Beautiful Britannia started as a ‘Freedom Mod‘ for Ascension, assembled by Michael Menapace in response to the rather absurdly linear feel to the plot of this last Ultima title. The mod didn’t do much to alter the order of events in the game, or to change at all the inconsistencies encountered in Ultima 9‘s plot. What it does do, however, is alter some aspects of the structure of Britannia, eliminating obstacles that previously prevented you from roaming the land of Britannia freely.

Eventually, the project grew into what became known as Forgotten World, and a team joined FIrstkniGHT. FIrstkniGHT himself left the team for a while, though the project moved on; it gained a website and grew more ambitious, evolving into an attempt to decode the Ascension game files with an eye toward building a world and game editor, in order to provide players with a better experience.

Firstknight (slight spelling change) then rejoined the team, and the project split into two separate projects as a result: Beautiful Britannia (a more “lush” version of the original Ultima 9) and its “Unlimited” spinoff (a more lush Ultima 9 with a few additions and revisions), and Forgotten World proper (the in-engine remake, which will feature many corrections and updates). Firstknight subsequently departed the team again, this time apparently for good; in the process, Beautiful Britannia became this standalone project.

Beginning with Beautiful Britannia, I’ve begin granting FTP access to the site to project developers. This access is limited to the file repository for a single project, but it offers debs a means to get their downloads onto Aiera faster (and perhaps more reliably) than by “the normal means” (which entails me downloading, and then uploading, the file in question).

As noted, I’ve set this up for Beautiful Britannia, and will shortly be setting it up for Forgotten World. I’ll also be setting it up for the Ultima 6 Project for any of their future milestone/beta releases.

If any other project devs would like a username and password, do let me know! Drop a comment or hit up the contact form.

Firstknight has some sad news:

I’m very sorry to say this, but I have to leave “Team Forgotten World” again, and this time it will be definitly.

Several important “Real Life” Events forces me to do this, I have to accept the fact, that my “real life situation” simply not allows to work on such a fantastic project as “Forgotten World” will be.

But I will slowly continue working on “Beautiful Britannia“, which is only a simple upgrade to UIX, without story changes and other major improvements, as “Forgotten World” will provide.

And when the time comes, where I will get to an playable product, I will simply provide “Beautiful Britannia” for Download on “Ultima: Aiera“, but this will not happen within the next 5 years.

And because of the very limited time I will have for creating “Beautiful Britannia”, there will be no new screens or other information on it for a long, long time.

I only can hope that you can understand my situation.

Please continue to support “Team Forgotten World” in their effort to create the “true” UIX.

All I can say is: well, doesn’t that just suck. But even so, I hope the good reader will join me in wishing Firstknight all the best in whatever continued work he is able to put in on the project, and all good fortunes in his “real life” endeavours.

It’s also important to remember: this announcement only applies to Beautiful Britannia, and not to Forgotten World (the other half of the project). I will presently be splitting the two into separate entries here, to reflect this change.

The team at Forgotten World have made an arrangement with the Titans of Ether to set up a discussion area for their project at the Titans’ forums.

I’m thinking I may need to make a point of adding forum links to project entries.

In a move that warms this shutterbug’s heart, Firstknight has gone back and re-shot about 20 screenshots for Forgotten World/Beautiful Britannia in which “the fog has been lifted.”

That is: he’s taken advantage of his team’s discovery of how to remove the fog from the game world, and has updated some of the older screenshots accordingly.

Head on over to the project website to check them out!

I’m a bit late in posting this, but from Firstknight comes yet more good news about progress being made with the Ultima 9 engine over at Forgotten World/Beautiful Britannia:

I’ve finally found a working solution to disable the fog for overworld maps.

Details how this can be done, including 3 screenshots showing the result, can be found in the news section on our website.

Click on over, good reader, and check thou it out!

Firstknight has posted a couple of updates to the Forgotten World website, including an update to the project information for Beautiful Britannia, and some news about the completion of a “general upgrade” to the northeastern part of Yew, near the court.

He also explains that “general upgrade” means, in essence, an upgrade to the flora and fauna of the region. Treasure and encounter placements remain unchanged.

Three screenshots have been added to give an idea of just what a retouched area in Beautiful Britannia can and will look like.

