Beautiful Britannia

Beautiful Britannia

Produced by: The Forgotten World Team
Website: Beautiful Britannia @ Forgotten World
Latest Releases:

Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3
Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3

The third — and, to date, final — release of Beautiful Britannia.


Beautiful Britannia Mini Mod 1
Beautiful Britannia Mini Mod 1

The first — and, to date, only — in a series of scaled down mods planned by the Beautiful Britannia team.


Beautiful Britannia U9BB Executable
Beautiful Britannia U9BB Executable

A modified Ultima 9 executable, used by Beautiful Britannia.

Previous Releases:

Ultima 9 Freedom Mod
Ultima 9 Freedom Mod

The Ultima 9 mod that served as the foundation for Beautiful Britannia.

Beautiful Britannia started as the Freedom Mod for Ultima 9, assembled by Michael “FIrstkniGHT” Menapace in response to the more linear feel of the plot of this last Ultima title. The mod didn’t do much to alter the order of events in the game, however. What it did do is alter some aspects of the structure of Britannia, eliminating obstacles that had previously prevented players from roaming the land freely.

Eventually, the project grew into what became known as Forgotten World, and a team joined FIrstkniGHT. FIrstkniGHT himself left the team for a while, though the project moved on; it gained a website and grew more ambitious, evolving into an attempt to decode the Ascension game files, with an eye toward building a world and game editor.

Firstknight (slight spelling change) then rejoined the team, and the project split into two separate efforts as a result: Beautiful Britannia (which aims to create a more lush version of the original Ultima 9 game world) and its Unlimited spinoff (a more lush Ultima 9 with a few additions and revisions), and Forgotten World proper (now an in-engine remake, which will feature many corrections and updates). Beautiful Britannia also aims to replace many of the lower-resolution textures in the game with higher-resolution textures, to further improve the look and feel of Ultima 9.

39 Responses

  1. Pictus says:

    Thanks, but the download of Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3 stops before 100% 🙁

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Hi Pictus…sorry I missed this when you first posted it. I’ve attempted to pull down the R3 release twice now, succeeding both times. As noted below, I’ll be testing the download again when I get home this evening, to see if connection quality has anything to do with it.

  2. Inquisitor says:

    The download doesn’t function. Is there another way to get the zip?

  3. Inquisitor says:

    Thank You very much!

  4. Thomas Chivers says:

    not sure if anyone will reply to this, I’ve downloaded the Beautiful Britannia patch and there is no change to my game. I’ve done everything in the instructions, have the most recent patches (which all work) but none of the beautiful Britannia patches make a difference? I’m not versed in computer language so the easiest explanation would be appreciated. I extract the files into my main Ultima directory, click on the correct installer, enter 1 to install, and receive a BB has successfully installed message. It literally takes less than a second though so I’m not sure anything is actually installing. Anyway any info, help, ect would be greatly appreciated. I have no idea what to do and I would love to play this game again with these upgrades.

  5. Firstknight says:

    First, sorry for my late reply.

    What always can be done:
    After extracting, you can see a subfolder named BB within your UItima IX Directory, containing another subfolder named BB2011R3. Within this subfolder you can see a folder runtime and a folder static. Now copy the content of the runtime folder into Ultima IX\runtime and do the same with the static folder. In the end you should have BB installed, just in another way.

  6. Tim says:

    The file’s gone again, comes up with a 404 error.

  7. Firstknight says:

    Hi Folks,

    Looks like a new year has started, so time for an update.

    Made some nice progress here and there (better Tools, new and good looking textures, a larger worldmap), but nothing is in a state to show up actually.

    Just be a little more patient (I know i’ve stressed this to much already), as far as I can forsee it, April or May will be good months for showing flashy new screens.

    And there is a good chance that you will be astonished greatly then…

  8. chris says:

    happy new yeear 2016 🙂
    I’m trying this patch now ,hope it works.
    I just found the u9 cd while i was going trough some old dvds i had stored.
    Thought it might be nice to try it on my win7 x64 system. Fingers crossed 😛

  9. bruce l temple says:

    love the origin ultima 8 and v. u9 , it least has a story….

  10. RyanF says:

    @WtF Dragon – This is great. Just to make sure I do this correctly, do I only need to apply R3, or do I need R2 and R1 as well? Thanks!

  11. Firstknight says:

    I officialy confirm here ;-), that the 2011 R3 Release includes everthing of R2 and R1.

