I missed one thing in yesterday’s Forgotten World news post. Obviously, the release of the new, music-correcting patch was the biggest part of the news, but buried in the team’s announcement message for the patch’s release was another wee tidbit of information:

I will be updating the Screenshots page as well over the next few days. I did add a couple of screenshots. First, some of you might know how hard it is actually make a decent map of New Magincia in-game (taking aerial pictures of the island), in fact, it is essentially impossible to get a good picture and a composite just looks terrible. Well I decided to go ahead and make a map of the island using our very own editor. The map is currently uploaded to our screenshots page (sans labels). There is another screenshot that I uploaded that is actually one I took years ago. I found it rather amusing and kind of apt given breakthrough we’ve made toward decoding Ultima IX. The caption reads “I fought U9, and I won (2006).”

You can find the team’s screenshots here.

There’s also this new bit of news:

…there is one area of our toolkit that could use improvement and that is our World Editor. As can be seen in the recent new Magincia screenshot, the core of the editor is there, but there remains some performance issues, missing features (like editing of some of each object’s parameters and the ability to add new objects to the gameworld), and reincorporation of fixed object rendering (which is a well known format). Unfortunately, our primary programmer remains effectively inactive due to nonfatal health issues. We therefore have a major hole in our development team and encourage anybody with some fundamental c++ skills and an interest in Ultima to join our team. The team is easy going, we are very considerate of real life issues that come up from time to time, and there are no deadlines put on any member (well except myself maybe). Just believe me, when I say you will most definitely not regret joining.

So if, Dragons and Dragonettes, you have some skill with C++ and a love of Ultima (oh, and free time), do drop the team a line. A full-fledged Ultima 9 worldbuilding application would be…beyond impressive, really. I’d download it.