Forgotten World

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Forgotten World is a project founded by Firstknight to improve the plot and scope of &lt;a _fcknotitle="true" href="Ultima IX"&gt;Ultima IX&lt;/a&gt; and to provide a more complete experience for the player.

= Forgotten World Projects =

Based on the work of Tumbleweed Dragon, the Forgotten World team has expanded the knowledge of the files used by Ultima IX. Over time, the team has developed several individual projects meant to improve Ultima IX. The first project, Ultima IX Patches, is to finish the patching and bug fixing started by the original developers. The plan to fix all remaining bugs, plot-stoppers, incomplete puzzles, and crashes. The second project, Beautiful Britannia, undertaken by FirstKnight exclusively is to improve the visuals of the Britannian landscape and towns. This project involves adding flora around Britannia, improving terrain and object textures, and adding walls and simple structures to certain towns.

Overview
Ultima IX Ascension, a game created by Origin Systems (an Electronics Arts Division) in 1999, was an outstanding game for its time, featuring a game world in full 3D, and one of the first games ever released with an implemented physics engine. Even though Ultima IX was a milestone in the history of computer games, it suffered from numerous bugs, crashes, plot stoppers, and performance issues. In addition, the hardware requirements were too high for the time it was released. In fact, the early release played no small part in these horrendous state version 1.0 of the game. Luckily for fans, the Ultima IX programmers and designers worked diligiently to remove many of the bugs, crashes, and performance issues that ruined the experience of the game. In addition, time has healed most of the remaining performance issues in the game, and amazing enough it remains playable to do this day on most modern systems without any emulation. Still, the unofficial patch 1.19f has proven to be a necessity for improvement of performance on modern systems.

Even though, Ultima IX has been fairly bug and crash free since version 1.18f and 1.19f, there are a number of issues that remain that need to be fixed for a completely smooth gameplay experience. During our research phase, the Forgotten World team will attempt to remove these remaining bugs and crashes and improve the overall performance of the vanilla game while we move forward developing our worldbuilding tools for our primary Forgotten World Project.

Features and Changes to Ultima IX
* Various Bugs throughout the game will be fixed * Plot-stoppers will be fixed * Game crashes will be reduced by correction of implementation errors and removal of offending details * Incomplete puzzles will finished

Details
The vast majority of our patches will focus on fixing bugs that occur due to issues outside of the engine itself. These will primarily consist of errors with triggers, certain objects, and sequences of triggers in the game that result in crashes or misfiring/failed triggers..

Some attempts will be made to improve performance by improving the graphical load of the engine inside the game world and possibly tweaking of the game engine itself.

In addition, certain missing or incomplete sections of the game will be finished such as Jaana and Mariah inside their respective towns and functioning Shamino statue sequences in other locations. Tweaks to the game's combat and economy might also be developed as add-on mods.

What are the details for the patching process?
The primary tools we will be using for correction of these bugs and triggers are tools that we already have developed (though they're currently messy due to holes in our knowledge). These tools are the same tools that we are actively using for our decoding research and will use (with additional features and documentation) in later development of Forgotten World.

Overview
BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA will the first release of the BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA series (consisting of 3 parts) and is based on the knowledge and possibilities we have obtained within the last few years.

It will be created using Firstknight's self-developed ingame-creation methodics, combined with hex editor coding and the usage of an self-written tool for automated code changes. The removal of the monster generators (a necessity in this type of building process) will give the player the possibility make the overworld completely free of enemies. This makes the game something more for adventurers. Because of the fact that no changes will be made to the textfiles, the modification will be compatible with all localized versions of Ultima IX Ascension.

Releases

BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA Demos: One is planned for every year

BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA: TBA 2015 (Even the first release will take some years for sure)

Further releases: TBA (Adding 5 years for every further release is realistic)

Features and Changes to Ultima IX
* Massive Upgrade of the existing worldmap, providing lush landscapes full of hidden treasures * Addition of reused content in the form of "Addin-Maps" * Removal of monster generators (no respawning of monsters) * Movement of quest related items and important treasures to new locations * Replacement of the Ruins of Empath Abbey * Compatible with all localized versions of Ultima IX   * Retexturing of several low-res textures

Details
Overworld Upgrade

At first the existing overworld map will get an massive upgrade, the result can be seen best when looking into the media section. No movement or enlargement of buildings is planned with the exeption of The Ruins of Empath Abbey. They will placed into a location west of Yew and also enlarged in size.

Addin-Maps

The next is the addition of "Addin-Maps".These are maps, which will be included into the game world without changing the overworld itself. This method allows us to expand the game with several generic overworld wilderness maps (two for the first release) as well as many free-exploration dungeons, which open fantastic possibilities for adventurers. In addition to using previously unsed maps, later releases will include redone versions of existing ones.

