Ultima 7 Design Documents: Usable Index and Flags

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 eighteen (18) images — which describes indices and flags hard-coded into Ultima 7.

Download the documents:

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This document is basically a huge listing of in-game flags, sorted and separated by location. For most, it won’t look like anything more than a wall of letters and numbers, but I’m sure it will be enjoyable fodder for the coders who’ve spent a significant portion of their lives poking and prodding at the Ultima 7 engine and data files.

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.