2013-01-16: External News: BB Cove and Eastward

{Note: post made in 2024 based on a news post in 2013}

First Knight’s continued work on Beautiful Britannia for U9 has produced some lovely visual results with new screenshots as shown here. He also send some commentary over to WtF Dragon at the Ultima Codex.

In the last 3 months I’ve developed a new method, which allows me to insert groups of objects from other maps. In fact, it’s a bit tricky, but works in the end. One of the screens shows a new weapon store in cove, which was reused from an old map. Now that Valclav has a nice store in Cove, the plan is to implement a schedule for him, so that he can walk home to Minoc in the evening and come back the next morning. Other screens show off a pair of caves, which were also reused from another old map.

So, with the added buildings (there is even a working windmill!), combined with some terrain motifications, the city of Cove…well, it looks like a little city now, don’t you think?

After that, I reworked the terrain of the Cove expansion, and created a more interesting landscape. One of the screens shows a river with a mountain in the background. Another screen shows the shrine (from some distance); it’s now located at the eastern edge of the island.

WtF Dragon and myself certainly had to comment on his progress:
Iceblade: “FK really has an eye for detail. And remember these are very preliminary work in progress shots. I would expect the terrain will look much less uniform upon release.”

WtFD: These shots really do look impressive, and there is already quite a lot of progress visible in terms of refining the terrain.”

First Knight commented back on the news post:

Many Thanks, friends.

And even if it will be difficult to make much progress over 2013 (because of a new “real life” job situation), I can tell you, that the methodics i’ve developed in late 2012 will help alot, because they are really very effective, especially when it comes to decorate larger outdoor areas.

One other thing I’ve not mentioned yet is, that there are quite some new textures seenable, most of them on the houses. Progress on terrain textures has also been made (snow is finished, complete with transitions, and also some more), so terrain textures are about 75% finished now.

Further i’ve played around with flower textures, and could made some improvements here and there, screens of this can be seen within the next post (hope this will be within Q1/2013).