Fellow readers,

for various reasons I feel like it is time for a glance at all my projects.

Ultima 6 Project German Language Patch for English Dungeon Siege:
For the moment this project is on hold, due to help I need: the server to compile the patch is set up, but the repository is missing and I cannot add it myself. Whatsmore, I need help in finding out what other files need to be translated. Although I have translated everything I know about, it makes no sense to poke around in the dark until the dear soul who agreed to help me, where I need help has some time to spare again.

Ultima 6 Project German Language Patch for German Dungeon Siege:
The Patch is complete, stable, and bug-free to the best of my knowledge. This said I feel like there will be an update version of this patch, once the aforementioned International Patch is complete. Just because the international version patch will make me look at all my scribblings again 😉

Ultima VI (original) German Language Patch:
The patch is playable and stable. Official versioning is “Beta 1”. The magic system is still in English, but I think I’ll translate it into German anyway, since I think I found agreeable abbreviations and plan to do a German reference card anyway, in which the abbreviations used can be explained. Other than that, all nitpickers issues are addressed as well, and only Quentons murder case is giving me headaches. I’ll be on about the Quenton issues below. What I say about the Nitpickers patch in this regard, is also true for the German Language Patch

Ultima VI Nitpickers Patch:
With 19 of the most common nitpicks addressed, I’m pretty satisfied with this patch. It works (at least for me it does!?) fine so far. I’ll be adding a modified start screen, so you know when you have the nitpickers version installed. What is a real pity is the Quenton murder case. I had posted over at Nuvie forums as a first of a kind address in regard to Ultima VI, and just had to learn, that there might be no way to “get rid” of Michael after all. Apparently, there is no code available in the conversion script that allows me to teleport or delete an NPC. In case this is proved wrong I’ll happily tweak the patch again to incorporate that, but for now the only solution seems to be (again) a contextual one: I’ll let Lenora ask the Avatar to turn in Michael himself due to a sudden lack of men ;-). That will make the player confront Michael with his doings and turns him hostile against the Avatar. Alas, he’ll be killed. Sorry to everyone who was hoping for a more virtuous, and Karma-friendly way to solve this quest. 🙁

Ultima VII – The Black Gate:
I got in touch with Andrea, who did the Italian translation and also programmed (with others?) the u7Editor. He agreed to help out (apparently you only find kind and helpful souls in the Ultima Community Crowd – isn’t that plainly gorgeous? :-D) He is confident to being able to modify the conversion table so the FONTS.VGA file can work with German Umlauts. IF this is indeed true, I’ll carry on with the translation, of course. I already have a FONTS.VGA file with a modified conversion table, that would allow the translation to run in Exult With Umlauts, but I want the patch to be working with the regular “DOS” version of GOG, with Exult as an option. For this I need a modified version of the U7Editor, for which Andrea kindly offered to try and modify the programming of the Editor accordingly.

Darghul:
Since Wolf is taking things slowly, so do I. But as with all my other projects, I will of course finish it – unfinished business is something I don’t like at all ;-))

All the best to everyone out there,

John