Forgotten World



Forgotten World is a project founded by Firstknight to improve the plot and scope of Ultima IX 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.

Ultima IX Patches
= 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 *     Game crashes will be reduced by correction of implementation errors and removal of offending details *     Various other issues that have plagued players in Ultima IX

= 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.

The project's first stage is to enrich the rather bland and empty landscape of the Britannia of Ultima IX. Further stages involve deeper changes to the game, like more sub-maps to enlarge the world, and changes to the flow of the game and inconsistencies in order to make it fit better in the Ultima continuity.

The understanding of the internal workings of Ultima IX has been completed, and the team has begun with making Britannia more pretty. They also started to create sub-maps (such as a map called "Way to Despise"). Their biggest feat up to now is the re-location of the ruins of Empath Abbey to the fitting location, while at the same time making the ruins look much more impressive. They also found a technical way to eliminate the fog in the game, creating breathtaking landscapes when combined with their enhanced overworld.

Beautiful Britannia is a spin-off of this project, which aims only at improving the visual aspects of Ultima IX, while leaving the rest of the game unchanged. Firstknight departed the Forgotten World team in order to work on Beautiful Britannia.