How Big Was the World In the Isometric Version of Ultima 9?
So in the comments to the news post about the Bill Randolph interview, a bit of a debate emerged after commenter Mark pulled up this screenshot from the Codex of Ultima Wisdom:
Using this as a basis, he did a bit of math, and came to the conclusion that back when Ultima 9 was still being built as an isometric game, the total size of its world would have been significantly bigger. The diagram above depicts his work and reasoning.
What say you, Dragons and Dragonettes? Are his math and reasoning sound?
I want to also give some credit to Ice blade who noticed that the coordinate s on the editor pic, combined with the scroll bar positions, point to a 2048×2048 tile world, which, at 4 feet a tile is 8192×8192.
one more interesting factoid to add:
UO’s map size appears to be 6144×4096 tiles. Since a lot of the horizontal space appears to be water, to compare it to other Ultima maps, its probably right to use 4096X4096. The tiles appear to be closer to 2 feet than 4 feet, so that gives a size of 8192 feet, or basically the same size we came up with in U9V1 above. That makes a lot of sense! These were two different teams that were working on Britannia at the same time; I wonder if they even shared assets? The U9Editor image’s inset of Britannia looks graphically quite a bit like UO.
So perhaps, if one wonders what U9V1’s Britannia feels like, at least size-wise, UO may be the best analog.
Here is a link to a map someone made within UO trying to reflect a more U4/U5 era Britannia:
http://uof.honorshard.com/index.php?topic=171.0