2010-10-30 Trick or Treat

Happy Halloween my friends,

It is so nice to eat… I mean meet you. Hey wait, where are you going? I’ve got presents just for you.  Ah that brought you back.

I’ve got some good news to report.  First, Hawkwind has been in a position of late to assist us with decoding work, but he is currently unable to do any programming work on the editor or other tools meaning we still really need a new programmer.  In addition, FirstKnight has returned to assist the Forgotten World team in finishing the task of decoding the remaining files and developing a final patch for the original Ultima IX that will act as a base for both of our projects.  I’ll let Firstknight describe this new partnership in his own words:  “I’m honored that Iceblade and I have found a new form of cooperation, which will lead to better improvements for both projects in the future.  Also, new Project Information about the progress of Beautiful Britannia will be available soon directly here on the Forgotten World Homepage.”  So in future, this website will house and present news and releases for both projects Forgotten World and Beautiful Britannia.

In addition, we have the ability to import and improve textures inside the game, so we currently have a need for a texture designer.  The textures we need are 15 and 16 bit bitmaps, so the resolution improvement is not significant on paper, but the effect in-game on objects and terrain has proven to be drastic.

In other news, I fixed the poll feature, so you can now vote on which Ultima IX bug you want finished most in the next month.  Also, I will be updating the screenshots section with new software sometime this week.

So I expect, you want your gift huh, okay here it is:  I present the first holiday themed map for Forgotten World that I call “Forgotten Hallows Rise 2010.”  I’ve made some “changes” to the Avatar’s house map.  To get access it, extract the following zip into your Ultima IX directory, make the change in your options.ini to use the gamestate.ini (instructions provided in the readme) and start the game up.  The gamestate.ini file will immediately place you on the Avatar map.  Unfortunately, due to conflicts with the starting state of the savegame0, you cannot access the changes by starting the game over from the journal.  Note, you should probably reduce your FarClippingPlaneDistance=3000 and MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=2500 to improve performance.  Oh and the disappearing objects is intentional.

More of these holiday maps will be released from time to time to show off what we can do inside Ultima IX.  Enjoy the treat….or is it a trick…. Mwuahahaha

– Iceblade