Exult Forum

A couple of people have suggested making a wiki or something for Ultima VII secrets. I think this is a great idea, and I'd be happy to help as much as I possibly could, but after looking at Wikipedia, it does not seem to be a really ideal solution to the problem. Is there another Wiki sort of page that would allow you to break your pages at least into categories by area as well as have more control over where screenshots are placed and such? I guess I could just write a web page, but then nobody would be able to change it themselves, and so I or another maintainer would be forced to constantly add users' comments and information.

Clearly there must be some sort of solution. I thought about actually writing a web databasem, but it would be much nicer to have some sort of html file collection that people could at least download and browse offline.

I'd love to start some sort of project like this because a text based faq/walkthrough is hard to parse quickly and you don't get the added bonus of having screenshots to show you precisely where something is.
Also the walkthroughs on gamefaqs are so jumbled up. None of them are comprehensive so if you are really trying to find as many secrets as possible you need to look at every single one and try to find out what one walkthrough has and then compare it to another just to figure out what one author might have missed.

What do you guys think? Something like this could be easily expandable to include other ultima games and other games in general. I would much rather have a nice html walkthrough that I browse quickly and it would be oh so nice to have people constantly contributing to the information pool.

Maybe we need a Wiki site for games.......

Any replies would be appreciated. It would be nice to have a discussion about this,

BTW, Exult is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think it is even better than Ultima VII!!! What a fantasticly amazing job you guys have done. You have sucessfully created the only complete game engine clone that I know of. (I'm sure there are a few others, but this is pretty successful)

Thank you so much for giving me back some of my fondest memories. Why, you even got the MT-32 music and sound fx!! I bought an MT-32 years ago just to play Ultima VII with it. (Still got the MT-32, neat little synth box)

Regards,

Zos Xavius
aka
Iron Dragon (UDIC)

Hmm, I run a wiki site, but it's powered by Mediawiki (the one that powers wikipedia) as well. So any limitations that wikipedia has mine will share...

It is possible to break pages into categories, simply by giving a diff name:

Ultima_VII_Trinsic
Ultima_VII_Magic
Ultima_VII_Cheats
etc.

and a category can be crealted, called "Ultima_VII", under which all those pages can belong, so any user can easily find all the U7 pages on the site.

I haven't played with pictures at all so don't know the exact nature of the problem nor suggest a solution.

But if anyone want to put Ultima 7 stuff on my wiki site, you are more than welcome to (creating an account is highly encouraged before you start contributing).

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~kchuang/mediawiki-1.3.3

I just took a look at MediaWiki's help file, and looks like you can place images anywhere in the page, and it can either be internal (uploaded to the server hosting MediaWiki) or external (any http:// url will work).

Wikipedia itself disables external images, but my own wiki site should allow it.

internal images are better as external links tend to get lost over time.

Please make a general Ultima resources wiki if you can. People have talked about putting up usecode and ExultStudio information on such.

Actually, I just have a general wiki site in general. I welcome people to create pages of Ultima resources on it. Individual pages can be on specific Ultimas, or specific aspect of specific Ultimas.

If the pages has the tag:

[[Category:Ultima]]

in it, then visiters to the wiki can have a quick way to call out all the Ultima resource pages on the wiki. Each page can have multiple category labels as well, so a page can be in the Ultima category, the Ultima 7 category, the Exult category, and Paperdoll category all at the same time.


If you are looking for an entire wiki site dedicated to Ultima and nothing else, that'd require more setup and management overhead for me (and I have to somehow get a different free OCF account to run it on, due to database usage conflicts), and then consistently paying attention to all these different account. Even though a wiki should be able to run on its own, you probably still want an attentive admin in case account space runs out etc...

Hey Zos/Xavius.23 are you still following this thread? I'm pretty sure you can put screenshots anywhere in the page, and there are several ways to do sectioning.

So if you (or anyone else for that matter) want to start the project on my wiki site, just go on ahead. If you need help with anything (that is site-related, as opposed to Ultima/Exult related), don't hestitate to ask me.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~kchuang/mediawiki-1.3.3

Yeah, yeah. I've been following the thread. I've also been fairly busy, but for everyone that is reading along, I'm planning on throwing some things together this weekend if I get some time. I would be delighted to use your WIKI site as long as you will let me make backups of whatever content is added.

Thanks by the way.

zos

Well it's a public site, so even if I wanted to prevent you from making backups (which I don't), I wouldn't have a way to do that d-:

Suggestion: make the first page called "Ultima VII" or "Ultima VII - Secrets".

Once the page is filled with tons of contents then we'll split different sections into their own sub-pages.