U5's. That one got lost in the mists of time.

This time thanks to some decent sound editors and my buddy photoshop. I have made a new U5 scenario using Ultima 5's original graphics and sound.

Getting the graphics required me to take many screen shots and a lot and copy and paste. But the end result looks great from my point of view, and quite nostalgic as well.

Credits for the original artwork from Ultima 5 probably go to many other people, Denis Loubet, and other origin people, so it says in my old ultima 5 manual, yes I still have it.

Although I took many hours making this scenario, I can't of course take credit for the original art or sound.

The map was made with bmp2map.exe which I downloaded from here I forget who made it but thanks you saved me a few hours there, and a computer generated ultima 5 map, which was touched up with the standard civ 2 map program. Although much smaller than the original ultima 5 map it is a reasonable approximation of it.

I will also post the readme here as well:

ULTIMA 5 Scenario.

To play add to your civlization2 scenarios directory.

This mod contains:

Custom sounds from the original ultima 5 game, original graphics taken from screen captures. I have tried my best to make it look and sound like orignal
ultima 5 as much as possible. I hope you enjoy it. Nostalgia factor was a must. The first time I played ultima 5 I was about 7 I think.

As yet there is not a point as such to the scenario, it's all for show. Choose a civ and go bonk some heads.

Changes:

Cities
People
Icons
Terrain
Improvements
Units
Sound
rules
=========================================================

Details

As I said there is no objective so far unless you make one for yourselves. However here are some details about the scenario.

Civs:

Free Britannia: Basically resistance to Blackthorns rule during British's absence.They rule Castle British and all non principle towns and most huts and keeps.

Inquisition: Blackthorns new fascism.

They rule from Blackthorns palace and control all principle towns and the keeps Windmere and Stonegate. They also control shadowlords and have some evil beasts amongst them.

Triad of evil remnants: The horrid things that lurk in the dungeons.

They control all the dungeons; Deciet, Hythloth ect. They have the most choice of units and some of the most powerful. An easy Civ to play. They also have some nameless
hell holes closer to home too. These represent the random spawning of monsters in the original.

Pirates: From Buccaneers Den. There just to be a pain. They control Buccaneers den and a couple of nameless outposts. Their units are weaker than the
equivalents from other civs, but much much cheaper.

Everyone is at war at present. Although I think evil would be allied with Blackthorn, and the pirates would side with the avatar and co.


=========================================================
Other Notes:

Shrines = Fortress.
Codex = Airbase
Moongates = Airlift.

There are no settlers, no techs worth researching, no terrain improving, no events.

All terrain production values are inflated.

Wonders:

Blackthorns state prison: Representing the vast torture chamber in Blackthorns palace. This wonder was Shakespeare's Theatre.
The three shards of modains gem: Separate wonders for Hatred, Cowardice and Falsehood. Contained within Deciet, Covetous, and Hythloth.

There is still much to do. But you folks can play around with this still.

Eventually there will be more purpose to this scenario, either I will or you will.
=========================================================


I will also add some screenies for your benefit.

Critique is welcome.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/132069/ULTIMA5.zip

2021 edit: It would seem the link above no longer works, but I host the file at my personal site anyway so I'll link to that: https://wrhnet.co.uk/stuff/ULTIMA5.zip

Holy cow! That looks awesome. Just looked through the graphics so far, but I'm looking forward to trying this out. I tried this a long time ago doing the exact same thing (using actual Ultima V graphics), but didn't get very far.

jhogun said:

Holy cow! That looks awesome. Just looked through the graphics so far, but I'm looking forward to trying this out. I tried this a long time ago doing the exact same thing (using actual Ultima V graphics), but didn't get very far.

Click to expand...

I had a think about how to get the graphics from the original. I looked to see if any third party programs had been developed to help people mod ultima5 or extract the graphics. I could not believe that in 20 years nobody had done anything.

Back to square one, I decided to use screen capures taken from the game, and then use photoshop to take them apart and place them in the CIV2 graphics files (units.gif, people.gif ect). I took about 200, each had a different graphic I needed for various things, this involved having to play the game a for a bit to get the graphics.

This worked quite well for the units and terrains although some further touching up with the in game editor were required because some colours went strange, must be because CIV2 is only 256 colour and Ultima 5 although only 16 colour the screen captures themselves were in 32 bit (millions of colours) colour and there was some loss.

I also has to do a bit of experimentation because the tile dither was spoiling it somewhat. There are still some speckly bits but not as bad as at first.

The coast was tricky, but I managed it. I could not be bothered with rivers though, so I left them out for now at least.

The sounds were far easier to get then the graphics.

I never got around to a plot though.

I have been thinking of a plot as well during the week, so it might end up more than just monster bashing eventually.

.

wrh2005 said:

I never got around to a plot though.

I have been thinking of a plot as well during the week, so it might end up more than just monster bashing eventually.

.

Click to expand...

