Beautiful Britannia demo released!
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the release of Ultima 9, Firstknight and the rest of the Beautiful Britannia team have decided to release an early demo of their ambitious in-engine project to make the world of Ascension more lush.
The demo — which can be obtained from the project entry — offers two maps (“Britannia” and “Way to Despise”) and also features a special launcher program. The launcher allows you to select which map to start the game with, where in that map to start at, and controls to quickly modify viewing distance and graphics quality. The team’s fog-disabling technique is also supported.
Dust off that old copy of Ultima 9 and give this one a try!
First, a big THANKS to WTFDragon for hosting the demo!
Install instructions:
* Unzip the Demo into a folder of your choice
* Install the VB6 Runtime Files
* Start Launcher.exe
* Define your UIX Install Dir (the Launcher makes a suggestion by reading the registry)
* Restart the Launcher once, now it’s ready for use
Usage:
* Select the Map
* Select your starting point (I recommend Yew, it’s the most finished part)
* For the “Disable Fog” Mode you need a savegame
* Try out different settings for view distance and quality, especially when in “Disable Fog” Mode
* Start the game
Really looking forward to this project! Thanks for all the hard work. I’m having some trouble getting the demo to work in Windows 7 however. The VB6 Runtime extracts but doesn’t seem to install and the launcher will not do anything when I try to run it.. any ideas? Thanks again!
I’m really happy about, that you like the work we did so far, Menion. I also have to say the Beautiful Britannia is only to 10% finished atm, because until 2008 we mainly worked on decoding, and 2009 was the first year, where we get more productive and made the first step towards an playable product.
To the Windows 7 related problem:
Could it be that you are using Windows 7 x64 ?
However, here is a detailed information from MS itself about the VB6 support in Windows 7:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbrun/ms788708.aspx
I hope that you can find a working solution for your problem there, and if that’s the case, then please report it back here.
Ah, I am using the x64 bit version! I didn’t even think of that. I’ll see what I can figure out and let you know if I get it working.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CB824E35-0403-45C4-9E41-459F0EB89E36&displaylang=en&displaylang=en
is the correct download to install and make it run. On Wine I noticed that I needed comdlg32 to make the launcher work. Extracting the cmdlg32.cab from the above download, extracting then cmdlg32.ocx from the cab and executing “regsvr32 comdlg32.ocx” mad it work.
Add ot it the same work for mscomctl.cab nad its mscomctl.ocx (both ocx need to go into the Windows/system32 folder)
Dominus, that did the trick… thanks for the info! Firstknight, the changes look great! Looking forward to the final product!
I’m very happy, that you I like the work we did so far, Menion.
It’s also very good to hear that UIX as well as our demo launcher runs well on Windows 7 x64.
A big thanks to Dominus for helping out!