Because I’m a horribly forgetful person, I failed to post this news when it was at its freshest. Firstknight left a comment on his project’s entry to bring us all up to speed on the status of the project and the progress he’s made on it:

Sorry, but I haven’t had the time to create a homepage so far, so I want to provide some quick info on the actual project state here:

Currently (after being offline for about 6 months) I continue working on basic tasks, like categorizing items and upgrading the creation tools. When this is done, the next step will be adding bigger objects (mainly rocks and trees) onto the Britannia overworld (which invovles pure hexcoding) Both of these tasks will take until approximately Summer 2011.

After that I will have something new to show (which is not really the case ATM), so this will be a good time for providing a homepage. Also, a new demo is planned for late 2011 (I hope that I get the .NET Launcher done before then).

Furthermore, I’m sorry to say that there will be no way to remove the fogging on overworld maps in Windows 7, but it doesn’t make much sense to do so anyway, simply because a MiddleClip value higher than 6000 makes the game unstable.

Long-term goals for Beautiful Britannia:

• Providing many more details for the Britannia overworld
• Making several unsued maps (overworlds and dungeons) playable
• Shortening the linear parts of the game and adding nonlinear elements instead

So there you have it, folks.

I have to confess a certain particular affinity for this project, in no small part due to the fact that it makes use of the original Ultima 9 game engine. Even in this day and age, that engine stacks up not badly against more modern systems, at least to my thinking.

Yes, the engine doesn’t do as well with DirectX (it was built in the era of Glide), and yes, the polygon counts are lower and the textures are low-resolution. But equally, the world of Ascension was far more interactive than most 3D RPG game worlds are these days (at least if one does an “out of the box” comparison), and few games these days do as well making a world feel truly seamless (many don’t even try). Many of the game’s systems (its conversation engine, for example) were quite well-implemented.

And while I’m not exactly the biggest fan of jumping puzzles, I actually rather miss the ability to jump and climb objects in many of the games I enjoy today. In Ascension, it was no big deal to jump across a small chasm or climb up a ledge…and I can think of a good half-dozen situations in Mass Effect 2 where I would have killed to have either ability.

This is a browser-based parody of the early Ultima games, and looks very much like them, though it purports to be set in Britannia post-Ultima 9.

So…check thou it out!

Feel like rescuing a princess again? Or maybe taking a space shuttle mission to a distant world? Has it been too long since you journeyed into the Abyss?

Ultimoid appears to be a browser-based parody of the Ultima games, constructed with the GameBuilder service. As such, it’s not a particularly lengthy adventure, and its control set is pretty simple.

Its appearance draws heavily on the tiled graphics of Ultima 1 through Ultima 5. Timeline-wise, it claims to be set in a post-Ultima 9 Britannia.

Oh, what the heck, eh?

Apropos of what I said before, I’ve decided to bump up the testing weekend a bit, and have made a couple of changes to the plan since yesterday afternoon.

For starters, the ‘Milano’ theme is out. I’ve gone with the ‘Perogato’ theme (from the same designer) instead, with a few custom modifications (including a sexy new logo, if I do say so myself). I’ve dropped the ‘:’ from the site name as well…it’s a minor thing.

Additionally, since I actually like this theme, there’s a decent chance that it will stay in place. I have to make a few modifications to it still (e.g. adding tag support and forum discussion links), but those are minor cosmetic changes. This theme has most of what else I was hoping to end up with: a more modern feel, a featured content pane so I can highlight stories that I think are important, more and better use of jQuery and inline images, and dropdown menus for quicker access to the things that keep many of you coming back to the site: Ultima remakes, patches, and utilities.

May I draw attention to the double menu bar at the top of the site? The red bar, the good reader will note, lists what are considered, by this site at least, to be the main canonical entries in the Ultima series, from Akalabeth through to Ultima 9, including both Underworld titles. Obviously, not every remake, patch, and utility is listed, and so the complete list of categories still appears on the sidebar, but this way there will at least serve to get a goodly number of site visitors to the content they want a) more quickly, and b) without even the need to scroll down the main page.

The main page of the site will also boast more articles under this template.

Anyhow, please leave feedback in the comments form of this article, or in the related forum thread. I want to hear what everyone thinks about this redesign. And as I mentioned, this design is one I like more, but is not yet at the point where it will be an unchangeable thing; if a goodly number of people who leave comments say “I hate it!”, I’ll put the ‘Aspire’ theme back first thing on Tuesday morning, without the slightest hesitation.

As if running the best French-language Ultima site and managing the ambitious Return to the Serpent Isle project wasn’t enough, Sergorn Dragon has taken it upon himself to take a cue from Ophidian Dragon and blog his way from Akalabeth through to Ultima 9…with detours through the Worlds of Ultima series and both Underworld games.

