Today is the 10th anniversary of the Release of Ultima IX.

To celebrate this, we will to provide a demo based on the current build of Beautiful Britannia, so that everyone gets the possibility to see, how the modified areas look like when playing.

Content:

• Current Work Copy of Map "Britannia"
• Currect Work Copy of Map "Way to Despise"
• Launcher (requires VB6 runtime, which is included into the Demo package)

• Map selection
• Selection of starting position using prerendered worldmaps
• Two Sliders allows fast and easy modification of View Distance and Quality Settings
• Supports the "Disable Fog" Mode in combination with a savegame

 Demo Size and Release Date:

• Size: 7 MB
• Release: December 2009

Firstknight, Hawkwind and Iceblade

I've found some time to exchange most of the existing screens with 20 new ones, where "the fog has been lifted".

Firstknight

Finally i've found a working solution to disable the fog for overworld maps.

The trick is: Simply start the game using gamestate.ini configured for a small map (I use map.83) and after that load a saved game (works with every existing savegame).

This makes the engine "forget" to add the fog on overworld maps, which makes in further consequence also higher viewing distances possible.

Config details:

Create this gamestate.ini file in your UIX Install Path:

[Init]
Version = 100
Map = 83
X = 6500
Y = 7500
Z = 1200
Time = 0800
[Interface]
Compass = 1
Toolbelt = 1
Backpack = 1
Journal = 1
Spellbook = 1
HealthBar = 1
ManaBar = 1

Now make the following change to the options.ini to make this thing work:

Replace the line

start=0

with

start=...UIX Install Path...\gamestate.ini

Why is this different to the "clipping plane out" settings in default.kmp:

Because the default.kmp methodics is not permament, when the weather changes or the map is changed, then the fog is back.

What is possible:

Here are the options.ini settings, which work well with the actual build of Beautiful Britannia, higher Settings cause crashes, especially in Yew:

FarClippingPlaneDistance=8500
MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=8000

MaxObjCullSize=5
CullStartDist=3000

LODScale=4.0

And how does this look like:

Here are 3 screens showing Britain and LB Castle, just to show the difference.

I've also used 4x anisotropic filtering here, which I highly recommend for better picture quality.

Britain Center

Britain Center - with LB Castle in Background

LB Castle Park

I have to say that the framerate is very low (around 10 FPS in Britain) on my old system (P4 2,4 with 512 MB RAM and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) using these settings with the actual Build of Beautiful Britannia.

The result is of course a litte better when playing original UIX (around 15 FPS in Britain).

I've updated the Project Information for BEAUTIFUL BRITANNIA.

Please read all the details here:

Beautiful Britainnia - Project Information

Firstknight