The team at Forgotten World have really, really outdone themselves this time.

First, the news: Hawkwind hasn’t been able to return to his coding role as of yet, but he has been assisting with the effort to decode the Ultima 9 data files. Firstknight has also returned to the project in a limited capacity, to offer yet more assistance with the decoding effort, and with the ultimate goal of working toward the release of a game patch that will serve as the foundation of both future Forgotten World efforts as well as for Beautiful Britannia.

Additionally, the team have managed to figure out how to modify the textures the game uses; they are looking for a texture artist to help them improve the graphical appearance of texture assets in the game. So if any of you Dragons or Dragonettes have some experience building texture graphics…drop them a line.

But the really cool thing is what gives this news post its title. Inspired by the Halloween season, the Forgotten World team have produced…a little patch:

I present the first holiday themed map for Forgotten World that I call “Forgotten Hallows Rise 2010.” I’ve made some “changes” to the Avatar’s house map. To get access it, extract the following zip into your Ultima IX directory, make the change in your options.ini to use the gamestate.ini (instructions provided in the readme) and start the game up. The gamestate.ini file will immediately place you on the Avatar map. Unfortunately, due to conflicts with the starting state of the savegame0, you cannot access the changes by starting the game over from the journal. Note, you should probably reduce your FarClippingPlaneDistance=3000 and MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=2500 to improve performance. Oh and the disappearing objects is intentional.

That’s right: to show off their prowess with the Ascension engine, Team Forgotten World have dressed up the Avatar’s house for Halloween…in a manner of speaking. You can grab the patch download from the project entry, and I do suggest you try it.

Happy Halloween!