    Some words about future updates:
    A new release is still in the works, but unfortunatly not much progress has been made this year, so I cannot confirm, a specific release date here.

    However, when it’s done someday, it will contain a complete new sets of ground textures, which are significant improved compared to the ones of the 2011 release, especially when we speak of the mountain/rock textures.

    Also I spended some time to optimize my (self-created) toolset, so future content updates (objects related) should less time-intensive to create.

    I try to prepare some teaser screens, as soon as the new ground texture set is done (actual screens would look, well, a bit disturbing), hopefully this will be possible sometime in spring 2017.

    • RyanF says:

      Thanks guys! I’m running into a bit of a challenge (i think) with the order of applying updates. Any help would be much appreciated. I haven’t played the game in almost 15 years and I’m about to strap in for the long haul but don’t want to have to start over due to a bumble on my part that could have been avoided 🙂

      Here’s what I tried, in order:

      1) Main GOG install
      2) install 1.18F patch
      3) install 1.19F patch
      4) install 1.19G patch
      5) install 1.19H patch
      6) install beautiful Britannia R3

      My in-game journal still shows 1.19F, and it seems that the beautiful textures haven’t been applied. For example, the doors in LB’s castle look like the originals.

      What am I doing wrong?

      Thanks!
      Ryan

  12. Firstknight says:

    2019 is the 20 Anniversary of the “beloved” Release of a certain game called “Ultima IX: Ascension”.

    So I think this will be “good Timing” to provide you with some Update, why all this promising BB Screenshots back from 2013 to 2015 do still NOT result in a playable release.

    Just as my companion Iceblade mentioned more than once, UIX is a beast when it comes to altering it. Every Detail you try to change increases the chance that the altered map becomes unplayable and crashes all the Time.

    BB even comes to a state (that was back in 2016), where I could not continue using the current build, because it was getting more and more unstable. So the whole project has in fact halted, from 2016 until 2019.

    Within this year, I found a way to reuse at least some of my work from more than 10 years, and it looks like that the current build is in a stable state now.

    For this a had to remove some intense content, especially the huge moonglow expansion. In Detail, the Terrain Expansion is still there, but using so many (trigger heavy) buildings was simply too much for the UIX Engine.

    So, there is still a chance, that there will be a working new release of BB in the Future, its just very difficult to say, when this will be, and what it will contain.

    • Gwydion says:

      Great to hear Firstknight 🙂 Bit late response I know, but it’s nice to hear the love being put into it, even if it never happens.

  13. sean says:

    Hello Firstknight,

    I’ve done what RyanF did (except installed from cd) and nothing past v1.19f shows up in the journal.

    Am I right in thinking that I need to install the “Freedom” mod then patches V1.19G and V1.19H and then
    “Beautiful Britain”?

    There is also the prboelm that therre are TWO different “readme’s” that come with BB (or at least I’ve ended up with two different “readme’s”) each of which gives slightly different info.

    Any help would be much appreciated.

    Regards,

    sean.

  14. EstelRandir says:

    I am glad someone took on the job of trying to improve U9. It had so much potential.

    Is there anyway you would release an improved texture only version? Although it is nice to see someone working on this… I do not prefer certain changes. It would also be nice to have options to turn certain things in some areas off. One example for me would be the flowers that line both sides of the pathways in Britain.

    Please keep on improving U9, the no fog patch is awesome!

  15. Enthusiast445 says:

    The grass and wall textures look really good. The mountains / rocks look bad. The textures are too uniform. The old ones were low res and ugly, but much less uniform. The new textures are very cookie cutter like. They need some randomness in the pattern.

  1. August 26, 2012

    […] spelling change) rejoined the team for a time, and the project split into two separate efforts: Beautiful Britannia (which aims to create a more “lush” version of the original Ultima 9 game world) and its […]

  2. August 28, 2012

    […] not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t all pay rapt attention to Beautiful Britannia and Forgotten World; those are both very interesting and promising projects that are working […]

  3. October 11, 2012

    […] Forgotten World. With me is Hawkwind who is our primary programmer and FirstKnight who manages the Beautiful Britannia (BB) […]

  4. October 13, 2014

    […] Balancing gibt es mittlerweile auch ein Projekt, mit dem z.T. massiv die Optik verbessert wird. “Beautiful Britannia” enthält neue Texturen und Objekte und macht aus dem hier […]

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