Quoth Sergorn:

I will be following a similar pattern for each game: a first post presenting the game, my relationship with it, and when it applies the version chosen for this playthrough. Afterward I’ll post blog posts and possibly some screenshots of my adventuring for how long it will take (which could take a while, or not so much considering I can end up devoting a crazy amount of time to such things when I put myself to it) with some final impressions once the game is finished.

He might even delve into some of the various ported versions of the Ultima titles, though at this time he has no fixed plans in that regard.

So…do be sure to check back with him from time to time!

This is (was?) another remake of Ultima 9, headed up by Thepal. It began using the Morrowind engine, and a demo (which is again available for download) was even released. At some point, Thepal made the decision to switch to the newer and more complex Oblivion engine, and the project hasn’t really been heard from since then.

I admit I’ve been tempted to move this one into the Cemetery…but for this somewhat cryptic announcement that Thepal made in the forum earlier this month. For the moment at least, this one will remain on the books as a remake.

Aquamarine Dragon’s simple utility for extracting the music files from Ultima 9 (and let’s be honest: Ultima 9 did have some beautiful music) is once again available for download.

Some years ago, Grandor Dragon and Novum Dragon produced a series of patches which overhauled the monster statistics, economy, and dialogue of Ultima 9, making for a generally better overall playing experience, assuming you found yourself less-than-pleased with Ascension’s inbuilt plot and game systems.

And yes, we could probably debate the merits and problems of Ultima 9 until Ultima 10 gets released (see what I did there?)…but that’s not really what I’m posting this article for. I just want to let you all know that Grandor and Novum’s patches are once again available for download.

This is actually a two-for-one deal, which actually means I’m back on schedule overall since I think I missed posting one download last week.

Anyhow, I’ve restored the 1.18 and 1.19 patches for Ultima 9. These two patches are basically required to make Ascension run well on any system, and the 1.19 patch in particular seems to be necessary to get Ascension running on modern graphics hardware. At least, that was my experience when I tried to re-install the game earlier this year.

Another advanced configuration utility — or set of utilities, as the case may be — for Ultima 9 is once again available for download.

Reader enirya alerts us to the following:

Spoony from spoonyexperiment.com is doing a series of reviews of the Ultima games, starting at Akalabeth and apparently he intends to go all the way up to Ultima 9 and Ultima Online. Thought you might be interested to know.

This leads me to think that I need to update and expand my list of links! Do give Spoony’s work a look-see, good reader. It sounds like an ambitious undertaking.

Update: You can find his Akalabeth review here, and his Ultima 1 review here.

If you’ve ever had the displeasure of attempting to manually edit the options.ini configuration file for Ultima 9, you might be interested to learn that there is an easier way. This utility from Xenerkes Dragon, which is once again available for download, allows you to edit almost every configuration setting for Ascensionvia a neatly-formatted, tabbed interface.

The full translation of Ultima 9 into Spanish (text only, no audio) is once again available for download.

Okay, granted, there wasn’t actually a download that I needed to restore for the Redemption project entry. It still needed an updated image and a few tweaks to the descriptive text, and these have been made.

The Titans don’t have much to report on at this time, although we do bid team member Direhaggis congratulations for being granted his Ph.D!

Other highlights from the report include Zini’s brief mention of a fully-implemented cooking system, and various team members commenting on work done on interior worldbuilding. Britannia, as the Titans will tell it, sounds as though it will be very much alive indeed!

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.

Work proceeds apace on Ultima IX: Redemption — the team has been working on NPCs in places like Vesper, on dungeons like Covetous and Hythloth, and on the in-game tutorials (among many other things).

They’re also in need of a 2D artist…so, if drawing is your thing, drop them a line.

When I was forced to switch hosting companies — moving away from Canaca over to MediaTemple — I thought I’d lost my most current version of Aiera’s file archives. Yes, I had backups, but as I have learned over the last few months, I allowed too much time to lapse between backups; there were some files that were, apparently, forever lost.

Today was almost one of those days.

It started with someone asking for me to restore the download for the Ultima 9 Freeform Savegame. Which I finally got around to, today. However, it turned out that the ZIP archive for the savegame was…how shall I say this?…corrupt.

And believe me, there is not another copy of this thing anywhere on the Internet that I (or, rather, Bing and Google) can find. Not good.

So on a whim, I scoured my Gmail archives, and found the IP address for my old hosting server. Hoping against hope, I opened up Filezilla and tried my old account credentials. And somehow (I know not how)…it worked!

Seriously…it was like Christmas, the sequel.

I’m not sure, but I think I might just have everything back. I still have to check, but I’ve got a good feeling about this.

Update: the one file I was missing and feared to be lost — the download for Ultima Underworld for Dungeon Keeper — was among the recovered files. YES!