There are a couple of pieces of good news — including one piece of what might be big news — from the Forgotten World team. The first is that the team itself has grown, with a few well-known names signing on:

Axiom has joined our Forgotten World design team and brings industry experience in design and worldbuilding. In addition, Blu3vib3 (a major contributor to the Codex Wiki) has offered to write some fairly ‘pedantic’ books to flesh out Britannia in Forgotten World. In addition, Lord Eternal Dragon has just joined this past week. He brings industry worldbuilding and coding experience and will act in multiple capacities including tool development, worldbuilding/design, and some 3D modeling (buildings and simple objects). Progress on Forgotten World’s designs continues with significant developments in Trinsic amongst other much more widespread story details.

There is also this detail, which could prove to be tremendously significant in the future:

Also, it would appear that the nonfixed object writer code for our editor is functional now. We can’t find any more crashes with the resulting rewritten file, but we want to be sure that the rewritten nonfixed files don’t have bugs in them. As such, we are sending out a call for testers to replay and run around Britannia to let us know if you find the game crashing in unusual locations/ways on the surface map. All you have to do is replace the nonfixed.9 in your runtime folder with the nonfixed.9 found within this download…and report back to us crashes you find.

The nonfixed files that Ultima 9 draws upon are designed to be editable, but are evidently quite difficult to create from scratch. If in fact the Forgotten World team have cracked the secret of how to do so, that would (as Iceblade explained to me in an email) be a major stepping stone on the road to creating a full-fledged editing suite for the game.

Anyhow, I’ve added the new nonfixed file as a download to the project entry, so go…grab, test, try, and report back!