Iceblade has posted a short update to the Forgotten World website. In it, he praises Firstknight’s recent excellent work on Beautiful Britannia, and details some of the progress that has been made on the Forgotten World side of things:

Currently I’m working to get the activity editor completed with full dialogs and menus, so that there is nothing left obscure from slider bars for action speed to drop-down menus for various gestures. Trigger and object property analysis is close to half way completed with almost all triggers and properties identified. Much of the remaining work is clarifying what each parameter does and then updating the trigger editor for more intuitive editing.

From our last poll, the Stones theme was voted to be most fitting for the Forgotten World version of Cove located just East of Britain. Currently, progress on our editor is slowed due to a bug in the nonfixed object file saving routine, which creates an all new nonfixed file rather than simply editing an existing. Whenever we save the primary map for U9 and load it up in the game, there are crashes at least one if not several select locations. Currently, we are somewhat baffled as to the exact cause the problem, but we are hopeful that the offending issue will be found.

Iceblade has put a new poll up at the site, asking Ultima fans what path they’d like to see in a hypothetical Forgotten World demo release. He elaborates a little bit:

Eventually, our worldbuilding will get to the stage where we will release milestones similar to Archon’s U6P; however, if we were to release a demo map of our designs, what path would you like to see in such a demo? Included in the demo would be the related towns, the dungeon, surrounding areas/islands, and cave systems. I decided against Spirituality as an option because it technically involves so many locations.

So, what would you Dragons and Dragonettes like to explore first, Forgotten World-style? Britain/Compassion? Yew/Justice? New Magincia/Humility? Moonglow/Honesty? Actually, for my money, I’d like to see a functional Moonglow release, because on my most recent playthrough of Ultima 9 it was Moonglow that proved to be the buggiest. If they can fix those issues and release a stable-ish Moonglow as a demo, I would be massively impressed.

Or, rather, even more massively impressed than I am already where this project is concerned.

Final note: Iceblade is also, according to the news post, intending to open up a new section of the Forgotten World website, which I would assume is going to either be a periodically update page or a short article series. In it, he’ll give his thoughts and commentary on vanilla Ultima 9.