2011-08-30 Beautiful Britannia 2011 R2 – Release!

by Iceblade · Published August 30, 2011 · Updated October 28, 2020

Because myself and Iceblade will be working together on some difficult background tasks within the next series of months (related to decoding and creating tools, with a clear focus to the Conversation System of UIX), I have finally decided to release the current build of BB as

Beautiful Britannia 2011 R2

First, as ever, let me THANK WTFDragon for hosting the demo!

I’m using a simple batch file as Installer, so it will be working on any system, starting from Windows 98 up to Windows 7, and on x32 and x64 systems.

Features:
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* More than 100 new designed Textures (Terrain, Foliage, LB Castle, Walls), most of them in higher resolutions than the original ones.
* More than 15.000 objects added (Flowers, Grass and other plants, Butterflies, most of them around yew) to the original release from 1999.
* Contains the latest version of U9BB.EXE (supports more than one fogless overworlds, those overworlds will be implemented in future releases)

NOTES:
Terrain textures are not completely finished yet, please excuse the disburbing effects because of missing transistions.
BB2011R1 Hotfix 1 is included.

Quick Install instructions:
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* 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 using U9BB.EXE (fogless overworld) or standard U9.EXE (overworld with distance fogging).
* BB2011R2 will further work every early savegames from the earth map or stonegate.

If you want to send comments, I recommend posting a reply to the entry on Ultima Aiera, I will stop by there frequently and will also answer questions.

With this effort I hope to bring in new possibilities for both projects (FW and BB). In my opinion it’s most important now, that the great work done by Iceblade within the last months (related to triggers and NPC activities) could be used in later releases, but the behaviour is quite complex and not implementable easily without having powerful and easy-to-use tools around. Having those will boost the creation process and help to provide more high quality releases in less time in the end.

Thanks for your interest.

– First Knight