The pace of development at Forgotten World seems to have picked up significantly; not a week has gone by since the last update from the team, and already Firstknight has more to report:

I think everyone will agree that the worst geographical inaccuracy in
Ultima 9 is the position of Empath Abbey, which is placed north-east of Stonegate. So we tried to find some way to correct this for quite some
time.

I have to say, the the placement of bigger objects is very tricky, because
we are only able to place such objects using the hex-editor and by changing
existing objects. Further these objects must be placed within a range of a
certain area, otherwise the engine is not able to render them correctly.

But in the end it looks like found some working solution for this. The position of Empath Abbey in Beautiful Britannia will be west of Yew, right on the coastline.

Also we tried to make it a litter bigger than in UIX…

There is even a shiny new screenshot up at the project website, good reader. Check thou it out!

Firstknight and the rest of the team at Forgotten World have been busy these last few weeks. They have added a new projects section to their website, which gives additional details on Beautiful Britannia, Forgotten World, and a new, interim project called Beautiful Britannia Unlimited.

Best to go and read up on them for yourself, good reader. This project, which began as a simple modification for Ultima 9 to improve the gameplay experience, has grown by leaps and bounds, and the possibilities it presents for a re-play of the final Ultima game are quite exciting.

The team has also posted three new screenshots demonstrating early work done toward Beautiful Britannia. I like this one the best, personally; river banks should be that lush.

I’ve been horribly lax in posting this, but the Forgotten World project — an ambitious, in-engine remake/modification of Ultima 9 — has seen several major updates in recent months.

Their first bit of news is that the project’s founder, Michael “Firstknight” Menapace, has returned to the team; his return has, in turn, stimulated a kind of “return to the roots” for the project, which has now split into two projects: Beautiful Britannia and Forgotten World. Notable distinctions between the projects include:

What is Beautiful Britannia?

FORGOTTEN WORLD in its original form – that means only enriching the landscape with animals and vegetation and adding the Old Cove Map as “Great Wilderness” to the game.

More simply in comparsion to FORGOTTEN WORLD, but with the possiblity to make a faster release.

…

The creation of FORGOTTEN WORLD is based on the self-developed, FANTASTIC world editor (mainly developed by Hawkwind, with support of all the other team members). The editor (when it’s done) will support fully 3D worldbuilding for terrain and all available objects, also story changes and the adding of more NPCs.

BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA will be created using Firstknights self-developed ingame-creation methodics, combined with hex editor coding and the usage of an self-written tool for automated code changes. This all allows limited changes to the landscape and adding of some of the unused maps.

Personally, I’m still looking forward to Forgotten World more than Beautiful Britannia, although the thought of exploring an even more lush Britannia (for all its faults, Ultima 9 did feature a beautiful world) does have a certain appeal.

Hawkwind, one of the developers over at Forgotten World, contacted me to let me know that despite the lack of news from the development team of this promising, in-engine remake of Ultima 9, things have been moving.

What is more, they’ve given their site a bit of a facelift, having ported it over to the Joomla content management system! On that basis alone: way to go, fellas! Joomla is a pretty sweet CMS, and one of my two “go-to” pieces of site software whenever I have a site to build.

But an even bigger hurrah should be sounded over the news that accompanies the new site design:

We have – again – done a lot of work without results that are presentable.

Due to some strange issues with some of the files, it is now certain that there is still an unknown part in what we thought unraveled. We, therefore, had to rewrite some of the file loading routines. Meanwhile, we wrote a model viewer. So far, we have yet to find any really special models. We will keep you appraised!

Our next aim concerning the editor is getting object selection and property display working.

I can’t imagine how complicated it must be to unwrap a game engine and try to make sense of it, and I am constantly impressed by the demonstrated progress this team has made. I’m confident they can overcome this little hiccup.

Dino’s Ultima Page beat me to the scoop on these developments, but the news is big enough to be worth repeating. Ultima 6 was always my favourite Ultima title, and that particular remake is a project that I’ve been watching with anxious anticipation.

And as if that wasn’t good enough, there is yet more news from other projects as well; that’s what I call a good week, Dragons and Dragonesses.

