Leroux: Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA) or just Unlimited Adventures (UA) is the Neverwinter Nights of the 90's, a tool designed to allow players building their own Goldbox-style adventure campaigns. With it, you can easily create a 3D dungeon by setting walls and background of your choice, and then fill it with text and combat events to tell your story. Naturally, it also allows you to play the creations of other people, and since UA's release in 1993 hundreds of those have already been created by the game's community. This guide is meant to help you on your first steps to discover UA, the custom content available for it and its welcoming community.
ESSENTIAL LINKS The community forums are located at ua.reonis.com. Join us to ask any questions that this introduction didn’t answer, to give feedback on modules or just talk about the game. We’re a friendly bunch. In addition to all things UA the forums are also home to the community of
Dungeon Craft, an open source project that aims to recreate and expand on the general idea of UA without the need for DOS emulation, and
IceBlink, another indie RPG toolset.
The UA archive with all the downloadable community content is located at
frua.rosedragon.org/. You can also find module lists, newsletters and older FAQs archived there.
Another (curated, not exhaustive) module list can be found
here. Just browse the UA file archive for the file names in brackets.
For more links and FAQs check out the UA forums.
THE DEMO CAMPAIGN UA includes a demo campaign called "Heirs to Skull Crag". Don't mistake this for all UA has to offer, and play it at your own risk. Some people like it, but most that I know don't, and there are tons of community created campaigns that easily surpass it in quality, so don't judge UA solely based on the demo campaign.
CUSTOM ADVENTURES AND CAMPAIGNS In UA, custom modules are usually referred to as "Designs". There are three types of designs in the UA community: Vanilla, Hacked and French Vanilla. Vanilla designs are the most basic ones, they only use the assets that came with the game, without adding any new pictures. French Vanilla designs are like Vanilla designs but they also feature some new pictures and icons which were added via the editor's Import function. Hacked designs are modded modules that can significantly alter the look and experience of the game by not only adding new pictures, but also new fonts, new frames, new intro sequences, new wallsets, new sounds and music, new races and classes etc. They've modified the game files with the help of third party tools that allow for greater customization than the editor itself. To play Vanilla and French Vanilla designs all you need is the original game and nothing more. To play Hacked designs, you need to install UAShell, a shell that backups your original files and then overwrites them with the hacked files of your chosen design, before running the game.
DISCLAIMER: The following instructions assume that you've installed the English version of Unlimited Adventures which is patched to version 1.2. GOG also offers the German version of UA, but I don't recommend to use it, as the German version is stuck at 1.0 and therefor outdated and incompatible with UAShell and most hacking tools and modules, on top of being badly translated. General design installation Designs are stored as folders in your main UA directory. Their name should not be longer than 8 letters, followed by ".DSN" (Example: GAMENAME.DSN). To install a design, just extract the .DSN folder contained in the zip file to your main UA directory, or if there is no .DSN folder, then create and name one (following the rules listed above) and extract the files from the zip into it. Make sure that each .DSN folder also contains a "SAVE" folder where characters and savegames are stored. If there is none, UA will miss it and prompt error messages about inserting a save disk. So if your design folder does not contain a SAVE folder after you've extracted all files to it, just create one yourself.
Running (French) Vanilla designs After you've installed the design following the instructions above, all that is left to do is to start the game, "SELECT A DESIGN" in the main menu, choose your freshly installed module and start playing.
Running Hacked designs In order to play Hacked designs, you need to install UAShell, which is a DOS program, so it will only work through Dosbox emulation. This may seem a bit complicated and intimidating at first, but it’s actually rather easy and totally worth the 5 minutes you need to spend on it. Hacked designs are where UA really shines, and besides, you only have to do this once, for 100+ hours of fun. If you know your way around Dosbox you can check out
Nol’s installation guide for FRUA newbies instead of reading on. If you don’t, here’s a step-by-step guide for installing UAShell in Windows or Linux without prior knowledge of DOSBox or the need for third party tools (thanks to joeshell for the advice on DOSBox configs and Linux!). On OSX, check out
these instructions first, then follow those for Linux (thanks to Gydion!).
