Thanks for the files. I'll make sure to have a look.
If you decide to give your approach a go, please make sure, to let the public / me know - Whenever my translation of Serpent Isle is complete, I might have a go at UW ;-)

Hi! My name is Igor Damini, I'm from Brazil... I'm a HUGE fan of Ultima Series, especially Ultima Underworld! I just found out about your work... About the Ultima Underworld Edito... And instantly got thrilled! I download it, installed it, and try to use it.... But i didn't worked... I have the original game here on GoG.... The Editor asks for some file named PALS.DAT that dosen't exist where the Editor says it should be... I tryied but coudn't make ir work... Can you gimme a hand on it? I've beem wantind to make a fangame of Ultima Underworld for almost 20 years....lol...

Thanks in advance^^

Did you unpack the gog file? Ultima folder should have DATA folder that contains LEV.ARK which you need to pick in the editor, and other files that are needed are also in DATA folder (PALS.DAT, etc).

Just use zip/7zip or any archive software on "game.gog" and unpack this. Also you will need to either put it back to this file, or use Dosbox to run this unpacked version.

Holy Cow! This thing is awesome! I just recently got back into DOS gaming, and I ran into this a few weeks ago. Awesome job! I already started modding UW, but I do have one question:

I can't seem to figure out how to replace the stock character sprites (the faces, the paperdoll for the inventory, and the head sprites for the conversations). I figured out how to do it for the NPCs, but is there a way to do this for the player character? Am I missing something?

I updated the editor due to a small bug with terrain trap.

Sorry for the late reply. You need to put textures in the Textures folder, for example, new item texture : Textures/Objects, new NPC head : Textures/Heads

Sorry for necroing an old thread, but I've been playing with this for a few days and it's absolutely friggin' amazing. THANK YOU for making this! Great work!

One question, there is a switch (http://prntscr.com/rytHxwCfkZSV) on lv. 3 that I've always wondered what it does (the one next to the secret door in the north). Sir Cabrius' walkthrough indicates that the switch should summon a headless, but that didn't seem to do anything for me.

Can I use your editor to determine what that lever influences? when I select the lever and then I click on "Advanced," I couldn't see anything that indicated what the switch influences.

Hello everyone !

I just find out this post, and just 10 years after, I’m working on a complete translation of this amazing game ! And what a wonderfull tool to do that.

But actually, I don’t know if anybody has tried a translation before (I doubt no one has), and although I’ve read that some strings are hard coded and not editable with the tool, I’me quite surprised for some missing strings which occur very often:
- « you see » : absolutly always (the occurance in block 1 #260 is not this one)
- « named » : after looking at a NPC …
- « ou of » : for Life/mana points

And surely others.

Moreover, I assume that the articles « a » and « an » before an object name is hard-coded because it depends on the next letter … it’s annoying for a translation.

Do I miss something in the editor to translate theses strings ? Or do you confirm its hard codes ? Does anybody succeed to by-pass it ?

Thank you

I answer to my own post :

I confirm that some strings are hard coded (you see, named, use [item] on what?, the book exploses in your face etc.).
BUT it is still editable using a hex editor on UW.EXE file : theses strings are not compressed and you can be found with a simple ctrl+F.
Sadly and with no surprise : you must respect the string length to keep the exact same number of bytes. And the english grammar is hard coded (not the NPC conversations of course), so you you must respect pronoun-verb-adjective-noun. There is 2 distincts strings (in the EXE File) for « a » and « an », the choice according to the next letter is hard-coded, so it can be tricky for a translation … I replace them with a « 1 » … not very beautiful, but with only one character, there isn’t many options. In my case (translation into French), I just can’t translate some strings because of the names gender, which doesn’t exist in english, or because the correct translation contains too many letters, so I might sometimes loose the original sense or touch.

Oh, and I managed to add new characters also (like é, è, à etc.), but UltimaEditor cannot do that, and for a good reason : strings are compressed using a Huffman tree, you need to modify that tree by adding new leaves with the new characters. I’ve made my own tool to edit the tree, the fonts and some graphics with other strings (map, menus etc.). To be honnest, so far, any modification of the tree I’ve tried makes the in-game strings unreadable, so I’ve just replaced some unused (or rarely used) strings, like &,#,% etc. … My tool generates excels sheets to edit strings with more conveniance, with the ability to ctrl+H to replace 50x the same string… and the best part is that my tool works perfectly with Ultima Underworld II !! (No surprise, the file format is exactly the same.)

Anyway, UltimatedItor is still an amazing tool and the only one if you want to create or edit levels, stats etc. But for a pure translation, know that it has restrictions, but a full translation is possible with constraints (english grammar, hard coded string length …).

Bye !

Nice job! The translation you posted looks fantastic, given the limitations. Regarding the pronouns, grammar, etc, I think you'd likely need to go the UltimaHacks approach - change the local assembly to add a call to function with the updated string concatenation in some memory overlay at the end of the program. I have some ideas about how this could be used for other things I'm planning, but I need some more time to fully wrap my head totally around the patcher program and writing assembly (scary).

Oh, and there are a few translations out there. Notably there's the Japanese->English translation of UW1 PSX, and three translations, most of them incomplete, of UW1 ([url=https://underworld.ultimacodex.com/ultima-underworld-translations/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20known%20fan-made%20translation%20patches%20for%20Ultima%20Underworld]https://underworld.ultimacodex.com/ultima-underworld-translations/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20known%20fan-made%20translation%20patches%20for%20Ultima%20Underworld[/url].)

And there's this: https://github.com/israelpossoli/ultimaunderworld-ptbr

Will you release your tool to edit the huffman tree?

Scrocher what language you are trying to translate to ? I know there is full spanish translation. For some reason I can't find it now on web, try to search for "traduccion al castellano". I have it on my PC if something.

Edit : I'll try to upload the code somewhere (finally).

I uploaded the source code for the editor.
Available here
To run this you will require Unity and then probably fiddle a lot to run this, this was made a lot of Unity versions in the past. Also you can just use the C# code to make your own applications or stuff.

Feel free to take over and improve this further, I unfortunately will no longer make any work on this.

Thanks a lot! I'm working on some tools, including a randomizer, this will greatly help me figure some stuff out. And who knows, maybe adding support for UW2 to your editor will be relatively straightforward. Perhaps as simple as just getting the compression/decompression algorithm working. Hah, famous last words.

Hi !

I’m about to finish the full translation, and I had some help from french translators of abandonware, and I manager to overpass every limitation !

First, using IDA pro software, I’ve found the address of the hard coded strings in the EXE, so I could modify it to write longer strings in a unsed area in the EXE !

Secondly, and it was the most difficult : modify the english grammar… no other solution than directly modify the assembly instructions in the EXE. Again, IDA pro was mandatory to identify the finitions in the EXE. To be honnest, I couldn’t do it by myself, a very skilled fellow helped me…

I’ve studied spanish and italian translations, and they havent dealt with the grammar.

I just have to translate the ending screen and the acknowledgments to sign my work (quite annoying, the ackniwledgments are stored in a cutscene, not in fix screens … one more type of file my tool must modify) and I’ll be ready to release the patches (for GoG and stand alone). I Will also make a video on YouTube to describe every problèm and solutions.

Sorry for the mistakes, my phone doesn’t like english and « corrects » every word …
I meant « manage », not « manager », and « functions » not « finitions » ….