Ultima 7 Design Documents: Conversation Functions

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 five (5) images — which discusses the functions and routines behind Ultima 7’s conversation engine.

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The document — which, incidentally, was written by the late John Watson — is rather more technical, and details (as one might expect from the title) the various functions and routines that could be called from conversations; almost everything you could want to know about the procedures the game used to control NPC activities and interactions is in here.

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.