1. Download
uashellc.zip from the UA archive and extract its contents to your main UA directory (Windows users) or the DATA folder contained within (Linux users).
1b.
OPTIONAL: Code check removal (Pt. 1): If you want to permanently remove the obsolete codeword check from your legit copy of the game, also download
ckit-crk.zip and extract CKIT-CRK.COM to your main UA folder (Windows users) or the DATA folder contained within (Linux users).
2.
Windows: Make a copy of GOG‘s „Launch Unlimited Adventures“ link in the same directory and rename it to „Launch UAShell“, then edit the target line in the properties of your new link: Find the part that says
dosbox_ua_single.conf and replace it with
dosbox_uashell.conf.
Linux: Make a copy of the shell script start.sh in your game directory and rename it to start_uashell.sh. Open the script with an editor, find the part that say
dosbox_ua_single.conf and replace it with
dosbox_uashell.conf. Make a copy of your desktop link for UA, rename it to "Launch UAShell" or whatever you like and modify it to call
start_uashell.sh instead of
start.sh.
3. Make a copy of the file
dosbox_ua_single.conf in the same directory and rename it to
dosbox_uashell.conf. Open
dosbox_uashell.conf with a text editor. Find the line that says „start“ and replace it with „CALL uashell“.
3b.
OPTIONAL: Code check removal (Pt. 2): Insert a line
above „CALL uashell“ and put „ckit-crk“ in it (it's very important that your config file runs ckit-crk.com
before calling uashell or it won't work!). You can also remove GOG’s copy protection notice by deleting all lines from „@ECHO OFF“ to „pause“.
4. Save
dosbox_uashell.conf with your text editor, quit and click on „Launch UAShell“. The installation should start. Ignore any warnings about files in the TEMP folder and press a key when the program asks you to. After installation UAShell will ask you about the game's sound settings, which is great, because now you can switch from the default Roland music (which sounded awful in Dosbox on my rig) to Adlib emulation. I found you get the best results if you always click NO when asked about PC speaker and Roland and YES when asked about Soundblaster and Adlib. (If you misclick, you can repeat the sound setup later by choosing EDITORS/SOUND REGISTRY from the UAShell menu.) Now UAShell will ask you to remove any files from the TEMP folder. Quit UAShell, navigate to the TEMP folder in your UA directory (or the DATA folder contained within it, for Linux users) and delete or move the readme you will find in it. Once you've done that, everything is setup to play Hacked community modules, and you're in for a treat!
4b.
OPTIONAL: Code check removal (Pt. 3): Open
dosbox_uashell.conf and delete the line that says „ckit-crk“, save and quit the text editor. Then delete CKIT-CRK.COM from your UA or DATA folder. You won’t need it anymore.
It is recommended that from now on, you always use UAShell to select a design, instead of clicking SELECT NEW DESIGN in the main menu. That way, you won't ever have to worry about accidentally mixing Hacked and Vanilla designs and messing up things, and everything will be cleanly separated. Just „Launch UAShell“, select DESIGNS/APPLY (or press F5) and choose the DSN folder of the design you want to play. UAShell will apply all the hacks contained within and then prompt you to press OK. Choose DESIGNS/RUN (or press F8) to start the game.
OPTIONAL: If you want DOSBox to return to UAShell when you quit UA, instead of shutting down, open START.BAT with a text editor and delete or comment out the last line that says "Exit" (e.g. "REM Exit" will make DOSBox ignore the line). And if you want to be thorough, you can also open
dosbox_ua_single.conf and replace "start" by "CALL start", which will offset the change you made to START.BAT, so that DOSBox will shut down properly even if you run UA on its own, without UAShell. If you've removed the code check, while you're at it, you can also delete GOG's warning in
dosbox_ua_single.conf, so that it won't be displayed even if you run UA without UAShell.
Hi i bought frua on steam...are these instructions compatible with the steam version?