We haven’t heard all that much from the Forgotten World project over the last little while, and Iceblade has posted an explanation for why that is. (In two words: Star Citizen.) As the initial excitement over that has died down some, Iceblade has returned to the Ultima side of life, and has decided to try something he hasn’t done before.

That would be: play Ultima 7. Along the way, he has taken the opportunity to mess about with all the capabilities of Exult and Exult Studio, and has even modified the castle on the Isle of Fire to serve as a fine fortress for his Avatar. (See the second gallery on the page at that link; you’ll have to scroll down a bit.)

But: how does this related to Ultima 9 and Forgotten World?

You guys know I can’t wait for a time when I can add objects directly to the U9 maps.

So what else, well I have been looking over my town designs and I’ve started working on a basic city layout for Trinsic using top-down images of in-game buildings. It’s just something more usable than the simple, hand-drawn layouts I’ve currently done for several towns.

While FirstKnight remains ever busy IRL, he has still managed to make some excellent progress on the Eastern Expansion for Beautiful Britannia and work on Cove is progressing quite nicely.

Hawkwind has remained rather busy as well for the past several months, so little additional update on the editor. Still it works for editing nonfixed objects, which is what I need for patching, so I’ve got something to keep me busy…. once I’ve conquered U7 ;).

Oh, and it has been brought to my attention that I neglected to add our latest patch to our downloads page: 1.19h. It has been out for months now, so nothing new for those who found it over at our Codex page.

He goes into some detail about some of the problems facing the team’s current efforts as well; skeletons, for example, continue to be a pain.

There is also a new poll on the main page of the Forgotten World site:

..our next poll question is about U9’s magic. While our plans for changes to Ultima IX’s magic system and spells are limited mainly to background text and story-related alterations, we do intend to at least make magic something more useful in the game. So what would you like to see done to make magic more interesting?

Hit up the project site to see an expanded explanation of the poll options.

As always, it’s great to hear that this project — and its counterpart, Beautiful Britannia (but more on that in an upcoming article) — are doing well and making progress.