Beautiful Britannia: Rock and Cave Textures!
Okay, before I begin, you all need to see this:
That. Looks. Great!
My jaw basically dropped when I saw this image in and amongst the set of preview pictures that Firstknight sent me this week. Periodically, as you’ll all hopefully recall, he sends me a handful of screenshots demonstrating recent progress made with Beautiful Britannia, which I dutifully share with all of you.
But this might just be the first time something he has sent me has stopped me in my tracks and made my jaw hang open. The cave texture above looks absolutely fantastic, and it just works for the caves in Ultima 9. Seriously…I would gladly re-play Despise again just to be able to enjoy the cave walls with these new textures!
Now, there are some other texture changes that Firstknight wanted to show off…so I’ll just stop gushing and share what else he sent my way:
Approaching a cave.
Those cliffs look waaaaay better...
Rocky road!
Oh, and one more example of the cave textures:
Seriously. This looks awesome.
Firstknight was…somewhat surprised by my rather enthusiastic reply, and he replied that he might try and have a “work in progress” release of Beautiful Britannia ready for next week some time. If that materializes, Dragons and Dragonettes, you will of course be the first to know!
Brings a tear to me eye.
It is indeed impressive. Can’t wait to see more.
Maybe it’s been too long since I played U9, but I don’t really see the difference.
Actually that was unfair, I do see a difference in the cliffs, which do look better.
Kenneth: If you want to impress people with these, you have to make “before and after” shots.
Infinitron:
What, you mean the sub-par cave rock texture from the first game isn’t seared into your memory? Must just be me, then. 😉
I think I’ve made that suggestion to Firstknight before (he provides me the screenies; I’ve no direct control over them). Perhaps, in his excitement to show off a new, cool development, he forgot.
Yeah, to be fair I think the improved textures and such are much more apparent ingame that from the screens. The latest demo that definitly makes the game sharper even if I’m not that fond of the textures style personally.
Thanks for your comments, friends.
Please give me one week, I will provide a release here on Aiera then.
If you try it out, it will be easier for you all here to receive an impression.
Lawl, I just looked up the u9 caves. As I too could not tell an immediate change. Holy smokes! This is much nicer than flat stalagmites lining the walls of the caves.
Thanks for Testing, Micro Magic!
With the release next week I will bring in some comparison shots, so that you can see what you will get.
Those are some pretty sharp looking rocks. Yeah it is easy to forget that most people aren’t that familiar with the original game textures like we are.
One look at those caves sure rocked my world.
Love the new textures! I thought you one time said it was going to be difficult to update the dungeon cavern textures. What happened? I really enjoyed your last release of Beautiful Britannia. Have you finished updating all the mountain and grass tiles since then?
Some of the terrain textures including transistions are still missing in this R3 release, for which i’d set the focus on rock and cave textures. But very soon you will get the chance to see yourself…
I have an off-topic question regarding Ultima IX. Is it possible to use the Dialogue/economy and monster patch if you have already started a game? IE load a saved game ?
The dialogue patch should work as I recall though I don’t see much point since it changes all dialogues.
But the economy/monster patchs requires the game to be restarted to take effect.
In all fairness I wouldn’t recommend the economy/monster patch – the economy part is not too bad, the the monster patch is clearly unbalanced and tends to make combat somewhat frustrating at times.
Dialogue and Economy/book patches work for all saves. The monster patch requires a fresh start from the very beginning.