xu4 – Ultima 4 Recreated
Produced by: Andrew Taylor, Darren Janeczek, Solus, Wickedsmoke
Website: xu4- Ultima IV @ SourceForge, xu4 @ GitHub
Releases:
The Windows port of the cross-platform Ultima 4 engine.
The Linux port of the cross-platform Ultima 4 engine.
Source code for the cross-platform Ultima 4 engine.
The Fedora 37 port of the cross-platform Ultima 4 engine.
The Fedora 38 port of the cross-platform Ultima 4 engine.
Combines the Ultima 4 Graphics Upgrade with (apparently) some AI-generated voiceover work to enhance the experience of Ultima 4. Can be loaded as a mod within xu4.
Andrew Taylor’s SDL-based re-creation of the Ultima 4 game engine was intended to be a cross-platform engine for Richard Garriott’s most storied game, much as Exult is for Ultima 7. The project fell dormant after 2008, but was subsequently restarted in 2011 by Darren Janeczek, who went on to improve xu4’s gameplay experience, and restructured the code to facilitate the goal of porting the game to other platforms, including mobile.
After another bout of dormancy, xu4 was incorporated into ScummVM alongside several other Ultima fan engines in 2020. However, since then, Karl Robillard has taken on the responsibility of maintaining xu4 in its standalone form. Version 1.0 of the engine – it spent 18 years in a beta state! – was released in early 2022, with version 1.1 following in July of the year, bringing with it improvements to the engine’s handling of sounds.
Version 1.2, released in December 2022, brought with it an improved Linux backend for the engine, as well as expanded support for game mods. Versions 1.3 and 1.4 were released in 2023, adding – respectively – AI-synthesized voiceovers and the U4 Recreated module, and improved spell incantations alongside more improvements to mod support.
xu4 is also compatible with the graphics update for Ultima 4 (in fact, this is included in the U4 Recreated module). It still requires Ultima 4 to run, but this can be downloaded for free from a number of sources.
Both windows binaries (beta3 and snapshot) seem to be corrupt. There’s also newer snapshot available at xu4 site dated 2010-01-15.
Augh.
I’m wondering if perhaps…you know what? I need to rethink how I’m doing this. It’s perhaps fortunate that my wife is going away to the Olympics this week; I can tie up the Internet bandwidth without fear of lagging her out of what she’s doing.
I’ll upload my recovered archive of files from my old host and see about overwriting files copied to the current server from my optical backups; there seems to be a higher rate of data corruption in the optical set.
I like this project ALOT, but Im not confident they are stable. Granted they are still considered beta so not a full release. I wonder if the full release will ever happen?
I was playing snapshot from like 1-25-2011 and the game froze every time in the Castle prison. Due to this I decided to play the C64 versino of the game.
As nice as this one is I didnt wanna play half way through the game and then have a gamebreaking bug.
Great work on it though, it looks and sounds fantastic and the customizable options are wonderful. I’ll keep checking on it from time to time.
I think a full release will happen some day, but perhaps not as soon as it might since the developer is splitting his efforts between improving this version and getting the iOS version working.
Thanks for reporting the bug. I’ll relay it to Darren.
I already posted the bug on the bug tracker section of the project page. Thanks for the reply.
Hey, you’re welcome!
And good on you for actually USING the bug tracker. 😉
Game freezes in Castle Britain prison section, which is very easy to encounter as it is close to the throne room. I see this was reported 6 years ago. I wanted this to be playable but that freeze kills it for me.
Alas, I don’t think xu4 is being actively worked on…as evidenced by a six year-old bug, I suppose.