Beautiful Britannia – Project Information

by Iceblade · Published January 6, 2011 · Updated October 19, 2024

General Information:

BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA is a project, which improves Ultima IX Ascension by adding more objects to the overworld and providing new textures of higher resolution. Beginning with Beautiful Britannia 2012 there will expansions of particular areas, starting with Cove.

BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA is created using Firstknight’s self-developed ingame-creation methodics, combined with hex editor coding and the usage of an self-written tool for automated code changes. But no changes will be made to the textfiles, so the modification will be compatible with all localized versions of Ultima IX Ascension.

Current Release – Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3:

The main focus for this release was to bring in more high-res textures.

Features of this release:

Fully playable version of Ultima IX Ascension
Main continent upgrade: 30% finished (Yew area upgrade: 90% finished)
150+ new highres textures

Quick Install instructions:

Unzip the Release into your Ultima IX install directory (where u9.exe is located, otherwise the Installer will not work)
Now you have a new directory within your Ultima IX install directory, named BB, with a Subdir named BB2011R2, further the Installer called BB2011R2.cmd
To the next please run BB2011R2.cmd
At the first start the Installer creates a Backup of the original files in the BACKUP Subdir of the BB2011R2 directory.
Enter 1 for installing the BB2011R2 (Enter 2 for restoring the previous installation)
Now please start a new the game or use a early savegames from the earth map or stonegate.

Necessary settings for options.ini to use the new textures:

[Performance]
Use16BitTextures=1
UseCompressedTextures=0

Further recommended settings for options.ini:

[Performance]
FarClippingPlaneDistance=12000
MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=9000
MaxObjCullSize=12
CullStartDist=4500
DungeonClippingPlaneDistance=6000

MaxMeshesPerFrame=100
MeshCacheMemorySize=512000000
MaxInstancesPerFrame=200

UseTerrainDetailLevels=0

[Lighting]
LightQuality=3

[Game]
Game Rasterizer=2
LODScale=8.0

The Release is available for Download on the project section of Beautiful Britannia on Ultima:Aiera:

https://ultima9.ultimacodex.com/beautiful-britannia/

I recommend to check out the latest screens to see what you will get.

Next Release – Beautiful Britannia 2012:

The next release will provide completely reworked terrain textures in HighRes (including all transition textures), further some more Highres object textures.

But the main feature will be the expansion of cove island.

Features of this release: