Exult 3D
Produced by: Sam Matthews
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A project that surged onto the Exult forums several years ago, and which subsequently stopped development in a half-complete state. Currently, Exult 1.4 is required to run it, but neither The Black Gate or Serpent Isle will be playable to completion.
That said, the numerous screenshots that the developer made available were amazing, to say the least, and offered a “never-before-seen” perspective on the world(s) of Ultima 7.
As this program uses the original data for Ultima 7 (being, essentially, Exult with a different graphics engine) you will need the original game files to run it. And yes, like Exult, it supports both The Black Gate and Serpent Isle.
So I attempted to run this, and it worked, but no differently than standard Exult seems to. Basically, there’s no 3D to be found anywhere. Is there something that needs to be done (ie, a flag set in a configuration file or something somewhere?) I can find no reference for a how-to anywhere online and the readme files included with it seem to be exclusively geared towards a regular Exult install.
Well, I managed to get it to run… Kind of. Start by beginning normally and make a saved game in either game of your choosing. Then change the scaling method to OpenGL in the settings menu. The game will crash (or at least it did for me consistently), ignore this. Then run the game from the command line with the switches –nomenu –bg (for Black Gate) and –nomenu –si. This at least gets the 3D engine going, however I cannot switch from the top down viewpoint; I’m not able to pan/rotate/whatever the proper words are and to get it to look through a different viewpoint as in the screenshots. I’m not attempting to run this to actually play the game in 3D. It would, however, be nice to be able to look around and visualize the worlds of Ultima 7 + 7.5 in that way.
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how it all works; Sam no longer supports this project, and it was in a very rough (pre-alpha) state when he stopped work on it.
The forum thread linked at the top of the article is probably your best resource, and outside of that there’s really just experimentation left as an option.