Beautiful Britannia: Castle Britannia And Foliage Improvements
Firstknight, from the Beautiful Britannia project, sends word of his team’s latest progress:
First, I have to tell you, that Viriathus, while still very motivated to create textures for UIX, has to take on some serious “real life” tasks, and therefore will discontinue his work for at least the next 3 months.
Because of this situation, I decided to rework LB Castle in a more simply way on my own (mostly recoloring), so that got it done for the next BB release in september. Further I made a good progress with the terrain textures including transistions lately (about 50% of them are done now) as well as with foliage (grass, tree leaves, flowers, about 60% are finished here).
And, Hawkwind from the sister project “Forgotten World” was able to create a list of textures used by the 3D models, which will help me in creating texture upgrades from now on, because I don’t have to search for the texture codes first. Now that’s how a joint venture works!
I’ve posted four screens to give an impression how the actual build looks like.
Notice all the little hints and tells he drops. Not only can we expect a new Beautiful Britannia release come September, but we can also infer that the long-silent Forgotten World team have, it seems, been tinkering with the 3D models used by the game. Interesting!
Anyhow, here are the four screenshots Firstknight sent. I think you’ll all agree they look great:
Castle Britannia!
The bay near Yew.
Same bay...now you can see Yew!
Moar grasses! Pretty trees!
I’ve scaled these pictures down a bit; you can find the full 1920×1080 screenshots at the Forgotten World gallery. And I have to ask: does anyone else think it’s just awesome that they’ve managed to get the game to run at full HD resolution? Because I think that’s just fantastic. (Update: Apparently this is not as impressive as I think it is. Apparently, the game supports it out of the box. Which is cool, really…though unexpected.)
Seriously, that picture of Castle Britannia looks incredible! Dungy wants more!
Nice work, as always.
Having never played Ultima IX, what the hell are the dark little humanoid creatures on the left and right? Statues? Looks kind of creepy, like gothic lawn gnomes frozen in mid action.
I believe they are groundskeepers…
Sanctimonia: Yeah, the shot here is from an elevated point (maybe the mayor’s house?), and the massiveness of the castle throws off the perspective. The little guy on the left is a groundskeeper; the other guy is a castle guard.
Yeah one of the cool thing about UIX is that you can run it at basically any resolution, all you need to do is edit the .ini file.
Things is not perfec though since it’s not true widescreen: it actually cuts the top and bottom of the picture which leads to some UI issues in the journal and books.
I don’t know if that is an issue that can be solved but that would be awesome.
Thanks, friends!
Some hints to the 2012 release(s):
This will be mainly content upgrades, means upgrading the other areas in a way similar to yew, but of course the look of the different areas will be kept different. And further I want to make some use of the old maps, here I will have to do some additional research, to know how the old content could be used best.
Retexturing will be also included, but not that much as it is with this release. I think there be 70% of my available time used for content upgrading and 30% for retexturing then.
Reason is, that I have so many ideas related to content upgrading, and I’m already curious about, what is possible for me to create in the end.
WOW. That does indeed look quite beautiful!
Is this just a Graphics Project? Or is it Graphics and fix the horrible story mod? 😉
Pretty, this is oh so pretty!
It’s a both type of project. Apparently the graphics will be fixed first and released. And sometime down the road the storyline will be fixed.
I can’t wait till the storyline is finished. The longer I wait the fresher this game will be to me. Every time I see these screens it remind of the battle music and bad memories come back. Take your time guys! When it’s done lets make this a game/project to have fond memories of playing through!
Actually, its technically three projects:
Beautiful Britannia, which seeks to upgrade graphics and add some additional content like side maps to explore and hidden treasures around the vanilla Britannia map.
Ultima IX patches, which will actually fix as many bugs as possible.
Then there is Forgotten World, a rebuild of Ultima IX using the original engine. Many parts will be kept or tweaked, while others will be significantly changed such as topology and towns. The storyline will remain essentially the same with improvements (to strength plot points) and expansion to fill in needed or too subtle details (especially about the relationship between the Guardian and the Avatar).
Iceblade! Long time, no see!
How are things? How’s the project? Send me some news when you get a minute; people have been asking about Forgotten World lately!
Posted.
Oh!
That works! Thanks. I’ll post some news of it tomorrow, then. Or today, now. But later.
I gotta ask: is there any plan for a separate Beautiful Britannia that would only be about improved graphics for vanilla Ultima IX ?
That’s not to say additional content and maps are not interesting, but it feel it would be nice to be able to enjoy could old plain Ultmia IX without any change outside graphical improvements.
BB and FW are separate in as far as the maps go (though the worldbuilding starting point will be the BB maps – at least on incarnation of them), we will of course share the improved textures.
As for whether or not BB will be released without additional areas/hidden treasures in the final build, I’m not sure.
Well at least I can tell you have one interested person about a BB without additional areas and stuff. :O
@Sergorn:
Yes, this is possible.
The High-Res-Textures are stored in these modified files:
bitmap16.flx
sdinfo16.flx
BB comes with somes model changes, means I exchanged some of the “too low poly” models with better looking ones, and the textures are related to the “new” models. Means, that in addition you need the modified version of:
sappear.flx
So, using only those 3 files from the BB release result in a “Original UIX”, but with high-res-textures.