Forgotten World: New Team Member, Minor News
Iceblade has posted a minor news update to the Forgotten World website, in which he announces the arrival of a new team member:
We are glad to welcome Asmon to the Forgotten World team. He will be joining the Forgotten World Design Team as well as helping me add new books into the game. In addition, he will be one of our world builders when the FW world builder is ready.
Iceblade has also updated the Forgotten World website slightly, in particular noting that one of the project’s goals is to expand the size of Britannia in Ultima 9 to be about four times its current size.
The team has also made some other progress:
In other news, I will admit that little progress has been made in the past week or so on decoding UIX’s triggers and properties. Even so, work is progressing on a map saving function for our World Builder, which involves actually rebuilding the map files from scratch rather than just editing the original files. So this will indeed be a big step toward a complete World Builder once all of the bugs have been ironed out.
On the design side, plenty of progress is being made currently and many details from dungeons to towns to overall plot are becoming more fully developed.
I also recently played through Ultima IX, and I now have a better idea of why certain bugs are occurring, so when I have some time I will start to work on that part. First up, though, is finishing up my bug fixes for other issues such as music transitions for Minoc and Valoria and one or two other bugs I’ve been working on. Hopefully, I will have it completed soon.
This team has proven, time and again, that it is capable of very rapid progress and sudden, revelatory developments. I would imagine we can expect their next patch release sooner, rather than later.
As to their design changes…I’ve seen a bit of what they have been planning, and I must say that I’m really excited for it. They have found a few interesting things in the game that were built but never used for the final release, which they plan to make use of as part of their efforts to expand the world. Trust me: you’ll like it when you (eventually) see it.
intriguing!
Good news all around, but the part about making Britannia four times as large is particularly interesting. Does this mean the scale will be increased by a factor of two? As in 1×1 becomes 2×2, which is four times the area? Could mean that additional “lands” are added, since from what I’ve heard (haven’t played, sadly), Ultima IX wasn’t a continuously-loading environment and was sectioned off.
If anything is going to make me play Ultima IX, it will be this project. To date I’ve been holding off because I fear the anger it will create knowing my own disposition about the series.
In any case, keep kicking ass… I’d love to see another ambitious project (or any project, really) succeed.
Ultima IX does appear to be pretty much seamless looking at least. It is, as far as I can recall, multiple maps in actuality though. Still, if they could pull off resizing the land and making it look good in the process that’d be nice to see.