This just warms the cockles of my heart. (For the record, that’s the full tile sheet for Ultima VI. That site also contains full maps and tile sheets for The Savage Empire and Martian Dreams, as well.)

It’s also pretty surprising. Ultima VI was the biggest tile-based RPG of its time – the world was represented by a single map that was 1024×1024 tiles in size. The world felt large and varied, but now that I look at the tile sheet…there aren’t nearly as many individual things on it as I thought there would be. The tilesheet has 2048 tiles, but many tiles are taken up by multiple animation frames for a single object. A full 64 tiles are used just to animate the water! The designers did a good job of making different parts of the world feel different, despite the limitation.

Once again, I’m having trouble finding decent terrain tiles for Star Revolution. Not only am I having trouble finding Earthlike tiles, I can’t even begin to figure out how to find or generate tiles for non-Earthlike environments. This is all going to have to be solved, of course.