Ultima 7 Design Documents: The World Editor

Courtesy of former Origin programmer Bill Randolph, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Joe Garrity of the Origin Muesum, the Ultima Codex is pleased to present this document — which has been broken out into thirteen (13) images — which describes the world editor for Ultima 7.

Download the documents:

[wpdm_file id=112]

The world editor document is a straightforward introduction to the software used to build the gameworld of Ultima 7, with notes on its interface, keyboard shortcuts, and changes made to it since “the last version” (which I assume is a reference to the Ultima 6 world editor). Apparently, Deluxe Paint was used to create many of the graphical assets used in Ultima 7.

Now, the images here, in JPEG format, are lower-resolution extracts from PDF scans of the original documents. They are legible, but not of particularly high quality, and thus are not recommended for printing; download the PDF files for that purpose.

Most importantly, though: enjoy! Pull up the images, download the PDFs, and pore over them. Search out every little detail, and enjoy a fascinating glimpse into the nuts and bolts of how Origin crafted a truly ground-breaking RPG. The Ultima Codex is indebted to Joe Garrity for providing these documents, to Bill Randolph for releasing them and making them available for us to see, to John Watson, and to everyone who worked at Origin Systems.

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