Beautiful Britannia Demo 2010 released!
Firstknight has just uploaded the 2010 Beautiful Britannia demo to Aiera, and I have added it to the project entry. The demo contains the latest and greatest modifications — such as enhanced foliage and improved textures — that Firstknight has been making to Ultima 9 as his project progresses.
If you’ve been following the recent screenshots that Team Forgotten World have been releasing, you have some idea of what to expect. This demo is, as Firstknight reminds us, a fully playable version of Ultima 9…just with his modifications in some areas.
For more details, check out the Forgotten World website. Then head on over to the project entry and download the demo! (Instructions on how to install it can be found in a text file within the ZIP archive.)
Looking forward to trying it out. hope to get it working tonight
Important:
Please use the following options.ini setting to activate the texturepack:
[Performance]
UseCompressedTextures=0
I will post more settings here tomorrow (not necessary ones, but recommended).
Greetings and have fun with the demo
Firstknight
This time I’ve created a simple batch file as Installer, so it will be working on any system, starting from Windows 98 up to Windows 7, and on x32 and x64 systems.
Quick Install instructions:
===========================
* Unzip the Demo into your Ultima IX install directory (where u9.exe is located, otherwise the Installer will not work)
* Now you have new two directories within your Ultima IX install directory, named Bckp2010 and Demo2010, further the Installer called Demo2010.cmd
* To the next please run Demo2010.cmd
* At the first start the Installer creates a Backup of the original files in the Bckp2010 directory.
* Enter 1 for installing the demo (Enter 2 for restoring the original files, but I bet, you will not want to do this anymore ;-))
* Start a new the game (the demo will work with new games and early savegames from the earth map)
Firstknight
A minor thing, but “Demo2010.zip” isn’t a totally descriptive filename. Perhaps something like “BeautifulBritannia_Demo2010.zip” would be better?
Well, I won’t be changing it now, since it’s in the download manager already. 😉
Though I am generally a fan of descriptive filenames, it’s true.
I will try this tonight.
Very interesting. I’ve managed to run around Stonegate and the area around Castle Britannia, and you’ve definately added some impressive foliage to the area. The area around Stonegate seems far darker now. I don’t have a good eye for graphics, so I can’t tell what you’ve done in the way of texturing, but I’m honestly impressed. Very impressed indeed.
I’ve come as far as Dungy, running around Stonegate and Britain…
It looks very good with the added stuff (though I need to start a regular game to better compare them) the only downside is that it’s much easier to have the flora hinder your sight when you are in a fight – especially when the plants are obstructing the sight of the avatar…
I used this via Wine on OS X. Wine does not give much feedback when using the batch file, so I ended up having to do everything manually… And then U9 is not very useable via Wine since the cursor gets drawn underneath the u9 gui elements (for example, when the backpack is open, underneath the backpack – hard to manage the inventory like this…). The only way is with the glidewrapper psVoodoo (since that seems to have a bug and it doesn’T hide the system cursor, thus you can see where you click… :))
Of course this is not caused by your beautiful demo, just wanted to rant about this problem a bit… 🙂
Thanks for all your comments.
Looks like the demo is stable working so far, very good.
And yes, I will use a better name for the demo zip file next time.
To your comment, Dominus:
Yes, the flora can hinder your sight a bit when you are in a fight, but on the other side you can be surprised by your enemy (which could especially the case later in Yew), so you have to be more careful, when walking around.
Not to forgot, the highres textures can only be seen, when setting up options.ini like this:
[Performance]
Use16BitTextures=1
UseCompressedTextures=0
Means, that only the 16-bit texture file has been altered by me.
Firstknight
tried it now in VMWare, at least the hand cursor shows there 🙂
Dominus: You’re obviously running this thing on an Intel-based Mac…so why not skip the emulation entirely and just Boot Camp the darn thing?
General comment: The fact that the flora occasionally occludes the view of enemies isn’t really a point against, as far as I’m concerned. Kind of adds to the realism, really.
I’m not really fond of Windows anymore, everything I do is done on the mac these days, except for playing old Windows games. For a few things, like testing for Exult, I’ve made virtual machines (all windows since win95). I cannot imagine booting into windows and be stuck at gaming only on that OS (really, writing it down it shows how much I’m fed up with windows since I switched in summer ’09…)
Eh, fair enough…it just seems to me that emulation adds all kinds of unnecessary performance impairments. I mean, it may be that both Wine and VMware can offer 3D acceleration to the guest OS, but passing through that emulation layer still massively hampers graphics performance (in addition to introducing the potential for other glitches, some of which you’ve encountered).
Addendum: It’s a pity that Ultima 9 is listed as “Known Not to Work” under CXG‘s compatibility listings.
Finally noticed some of the new textures you used. They look truly great. Guess I had forgotten how low-res some of them were before, but the buildings in Britain look much better now. The tower you added to Britain looks spiffy too. I’m not so thrilled about Yew, though. It’s just too much. I’m running around blind.
@Dungy
Yew looks like this, because I think it should have this “deep woods” feeling, and the possiblity to get lost there is “not a bug, but a feature” therefore 😉
This Yew business sounds like one of those instances where a concept from the 2D game didn’t translate as well to the 3D. I mean, in Ultima 6, the Deep Forest was kind of a maze…in Ultima 7, they just packed the trees in nice and dense. Either way, it felt like a big, dark, deep forest. It worked in the 2D isometric view…it worked very well.
Now we have a 3D engine, and things are a tad more problematic. I would personally expect the Deep Forest to just be an endless tangle of trees and foliage, but Dungy does point out that this makes navigation a pain in the butt.
To be fair, that’s kind of what a real untamed forest feels like when you try and hike through it…but there’s the rub. How accurate a simulacrum of the real world are we willing to tolerate, when what is being simulated is something that we would naturally expect to struggle with in the real world?
hmm, got to travel there, it seems to form an opinion…
@Firstknight, anything particular you want to show off? I guess normally you don’t want to spoil too much, but I’d like to know where to keep my eyes open the most…
Hey, and why not give that tower an inside and some stairs to the top. I’d love to explore the whole thing without flying. 🙂 I’m impressed with what you’ve been able to do. I thought it would just be flowers and shrubs, but you’ve managed to include some fairly detailed 3D objects.
Oh, I see now, the tower is actually the top of Stonegate.
Yeah, their screenshot from last week kinda gave that away a bit. Interesting re-use of the asset, though, and a fine proof-of-concept where adding buildings to cities is concerned.
Update in a few hours
I’ll keep an eye out.
Wow, I see some interest here 🙂
Ok, to the “Yew point of view”:
Yes, your’e all right, it looks like i’ve overdone it here. But I see the problem not the high dense, but more in the height of the grass (and other plants). Thanks for your detailed comments here, I will try to correct this in the next demo. Yes, that’s what demos are for, to give players something to test and to exchange their point of view with the creator. Works very well here, I have to say.
Better believe I’m interested. Can’t wait to see the next patch. The whole team’s work is nothing short of awesome so far. Can’t wait to play Ultima IX with higher res textures, new maps, and bigfixes.
Check out the new update, a couple of “awesome” things there if you look hard enough.
Yeah, both I and Iceblade try hard to keep you satisfied and WtfDragon busy 😉
Ok, back to business:
As you already noticed, this Stonegate parts fits well for using as City wall’s towers in Britain, so expect more of this in the next demo.
Further I gave some thoughts to, how to optimize the playability in Yew, while maintaining the dense foliage you see in the demo, and already got some nice ideas, how to do this. Will take some time to implement, but for sure will be releaseable with the next demo.
First screens of, how this looks like, will be available within the next 3 months, so I think.