One of the things I’ve kept in mind throughout the entire, already lengthy development cycle of Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands, is that I know that while my ambitions are great and lofty, there are plenty of people who will want to add more to it. To that end, I’ve always taken some careful steps to make sure that it is accessible to ‘mod’ makers that they can edit it as easily as possible.

I’ve always been careful to format my code legibly, avoid confusing code hacks, and generally be as understandable and straightforward in my programming as possible. It’s not always easy, or possibly, but when you can, it not only makes modifications easier, but it also makes tracing bugs and finding logic errors much more trouble-free.

I found tonight while I was poking around on the internet, a wonderful little PERL application called ‘Natural Docs’. This application takes comments from the code, provided they’re formatted in a certain way, and constructs a simple to use, searchable documentation for your code. While it could never replace the likes of some massive wikis some projects have, or the real-time help of chatting or a forum, I’ve decided to use this script to make some documentation for the source. I’ll have to go through the source to document it in a way the script can use, so for now the documentation is limited to what I could format in my limited time, but it will be expanded soon. You can access it thusfar from the “source docs” tab in the tabs in the page header, if you’re curious.

Stay tuned!

Just as a teaser for the mapping work I’ve been keeping at, I’ve uploaded a few screenshots to the page. Check them out!

Not quite with screenshots — yet — but the screenshots page has been upgraded with a plugin to be quite a bit more functional (and easy for me to update), so expect some more stuff there soon.
Cheers!

Just a short note to indicate that you no longer -have- to sign up to comment on the site (though some comments may still be placed in the moderation queue by Wordpress.) Cheers.

One of the things that I always enjoyed about Ultima VII was the “world simulator” aspect of it, how well (for the time) it immersed people in the world of Britannia: NPCs following schedules, going about daily chores, etc. In our discussion, Marzo and I both agreed that a very neat way to really add some depth to that game world would be to add a little rudimentary economy to it.

Read more for an insight or three into the economy system TFL will be adding to Ultima VII.