I've never heard of a company sue another company for copy right infringement
At which point we can all safely ignore you.
The entire point of "mods" is that you're not a multi-million dollar company, you're most likely doing it as (drumroll) a hobby.
As for people bleating on about "selling the mods" - DERP. You've not licensed the engine, get a fucking grip already.
As a mental exercise I briefly hashed out how much work a complete mod of Ultima VII would require:
1) Map translation - the brunt of the work.
This map is
extremely sexy -
http://www.kxmode.com/U7map/It does show that the project is viable and that the dungeons etc are fairly small. This, of course, can be expanded. Having an immediate reference to translate is double-plus good.
2) NPCs / Quests / backstory / lore
This site
http://bootstrike.com/Ultima7bg/cool.php contains the files for all NPC / books; cutting down a lot of work. Grunt work would be creating all the trees & technical placement / trigger testing.
3) Technical - scripting & quests.
This site
http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_VII_Walkthrough has a detailed list of all the main / side quests. This, of course, could be expanded upon.
4) Engine limitations: D:OS doesn't support ship travel (that I know of), a quick hack would be to have two classes of "gates" - the standard eight moongates (although working out moon phases without a day / night cycle might be "fun") and "ship gates". Where you buy a ship deed and/or get co-ordinates via side quests that allow you to fast travel between locations. e.g. You don't actually sail (boo), but you fast travel between set docks. Kludgy, but possible - for the smaller islands (e.g. near Serpent's Isle) you'd just make the water shallow enough to walk through. You'd probably lose the magic carpet, sadly.
You'd also need to work out a scale & map limits / where your zones changed.
5) Art assets / creatures. You'd need some work here converting to Ultima VII creatures, no doubt about it. Original content + work warning. Not sure of the NPC total, but portraits might be lacking. Specific items that might not exist: Sextants stick out, as do the various unique items (Cube, Sphere but we've got a pyramid already!).
6) Mechanics skills etc - Ultima VII didn't have skills, just basic 3 stats. Easily convertable, although you'd have to parse down 20 levels > 8 levels. Doable, I could hack it out in a few days. Simple system = easier.
Spells would be more work, given you'd be making them from scratch. Probably best to convert them to the already-existing element system instead. (e.g. swordstrike => lightning storm etc).
Reagents - you'd have to mod the crafting engine & link it to spell slots. Troublesome. A quick "hack" would to be to make all spells craftable "scrolls" using the reagents, and not have permanent skill slots for them. (Essentially ripping out a lot of the D:OS complexity for ease of use / not having to code). Kludgy but workable.
7) Companions - 4 as a max isn't so bad, and it'd be a blast if you could do 4 man co-op (although, tbh, making only a single player able to do dialogues would be sensible / not create massive headaches). Not worth the effort to expand to 8, I'd imagine.
8) Virtue system. Would be a doozy to mod the reputation system into something like the intended virtue system (that as far as I can remember never worked beyond Ultima V).
That's a rough draft [15mins thought + google]. Big project, would probably take 3-5 people a good part of a year (+?).
Lets put this into prospective, you are an idiot: encouraging people to copyright infringement, which may potentially close down at the owners discretion, laziness and no imagination.
No, I just know the difference between being a game company, licensing an engine to create your own project and making a mod.
You clearly don't, so *shrug*.
Hint: in all of the above, feel free to point out where you're going to get into legal trouble, I'm all ears. Hint: you're not. As both Lazarus & the U6 project have already proved.
