New U9BB.EXE provides a fogless experience!
Firstknight sends the following by email:
Finally, after many many hours of intensive research for more than one year, I can present Beautiful Britannia in a new, completely fogless experience, on any system up to Windows 7!
I found out, how to modify the EXE file to use a particular “blue ambient mode”, which is used for Map.40 (Ambrosia) by default, now for Map.9 (Britannia Overworld). While Ambrosia now has the standard “black dungeon theme”, Britannia gets maybe the most important improvement possible!
The latest “Awesome screen” really shows the effect, when playing “Beautiful Britannia 2011 R1” using the following “Super HQ” settings for options.ini:
[Performance]
FarClippingPlaneDistance=14000
MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=10000
Use16BitTextures=1
MaxObjCullSize=4
CullStartDist=3000
UseCompressedTextures=0
HiResSky=1
DeadPoolLifeTime=6000
DeadPoolSize=3200
MaxMeshesPerFrame=1000
MeshCacheDeadTime=1500
MeshCacheMemorySize=256000000
MaxInstancesPerFrame=2000
UseTerrainDetailLevels=0
[Lighting]
LightQuality=3
[Game]
LODScale=8.0My system (Intel Core i5 3.33 GHz, ATI Raedon HD 5670, Windows 7 Pro) can render this scenery in 25+ FPS, even with 4xSSAA and 8xAF activated (which both are recommended, if your hardware supports them)!
The package containing the modified EXE file (named U9BB.EXE) is available for download on the Beautiful Britannia project entry.
Simply unzip the package into your Ultima IX install directory so that U9BB.EXE is located within the same directory as U9.EXE then. After that start U9BB.EXE…
…and believe!
The new EXE works with any savegame of every version of Ultima IX or Beautiful Britannia.
Regardless of whether you are playing Beautiful Britannia or the original Ultima IX, get this dowload now, it’s simply MUST HAVE!
I don’t think anything more needs to be said, good Dragons and Dragonettes. I mean, feast your eyes on this hotness:
Britannia will never be the same.
…and then get thee to the project entry and enjoy Ultima 9 as it was meant to be experienced!
FOGLESS!!!! Great! I really like this 🙂
While testing I had to find out, that the view distance is stored within a savegame.
So please setup your options.ini with higher distance values, and start a new game after that to make use of these settings.
That looks… SPECTACULAR! First Knight, you’re making ultima IX do amazing things!
That’s kind of an oddity…storing view distance in a savegame?
I wonder why they opted to do that? It doesn’t make a lot of sense with me, and I can imagine a handful of drawbacks. (e.g. What if I wanted to move a savegame to an upgraded system?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Yes, curios, but explains why it was so hard to turn off the fog in games 🙂
It does, at that.
It makes me wonder what other tidbits are stored in the save files, now. Though I’m sure we’ll learn all about that at some point.
Not much more than we already knew, actually. The vast majority of the file contains the savegame screenshot, process.dat (the current states and properties of mostly unique npcs), and current states for all of the nonfixed files (movable objects in every map visited and the backpack).
The front end stuff was somewhat elusive for me, though. Great work FirstKnight. This is by far the best improvement to date. And this isn’t the last bombshell, we got several more to be presented in the coming year or 2.
I continue to enjoy you bombshells. A fogless Britannia with new scenery, properly working music triggers, and the return of Julia and Mariah. That’s already awesome. And more to come? WHOO!
And we continue to enjoy your comments, Dungy.
Thanks for testing.