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!

Tags: Aiera, Bing, Canaca.com, Christmas, Filezilla, Gmail, Google, Internet, Mediatemple, Ultima 9, ZIP

If so, hit up the contact form.

Tags: Ultima 9

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.

Tags: Forgotten World, Titans of Ether, Ultima 9

Actually, it sounds like the Titans are doing pretty good; they’re basically just looking for interior worldbuilders at this point.

The updates tell a similar story to past updates, of course: things are being worked on. Still, there’s a few tidbits buried in them that are worth mention:

• Titan Zini is, evidently, an absolute godsend for the team; what doesn’t he do?
• Dungeons and cities alike are in the process of being populated. The game world is coming alive, it seems.
• Direhaggis is working on endings, and has completed three so far. My question: already at three, and more to come? How many will there be, and how easy/difficult will it be to eventually see them all?
• I wonder what this undisclosed “cold” location could be? The frozen world from Underworld 2, prehaps?

Can’t wait to play this one, good reader? Yeah, me neither.

Which reminds me: general offer to all dev-teams out there at present…if you would like FTP access to the folder where I store your project’s current releases, or if you would like me to set up a folder and FTP access for you so that you can upload project releases whenever those come about, please let me know. I can’t help but think this will help streamline things greatly in the future.

Tags: FTP, Titans of Ether, Ultima 9, Ultima IX: Redemption, Ultima Underworld 2

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the release of Ultima 9, Firstknight and the rest of the Beautiful Britannia team have decided to release an early demo of their ambitious in-engine project to make the world of Ascension more lush.

The demo — which can be obtained from the project entry — offers two maps (“Britannia” and “Way to Despise”) and also features a special launcher program. The launcher allows you to select which map to start the game with, where in that map to start at, and controls to quickly modify viewing distance and graphics quality. The team’s fog-disabling technique is also supported.

Dust off that old copy of Ultima 9 and give this one a try!

Tags: Beautiful Britannia, Ultima 9

Buried in the middle of an otherwise fairly standard update is this little gem:

Direhaggis: I’m not going to get too ecstatic about it…but…I am about 10 hours away from finishing writing the main plot. I just need to do the last few scenes, the ‘main’ ending, and then that is that. I’m also working with Zini to write tutorials for all of the skills that can be done in game. The alchemy skill is pretty cool, for instance.

The Titans have made impressive progress, and it’s nice to see hints emerging that their ambitious re-invention of Ultima 9 is approaching its final stages of development. Direhaggis’ prefacing comments can probably be taken as an indicator that we shouldn’t expect a release announcement anytime too soon, although I wonder if the project’s status tracker has been updated to reflect the above-mentioned progress on the plot?

The Titans are also looking for Interior Worldbuilders and Writers.

Tags: Ultima 9, Ultima IX: Redemption

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!

Tags: Beautiful Britannia, Forgotten World, Ultima 9