Ultima 6 Project

Frilly Wumpus dropped me a line to let me know that Ultima 6 Project Milestone #4 has been released. This latest update to the Dungeon Siege-based remake of Ultima 6 features:

• New areas to explore ( Buccaneer’s Cave, Wrong, Empath Abbey and Minoc )
• New game intro which draws from the original classic game
• Enhancements to existing areas
• New plot details and other subtle refinements
• Numerous enhancements to the core gameplay such as:
  • A prototype of a customizable journal system so you can take notes on
    your journey
  • The “;” key now gives you extra information, such as reagent counts,
    projectile counts, etc.
  • New “Gameplay Settings” from the Options menu
  • Many more tunings and tweaks to the core Project Britannia systems

Exciting? Definitely. The latest milestone can be downloaded from the Ultima 6 Project Website, or from the project entry here at Aiera.

Forgotten World

Hawkwind wrote me to let me know that this ambitious, in-engine remake of Ultima 9 has released a sample of soundtrack music written and recorded by composer “Sounddreamer”.

“Time Travel”, the new music, can be listened to at the Forgotten Worlds website, or via the music player below:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A few more project updates come to us by way of Petrell at Dino’s:

Ultima IX: Infinity Eternal

Thepal has posted the first news update in about nine months to his project’s website to let us know that things are still alive and kicking (and just to keep us salivating, he’s thrown in a new screenshot).

The reason for the relative silence of the project, incidentally, stems from a couple of major developments in the real lives of the people working on it. Thepal himself got married (as a recent husband myself, Thepal, I offer my heartfelt congratulations!), and team member MartinLoki became a father (congratulations there, as well!).

It’s good to see that this promising-looking project is still being worked on!

Ultima 5 for TI Calculators

Ranman is continuing his breakneck pace of work on his port of Ultima 5 to the Texas Instruments calculator — in his latest update, he puts development at over 95% completeness.

Latest improvements include:

• A “new look” for Ultima 5
• Leveling up & down now works.
• Magic points are reduced when casting a spell and are slowly restored over time. Fighters have no magic capabilities.
• Enemies can now cast spells too.
• Frigate sails are now working.
• The final quest of the Shrine of the Codex has been implemented.
• Pit traps are now working. If you step upon a hidden pit trap, you are dead — plain and simple — so be careful.

Apparently, Ranman has been told by his wife that the project will be done in February.

Nazghul

According to this schedule, Gordon McNutt plans to release version 1.0 of his Ultima-like game engine, Nazghul, on the fifth anniversary of its registration at Sourceforge — May 26th.

Also, in wandering through other project websites, I noticed the following updates:

Realms of Ultima

With Jason White joining the team, the RoU project has begun implementing an Ultima-style gameplay system for Neverwinter Nights 2. They are changing the character classes to the 8 core classes commonly seen in Ultima, and associating each class with a city and virtue. They have also begun work on custom critters for the game, and have even implemented a wine press.

Project Britannia

With the release of Ultima 6 Project Milestone #4, numerous updates have also been made to the britannia_art.dsres, britannia_logic.dsres, and pb_laz_comp_layer.dsres project core files. These can be downloaded either from the Project Britannia Wiki or through the project entry here at Aiera.

Forgotten World started as a ‘Freedom Mod‘ for Ascension, assembled by Michael Menapace in response to the rather absurdly linear feel to the plot of this last Ultima title. The mod didn’t do much to alter the order of events in the game, or to change at all the inconsistencies encountered in Ultima 9‘s plot. What it does do, however, is alter some aspects of the structure of Britannia, eliminating obstacles that previously prevented you from roaming the land of Britannia freely.

Eventually, the project grew and a team joined FIrstkniGHT. FIrstkniGHT himself left the team for a while, though the project moved on; it gained a website and grew more ambitious, evolving into an attempt to decode the Ascension game files with an eye toward building a world and game editor, in order to provide players with a better experience.

Firstknight (slight spelling change) has since rejoined the team, and the project has been split into two separate projects: Beautiful Britannia (a more “lush” version of the original Ultima 9) and its “Unlimited” spinoff (a more lush Ultima 9 with a few additions and revisions), and Forgotten World proper (the in-engine remake, which will feature many corrections and updates). Firstknight subsequently departed the team again, this time apparently for good; in the process, Beautiful Britannia became a standalone project.

The project focus has also shifted in terms of the content the team is aiming to produce; Firstknight’s principal aim is to produce a series of well-crafted Ascension mods, rather than become lost chasing something which may not be deliverable in the first place.

The ultimate goal of Forgotten World hasn’t changed, however: they are still intent on turning Ultima 9 — using its original, promising engine (albeit with a little help from the OGRE 3D engine as well) — into a canonical, consistent-with-its-predecessors Ultima game.