Development
In this part of the series, Garriott delegated most of the work to others. Garriott later explained, "... I sacrificed everything to appease stockholders, which was a mistake. We probably shipped it three months unfinished."
A patch was released to correct the game's bugs as well as fix some plot holes, and eliminate most of the problems with jumping (the original release only allowed jumping over a fixed distance in eight directions while the patch enabled jump distance to be targeted; the original release also contained many moving platforms to be jumped across, the patch stopped their motion). Long-time Ultima fans jokingly referred to Ultima VIII by the nickname 'Super Avatar Brothers', in reference to the abundance of platform-jumping puzzles.
The Ultima VIII engine was later reused in the Crusader game series.
Being a DOS title, Ultima VIII has problems running on modern systems such as Windows 98 and later; however, it works reliably under the DOSBox environment. Unlike Ultima VII which used Intel's undocumented "Big real mode" which became known as Voodoo Memory at Origin, Ultima VIII used a more conventional DOS extender. An open-source project called Pentagram aims to create an engine capable of running Ultima VIII on modern operating systems, most notably Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Read more about this topic: Ultima VIII: Pagan
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Understanding child development takes the emphasis away from the child’s character—looking at the child as good or bad. The emphasis is put on behavior as communication. Discipline is thus seen as problem-solving. The child is helped to learn a more acceptable manner of communication.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)