The IT-HE Software Ultima 6 Development Utilities

Produced by: DOUG the Eagle Dragon
Website: IT-HE Software

The always amusing, always inventive DOUG the Eagle Dragon has produced an incredible wealth of software for editing many different aspects of Ultima 6, so much so that a “brief” description is rather difficult to give.

The Ultima 6 Developer’s Kit (U6DK) is a comprehensive utilities package that includes four programs that can be used to edit Ultima 6:

• Tweak – a party roster editor (add people to your party, even if in the game they won’t respond to the join command!) with a few other bonus features
• Map – world editor, edit the chunks and map
• RedSetter – affix ‘temporary’ objects to the ground, making static scenery
• Undead – repairs characters who have been rendered “brain-dead” by violent death and subsequent resurrection

DOUG has also released some useful subsidiary programs to this utility:

• Savage Empire Patch (96.0 KiB, 304 hits) – a patch that enables the editor to work with Savage Empire
• Martian Dreams Patch (69.2 KiB, 295 hits) – a patch that enables the editor to work with Martian Dreams
• Party Fix Utility (11.4 KiB, 283 hits) – a small program that corrects an occasional error in Tweak that causes ‘solid’ characters

Conversely, the Items List is more of a cheat than a utility (since you can only use the ‘item creation’ feature of Ultima 6 if you use the ‘spam’ cheat); this is a list of many of the items you can get Iolo to create in the game.

Other utilities that are peripheral to, but useful in conjunction with, the U6DK include:

• The Savegame Manager is a useful program that allows for more than one save-game in Ultima 6, even when using ‘hacked’ versions of the game.
• The Book Editor will allow you to UNBIND all the books and signs in Ultima 6 into a text file, and then REBIND them into the game format after you edit their contents.

The Finder utility has two components, both of which will assist in the use of the RedSetter program that is a part of the Ultima 6 Developer’s Kit:

• Stamp – affixes a ‘homing device’ to the Avatar (the location of the Avatar is critical to proper use of RedSetter)
• Finder – tracks the Avatar using the ‘homing device’

Finally, there is the U6DK’s source code: written mostly in Borland C, this is the code for all of the utilities from IT-HE software, as well as some information documentation to assist in its usage. Note that the source code has been RARed first, and then ZIPped, to make it smaller.