2019-11-26: External News: BB and the 20th Anniversary

{Note: post made in 2024 based on comments made in 2019}

Firstknight posted over at the Ultima Codex BB project page:

2019 is the 20 Anniversary of the “beloved” Release of a certain game called “Ultima IX: Ascension”.

So I think this will be “good Timing” to provide you with some Update, why all this promising BB Screenshots back from 2013 to 2015 do still NOT result in a playable release.

Just as my companion Iceblade mentioned more than once, UIX is a beast when it comes to altering it. Every Detail you try to change increases the chance that the altered map becomes unplayable and crashes all the Time.

BB even comes to a state (that was back in 2016), where I could not continue using the current build, because it was getting more and more unstable. So the whole project has in fact halted, from 2016 until 2019.

Within this year, I found a way to reuse at least some of my work from more than 10 years, and it looks like that the current build is in a stable state now.

For this a had to remove some intense content, especially the huge moonglow expansion. In Detail, the Terrain Expansion is still there, but using so many (trigger heavy) buildings was simply too much for the UIX Engine.

So, there is still a chance, that there will be a working new release of BB in the Future, its just very difficult to say, when this will be, and what it will contain.

He further commented in the Ultima Codex News Post regarding some of the troubles he had been having with Ultima IX. He also explained how he implemented many of his changes: merging the original in-development U9 maps into the game’s final game Main Map. This methodology proving to be the source of the stability troubles in his build.

Well, the chance for a future release isn’t that bad. I was finally able to recover quite some of the developed content, and merge it into an internal build, which looks like to be stable at least.

For example, the reworked version of cove is still there. Also the worldmap is expanded as shown back in 2012, which new regions east of cove and moonglow, and west of yew. For those I included terrain from some of the oldmaps (cove and moonglow) into the worldmap.

Last but not least, I managed to further improve my wide set of tools and methodics, so stability should also be provideable for future builds.

Also, it’s good to see, that there is still interest in Ultima IX related things from the community, even 20 years after the release of the original game.

Ok, maybe this needs some further explaination.

It’s not the amount of buildings or objects to render in General, with modern hardware this is not the problem anymore.

It’s the amount of triggers and other UIX Engine related things, that causes the problems.

I had to find out, that reusing of some content from the old moonglow map was the main reason for unstable builds in the past, and it was quite time consuming to revert this.

For future builds will reuse only proofed content, for example britain types of houses seems to be save, further more simple objects like trees, flowers and grass.

In the other hand, to create a City with 20 or more buildings will still be very difficult (with exception of britain itself), because of the limited world map size.

The 1998 build of UIX was meant to have several overworld areas, which are interconnected in some way. On this basis the area maps for certain regions were planned to be 4 times larger than the areas, which get into the final release of UIX.

He further clarified regarding the engine’s major bugginess not being quantity of art assets, but the engine having to process and load numerous trigger object simultaneously.

Maybe the reason is to be found in the engines core, which was created for glide from the beginning, Direct 3D support was added later, but never reaches the stability of the glide version.

However, the moonglow houses uses trigger based doors, flying platforms and so on, which stresses the engines object handling capabilities. Looks like this trigger based object handling is the most buggy part of the engine.

As of 2024, there has been no progress or updates from First Knight regarding Beautiful Britannia. Beautiful Britannia is probably dead as a project, and it likely ended in 2020. Lack of time and engine frustrations no doubt ended First Knight’s motivation and curtailed his ability to continue work with BB.