Details and Examples for Addin-Maps

* Expansion of the main overworld with two "Addin-Maps" (Old Cove, Old Asylum), allows additional Exploration while on the way. * Several free explorable dungeons can be entered mainly from these new added Maps, some even directly from the main worldmap.

Item Movement

Expect many quest related items as well as important weapons and armor to be found at new locations. Examples for moved Items:

* Fire Sword * Lighthouse Gems * Blackrock Armor Parts

Retexturing

Many textures within the game do not use the maximum texture size of 256x256, which the games engine provides. Our new texture import tool allows us to change those textures into new ones with higher resolution, which results in a FANTASTIC NEW LOOK of the whole game.

Known Problems

While testing the actual build we found out, that there are at least 2 major bugs included:

* The "Save the mother" quest (between Britain and Paws) cannot be finished * At the Beginning of the game, Aidon the mayor is making a speech. Now the speech doesn't start anymore.

I have to say that I cannot make sure that these bugs can be fixed later, but of course we will try to fix them. At least the next release of the series, BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA 2, will be build on the base of the original worldmap using a new developed methodics, and therefore will not have these bugs included.

Features and Changes to Ultima IX
* Unused maps will be included into the Worldmap along with changes to the Worldmap * Reduced linearity of the main quest * Improved and expanded version of the storyline envisioned by Richard Garriott * Expanded World including more quests, towns, npcs, and scheduling

Overview
FORGOTTEN WORLD is a project for Ultima IX Ascension, a game created by Origin Systems (an Electronics Arts Division) in 1999. Ultima IX Ascension was an outstanding game for its time, featuring a game world in full 3D, and one of the first games ever released with an implemented physics engine. Even though Ultima IX was a milestone in the history of computer games, it was rather unpopular among fans. Not only that the hardware requirements were too high for the time it was released at (not to mention the bugs in the initial release), some players also found that the story could not compete with the one of previous Ultimas. Some people do not even call it a real Ultima as many dialogues showed the lack of background knowledge of different new developers that had never worked on an Ultima before.

While some of the critics might be legitimate, it is also a true fact that the finally released game was not the one that was supposed to be released (from the developers' view). Electronic Arts set the Ultima IX Ascension developer team a deadline that prevented the team from fulfilling its original plans.

Some parts of earlier game versions can still be found in the various Ultima IX files. For example, the bitmap files include gumps from older game versions and there are still map files for different locations that were not seen in the released game. Other parts - such as summaries of earlier story drafts or screens from cutscenes that had to been cut due to a story change, can be found on the internet. Also, the canon of the main plot and origins of the Guardian as presented by Richard Garriott in a post-release interview provide a clear indication of the true story partially implemented in Ultima IX.

Our intention is to use this knowledge (about "old stuff" in the game) and to improve Ultima IX Ascension to make it a "better" Ultima or a "real" one as some would say. Of course it is a long way to go until we have gathered enough information to do that and we cannot promise anything concerning what is possible at the moment. But we have a dream that we keep working for!

In short, this is Forgotten World, the one true Ultima IX mod.

Details
First of all, the following is our overarching vision for improving Ultima IX using the released engine with possible upgrades to components of the engine mainly to reduce graphical issues and crashes.

The main goal of Forgotten World is to improve the execution of and expand the dialog, plot, background, and quest structure of Ultima IX to provide players with a better narrative of the Ultima IX storyline as envisioned by Richard Garriott. In addition, the dialogue will be greatly improved and expanded to take into account previous Ultimas including U8.

The game world and quest progression will also see improvement. First, the linearity of the game will be cut back allowing the player the ability to visit more towns and accomplish more quests earlier in the game. The size of the landmass will also be expanded significantly to allow for increased exploration and greater distances between towns. This increased play area will allow for additional quests, npcs and towns to be included. In addition, attempts will be made toward incorporating a scheduling system to add more life to the world of Britannia.

Finally, the overall gameplay experience will be improved. These improvements will include an improved economy system, more balanced loot and gold gathering, a town economic system where you can trade goods with different npcs, a complete system of specific enemy weaknesses, tougher combat, traps, and possibly improved spells from damage to function.

It must be noted that the above is what is an ideal goal, but not everything can be improved upon either due to issues of time, inadequacies of the engine or the inability to alter certain aspects of the game.

What are the details for the creation process?
The creation of FORGOTTEN WORLD is based on a self-developed world editor (developed by Hawkwind, with the support of all the other team members) along with various other tools that have been or will be developed. The editor will be the primary tool for Forgotten World (when its completed) and will allow full 3D worldbuilding for terrain, all available objects, and incorporation of various new elements including models, npcs, and art created for Ultima IX.

= External Links =


 * &lt;a href="http://www.forgottenworld.de/"&gt;Forgotten World&lt;/a&gt;

&lt;a _fcknotitle="true" href="Category:User-made_patches"&gt;User-made_patches&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a _fcknotitle="true" href="Category:Ultima_IX"&gt;Ultima_IX&lt;/a&gt;