Iceblade has just posted a lengthy — and I do mean long! — update to the Forgotten World website, which brings news of some amazing progress made not just on the in-house editor that the Forgotten World team have been working on, but also in their unending quest to fix as many bugs in the game as possible.

Here’s as brief a taste as I felt I could get away with:

I am finally putting our tools to good effect. The advancements in our primary editor along with a rapidly expanding library of trigger command definitions have allowed me to crack the scripting around a number of bugs and figure what went wrong or what is missing. As a result, I have fixed in less than a week 5 different bugs. Yes you read that right 5 bugs. Some small and some more involved.

For those who have attempted to re-enter Deceit, they will find the the door is locked. I have corrected this issue and simultaneously fixed any potential problem where a player finds themselves stuck between the wall and the offending door being already locked before it even closes all the way. In addition, I have worked around a bug that even the world builders were stumped by. If you click on the globes in the Shop of the Two Moons (Moonglow’s magic shop), an elevator will appear that takes you to the catacombs. If you click on one of the globes again, however, the elevator doesn’t disappear. The scripting commands for this event are there, but they must have run into an issue with their conceal/reveal functions. Specifically, the elevator and the display case either shrink out of existence or enlarge into existence. Or at least they are supposed to. Upon reimplementing their script, the elevator shrinks out of the scene. The display case does appear, but it fails to enlarge leaving behind a tiny, little display case with a scale property of 1. It would be cute if it wasn’t so frustrating. My best guess is that the enlarging reveal and shrinking conceal functions have code to stop the activity if a potential collision is detected. Honestly, it is amazing that what they did even worked once. Anyway, I changed the reveal and conceal command parameters so that the objects fade in and out, which looks great and works repeatedly. You can switch from the display case to the elevator and back all day without any bugs. I also fixed a bug with the crates in the catacombs not disappearing when they are supposed if you smash them.

And yes, the rest of the post is filled with more news of Iceblade’s progress in removing bugs and issues from Ultima 9. I’ve actually had the good fortune to be able to speak with him — or at least listen to him, such as it is — on Facebook over the course of the past week, as he has worked on many of these issues. The speed with which he can diagnose, fix, and test solutions to bugs in the game really is something that has to be seen to be believed.

He has also added a bunch of new screenshots (to the second gallery on that page; scroll down), which I have re-produced here:

This is some incredible news and progress from Forgotten World. And the best part?

I had originally planned to present more here, but I think this has already become quite a massive update. So stay tuned for something special next week.

Exciting!