Iceblade has posted a lengthy update to the Forgotten World website:

I recently found where I had already compiled the patched files, and the patch is now being given a reasonably thorough beta testing. Expect a release sometime in August.

The patch includes the previous fixes for music and the companions. The major addition with this patch is a fix that bypasses the Rune and Sigil bug altogether following shrine cleansing. In addition, the Moonglow Catacombs elevator should now work repeatedly, thus allowing players to travel to the Moonglow catacombs as much as they want with having to cheat. I also finished Dermont’s little schedule so that you should now find him inside the graveyard during the day and in the pub at night. We did, however, observe a limitation in the scheduling system, sleeping in the game prevents schedules from progressing. A rather troublesome issue that we will be looking at fixes for in future.

In other news, work on animation editing is progressing quite well. We now have a viewer that can show wireframe meshes from the game carrying out individual animations from the animation files. This is a major step in developing a convertion tool as we now know the animation format well enough to display it.

The post goes on for a few paragraphs after this, and explains the Forgotten World team’s intention to implement full NPC scheduling in the game. Or re-implement them, rather; they were implemented in at least some parts of Ultima 9 for a time during its initial development, but were turned off both because the system was still buggy and because the performance toll was, on systems of the day, rather severe. Other minor features that could also be implemented are discussed, and the poll question (visible on the Forgotten World main page) asks which minor feature the team should focus on implementing for their first milestone.

So…click on over, look at the options, and pick the one you’d like to see first!