2012-02-04 Forgotten World news at last

It is simply amazing what FirstKnight is able to accomplish using mostly a hex editor.  Images of his changes to the Cove area for Beautiful Britannia will be up soon, but you can already check them out at Aiera.

In other news, I have been very preoccupied IRL since about September, but I’m finally back at it.  Currently I’m working to get the activity editor completed with full dialogs and menus, so that there is nothing left obscure from slider bars for action speed to drop-down menus for various gestures.  Trigger and object property analysis is close to half way completed with almost all triggers and properties identified.  Much of the remaining work is clarifying what each parameter does and then updating the trigger editor for more intuitive editing.

From our last poll, the Stones theme was voted to be most fitting for the Forgotten World version of Cove located just East of Britain.  Currently, progress on our editor is slowed due to a bug in the nonfixed object file saving routine, which creates an all new nonfixed file rather than simply editing an existing.  Whenever we save the primary map for U9 and load it up in the game, there are crashes at least one if not several select locations.  Currently, we are somewhat baffled as to the exact cause the problem, but we are hopeful that the offending issue will be found.  In any case, we can save other maps without any problems, which brings me to our next poll question.

Eventually, our worldbuilding will get to the stage where we will release milestones similar to Archon’s U6P; however, if we were to release a demo map of our designs, what path would you like to see in such a demo?  Included in the demo would be the related towns, the dungeon, surrounding areas/islands, and cave systems.  I decided against Spirituality as an option because it technically involves so many locations.

Also, I am beginning a new section to the site:  Ultima IX commentary where I will go through the vanilla game and give my thoughts, impressions, and a little of background to the various areas.  It will be a little slow going at first, but progress on the commentary will pick up in time.

– Iceblade