Beautiful Britannia: Cove and Eastward
Firstknight, as Iceblade mentioned in his Forgotten World update, has been busily working on expanding the map of Britannia in Ultima 9. Cove, and the area east of it, has occupied much of his attention, and the results have been impressive:
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- Cove
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- The Cove town square
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- One of the caves
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- The other cave
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- Cove from above
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- East of Cove
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- The shrine
Commenting on his work, Firstknight had this to say:
In the last 3 months I’ve developed a new method, which allows me to insert groups of objects from other maps. In fact, it’s a bit tricky, but works in the end. One of the screens shows a new weapon store in cove, which was reused from an old map. Now that Valclav has a nice store in Cove, the plan is to implement a schedule for him, so that he can walk home to Minoc in the evening and come back the next morning. Other screens show off a pair of caves, which were also reused from another old map.
So, with the added buildings (there is even a working windmill!), combined with some terrain motifications, the city of Cove…well, it looks like a little city now, don’t you think?
After that, I reworked the terrain of the Cove expansion, and created a more interesting landscape. One of the screens shows a river with a mountain in the background. Another screen shows the shrine (from some distance); it’s now located at the eastern edge of the island.
As always, the screenshots from Beautiful Britannia look nothing short of amazing. I can’t wait to actually play through this expanded part of the world when the next release from the project is…er…released. Yes.
FK really has an eye for detail. And remember these are very preliminary work in progress shots. I would expect the terrain will look much less uniform upon release.
These shots really do look impressive, and there is already quite a lot of progress visible in terms of refining the terrain.
Indeed, I fell out of my chair when I saw them. I thought he was too busy to spend much of any time on BB and then I saw this amazing work of art. Definitely looking forward to the next internal release of the map files.
Many Thanks, friends.
And even if it will be difficult to make much progress over 2013 (because of a new “real life” job situation), I can tell you, that the methodics i’ve developed in late 2012 will help alot, because they are really very effective, especially when it comes to decorate larger outdoor areas.
One other thing I’ve not mentioned yet is, that there are quite some new textures seenable, most of them on the houses. Progress on terrain textures has also been made (snow is finished, complete with transitions, and also some more), so terrain textures are about 75% finished now.
Further i’ve played around with flower textures, and could made some improvements here and there, screens of this can be seen within the next post (hope this will be within Q1/2013).
Fantastic! Just fantastic! I’m always looking forward to seeing new releases! Glad to hear terrain textures are almost finished, the grass and road textures make the game look AMAZING, and finishing those off so there are no out of place old textures would be incredible.
The new terrain looks wonderful too. And I always love bugfixes.
On kind-of related yet not really related note, I found a previously undiscovered area in Covetous. On Level 4, there is a chamber full of treasure with a small living area beyond the walls behind the transition point from the lift. Pretty cool actually, but you have to use the fly cheat to reach. Still, I know I’ll be incorporating it into Forgotten World. Really cool stuff.