My scenario was based right before Ultima IV and revolved around Lord British bringing all the independent city states under his rule. I had the Britannians (LB’s faction) based around Castle British, naturally, and three other Civs based around each of the castles

-the warlike Valorians at Serpent's Hold
-the religious Empaths at Empath Abbey
-the Magincians at the Lycaeum, ruled by haughty Mage-lords ("Magincians sounds vaguely magic-inclined, Magincia is close enough to The Lycaeum where it could be part of the same Civ, and the Magincians were known for their prideful and haughty nature, which fit my concept of the mage-lords)

I had three other three Civs for flavor

-Pirates around Buccaneer's Den (like you have)
-Orcs and other nasty monsters at the dungeons
-the Stygians, nastier monsters (Daemons, undead, etc), based at the shrines, each of which were objective cities that had to be cleansed of evil

I may steal your work on the graphics and sound and try to get mine going again.

jhogun said:

I may steal your work on the graphics and sound and try to get mine going again.

Click to expand...

You may, as long as credit for those graphics and sounds goes to Origin Systems (after all they created them), and credit for their adaption for Civ2 goes to me. (because spent about 18 hours getting them into Civ2)

As long as you do that then help yourselves. That goes for anyone else who might wish to use them.

Have fun.

wrh2005 said:

2021 edit: It would seem the link above no longer works, but I host the file at my personal site anyway so I'll link to that: https://wrhnet.co.uk/stuff/ULTIMA5.zip

Click to expand...

Cheers for fixing your link after all these years. Looking forward to checking this out!

.

Finally tested it.. this is awesome! I love the effort you've put into making it look and sound just like the original game! Very immersive!

Only problem is if you start the game as Free Britannia (which most players will probably do since they're the protagonist and all) it crashes Civ2 to desktop. I'm not sure why as the crashes don't happen when I start as the other factions. If I switch out your rules file to a default Civ2 one I'm able to start as Free Britannia so presumably the issue is in there somewhere.
EDIT: Crash was caused by there being no Future Tech, have posted a repaired Rules.txt file here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ultima-5-anyone.253145/#post-16203283

Oh and I noticed you didn't have a title.gif so I made one for you and attached it below to this post!

.

The crash will probably be caused by a tech loop, meaning that maybe a tech has itself as a preq.
If the game cannot chart a tech road to the future tech, then CIV2 crashes.

CurtSibling said:

The crash will probably be caused by a tech loop, meaning that maybe a tech has itself as a preq.
If the game cannot chart a tech road to the future tech, then CIV2 crashes.

Click to expand...

Yup you're right it's a tech issue as when I replace the tech area with vanilla techs the Britannia faction works. Couldn't find any techs requiring themselves however I think I've figured it out (despite custom techs really not being my area of expertise lol) as the crash happens on the next research selection window and it looks like he's given Britannia all the techs they're meant to have and has locked off every other tech from them including Future tech. Which means there's nothing they can select to research, so the moment the research chooser comes up in their first turn it crashes the game. So the same crash likely would have happened with the other factions once they'd finished their next research too. I've turned back on Future Tech and renamed it to "Research" which sounds a bit better for a fantasy mod. Tested all factions next tech selection and it worked, no crashes. I'll attached the repaired rules file to this post for people using @wrh2005 's download and I'll go update the mirror copies I made too (I'll keep his original file in them as Rules.bak).

I've not been here in a while, but at the end of 2023 I noticed there had been some issue so I've re-visited the scenario again to tidy it up a bit. You know I'd been modding this game all this time and never even thought that the tech tree could crash the game. Well I'll be.

I've been and redone a lot of this, the graphics in particular I've redone without anti-aliasing and using the correct pallete. The ocean tiles I've corrected this time, I'd not realized at the time the ocean uses the small coastal squares from terrain2. The tech tree is fixed. I'm still working on out little bits and pieces, I tweaked the rules.txt and events a little too. The one thing I've not had much luck with is finding how to change the colour of the event text as it's black and I'm using black as the background as it's truer to the original Ultima V experience. Ultimately going forward I might look to create something that can be played as a full game, with a proper tech tree and the usual trimmings, but that'll be something I do later when I have more time.

I'll post what I have done so far for your amusement, bear in mind it's not a finished product.

wrh2005 said:

I've not been here in a while, but at the end of 2023 I noticed there had been some issue so I've re-visited the scenario again to tidy it up a bit. You know I'd been modding this game all this time and never even thought that the tech tree could crash the game. Well I'll be.

I've been and redone a lot of this, the graphics in particular I've redone without anti-aliasing and using the correct pallete. The ocean tiles I've corrected this time, I'd not realized at the time the ocean uses the small coastal squares from terrain2. The tech tree is fixed. I'm still working on out little bits and pieces, I tweaked the rules.txt and events a little too. The one thing I've not had much luck with is finding how to change the colour of the event text as it's black and I'm using black as the background as it's truer to the original Ultima V experience. Ultimately going forward I might look to create something that can be played as a full game, with a proper tech tree and the usual trimmings, but that'll be something I do later when I have more time.

I'll post what I have done so far for your amusement, bear in mind it's not a finished product.

Click to expand...

Wow! You're back again! The new sharper graphics look great! Nice work. Great to see you're still working on this!

Ah yes if you want to tinker with font colours to make them work better on dark GUIs then you'll want to check out my experiments here. There are a number of side effects that you may deem not worth the effort. I had to take certain colours out of all the other graphic files and even the graphics in the dll files just to stop all glitches happening in my scenarios that use custom font colours.