New Beautiful Britannia Screenshots
Firstknight sent me a pair of screenshots by email, showing the fruits of his latest work on the Beautiful Britannia project:
Shoreline
Mountains
:extralife:
Now, like me, you’re probably thinking “well, that doesn’t look like much!” But you’d be wrong. Look again, Dragons and Dragonettes; what is it that you’re looking at? Ignore the plants and textures for a moment, and look once more. What do you see?
Firstknight explains:
No new textures this time.
And, as you already noticed, these areas are very unfinished yet.
So, what’s so special then ?
The position! In the original game you will see only water there!
These areas shows terrain, which was moved from map 5 onto the northeast of cove, and decorated with foliage after that. Cove island is planned to become 3 times bigger than in the original game.
Of course trees, rocks, and more have to be added before releasing this, but I thought it would be a good idea just to show, that there is also a map upgrade planned (and not only rextexturing and adding foliage), and how this will be sized. So I’ve created two different screens, whichs shows the new mountain view from Cove and Minoc.
Now…look at the pictures again. Suddenly, they seem a lot more exciting, no?
I would like to add that while the Beautiful Britannia Game World will be more of a modification and expansion of the original U9 game, Forgotten World will be a largely rebuilt game world. To increase compatibility between playing the two mods, we plan to create a launcher that will allow players to select the mod they wish to start up. In addition, this will allow players to have seperate sets of savegames, so the in-game journal doesn’t get filled with saves for both projects. Additional options for using the first Ultima IX mods (Dialogue, Economy, Monster) will also be included to allow for a much more customizable experience without requiring any file managing on the part of the user.
As FW is a good time away from even a demo, the launcher will be at a lower priority. Still, at the very latest, such a launcher will be included with the first actual Forgotten World Demo Map (holiday maps don’t count).
Sorry, I’m still confused about whether both FW and BB can be played at the same time, along with with the others. It sounds like your implying no, especially as they are progressing independently, but I feel like I’ve heard both ways. It’s not out of the question with other engines but maybe it is with this.
Congratulations on unlocking Cove though, tis a lovely city. I just hope I need not choose between it’s beauty and the enhanced plot and tricks.
FW and BB will be using the same engine, but are quite different projects, which will be not compatible “per default”.
As Iceblade already explained, FW will be a largely rebuilt, both plot and world related.
BB will be smaller in scale, with a focus on detailed surroundings and textures of higher resolution.
Further Expansions of the “too small” continents are planned (Cove, Moonglow, New Magincia, Trinsic) as well as fixing some “World Building bugs” like the position of Empath Abbey. The plot will not be changed, and the main dungeons will leave nearly unchanged.
These latest screens just show, that an expansion of cove is planned, and that it’s based on parts of the map.5-terrainfile. My idea is to provide new screens every month, this can be seen as a “development diary” in some way.
And, I’m very sure that I will be able to provide stunning content for even the most “demanding customers”, as WTFDragon is one for sure 😉
You after having tried the latest Beautiful Britannia… I gotta admit this project just doesn’t feel for me.
This is in a no way a criticism of the project – if anything it is very impressive, the new textures are great and much more detailed… but to me it just “feels” wrong.
What I mean is that in term of style it’s just not the same anymore – it doesn’t feel like the same game/Britannia. Each texture of Ultima IX has its own vibe and with new ones it’s just not quite the same because they are of course different textures and not just higher res version of the old one. But I mean you know for instance the grass just isn’t the same, the paths have a different shade of brown and many other small details like that. This will probably work better with FW since it’s supposed to be its own thing, but somehow in vanilla U9 this feels wrong.
I think to be fair that retexturing is just isn’t my thing, because I get this feeling everyime I try a retextured version of another game – the gain is there but it just doesn’t convey the same feel to me, which is why I tend to prefer to stick to the original low res textures even if there are better textures available because it does’t feel quite right (this is why I never played Oblivion or Fallout 3 with one of the many hires textures Mods, because they just change the feel of the games).
Oh well… guess I’ll stick with the U9BB.exe, the hidistance settings and the bug fixes
I can fully understand this, Sergorn.
Every new texture changes more of the style of UIX, and the final product (if there is one someday) will provide a very different look for the whole game.
The original UIX is a game of great style, but feels a bit unfinished to me. Now, I for myself got the possibility to change this.
My motivation (which is still burning within me) is just to create a gane, which I love for my own and want to play. And (thanks to WTFDragon and this platform called Aiera) is easy to share all this work with others, and give them a change to try and compare.
It will be compatible in the sense that you can play both projects on the same installation of Ultima IX. A launcher will be made available that will allow to you easily switch between the three versions of Ultima IX (vanilla – IE the original maps), BB versions of those maps, and the new maps created for FW. All without having to the rename, copy or paste a single file.
Easy install and intuitive launcher.
Not sure how releases of everything will work at the moment. More than likely we will have three separate mod packages (patches for the vanilla game, BB, and FW) that can downloaded separately and a separate download for an installer tool that will check for the packages and allow the player to selectively install and play the various packages.
From my experience, changing or improving textures often leads to an immediate, gut response. Doing this for an Ultima game only amplifies it. As such, a subtle change like making a red dirt tile less red can make the game look less canonical if not more natural. A good change though, no? (U6 dirt –> real dirt)
I say mess with the textures as much as possible and come up with something cool-looking. Experiment. Treat it like a window theme in your DE. It feels right when all the textures look like they were made for the same light levels and color transitions.
Also, there are two sets of textures and related files and two sets of savegame files. The projects may share similar goals and common data files, but they are two projects.