Well, isn’t it a happy new year?

Firstknight surprised me overnight by uploading his latest release of Beautiful Britannia, which focuses on improving texture quality and playability in Yew. As you can see from the screenshot here, he’s made some substantial adjustments to the foliage in and around Yew, making it a bit less aggressive but no less lush and beautiful.

Here’s “the official word” from the man himself:

How can I celebrate the new new year better than with providing a new release of Beautiful Britannia!

The main focus for this release was to improve both Texture Quality and Playability in Yew (I even removed some of the bushes and trees I’ve added before), but of course the new flower, grass and tree textures improve the whole overworld.

The new Release will be available for Download within this weekend on the project section of Beautiful Britannia on Ultima:Aiera.

Features of this release:
* Fully playable version of Ultima IX Ascension

* Savegame compatible with Beautiful Britannia Demo 2010

* Main continent upgrade: 30% finished (Yew area upgrade: 90% finished)

* 20+ highres textures, including one highres terrain grass texture

Necessary settings for options.ini to use the new textures:
[Performance]
Use16BitTextures=1
UseCompressedTextures=0

I recommend to check out the latest screens to see what you will get.

I also updated the Beautiful Britannia project information, here you can find further recommended settings for options.ini as well as some infos for the next release called Beautiful Britannia 2011 R2.

As the good reader can infer from the above, I’ve already added the download to the Beautiful Britannia project entry, and have updated the corresponding project screenshot to reflect the changes made in this release.

So what art thou waiting for? Go thou and partaketh of it!