Happy Anniversary to Ultima IX
As posted by WithstandTheFury Dragon, Ultima IX is reaching its 25 anniversary since its original release way way back in 1999, though the internet isn’t very certain which day it was released Nov 22nd? 23rd? even 26th?. Ultima Codex: Ultima IX Release 25
In any case, it has been a very long time since U9 was released and even many years now since the beginning of the original Forgotten World. Starting with the Freedom Mod in 2004-2006 before the project expanded into the team-effort known as Forgotten World in May 2006. It is very unfortunate how much of Ultima IX was built in a such rapid and compiled manner. The structure of U9 has made parts hard to decipher, harder to edit, and some aspects hardcoded into the engine itself. This structure has impended much of our efforts for updating, improving, and especially expanding the original release of U9.
It has to be said that just as Ultima IX was actually multiple projects with at best moderate asset reuse during its development, Forgotten World has had multiple and varying periods. Starting from an original bright-eyed anything goes design for beautification and expansion and even rewrite of Ultima IX to a more knowledgeable and measured approach after 2010 to the project suffering from the limitations of adulthood for time allocation since 2019. In many ways, Forgotten World has become a project focused on finishing what the developers did during those months following Nov 1999 – making U9 a cleaner, more polished and functional experience.
This leads us to the current state of Forgotten World’s U9 Patch 1.20. The patch saw significant progress in this past September and October, but the working world cut time allocation yet again during November to finally finish the last handful of bug fixes and scripting implementations. With the coming Thanksgiving break in the US, the patch should see completed progress to Beta form where the final phase of testing can be performed for release on Dec 24, 2024. A Christmas gift for the Dragons and greater Ultima community!
Furthermore, we expect to work steadily this coming year 2025 for Patch 1.21, where many of the remaining quests will be fixed to finally work on any engine (particularly those in Valoria scripts) along with forcing those dang shopkeepers to keep their shoes off of the counter. A major change coming with this next patch is the new workflow with multiple script and game editors where all of us can work on scripting, editing, testing, and more importantly designing patch updates. If one method for a bug fix doesn’t work, we come up with an alternative script as a team effort.
Happy U9iversary and Happy Thanksgiving!
– Iceblade and the Forgotten World Team
