Beautiful Britannia
Produced by: The Forgotten World Team
Website: Beautiful Britannia @ Forgotten World
Latest Releases:
The third — and, to date, final — release of Beautiful Britannia.
The first — and, to date, only — in a series of scaled down mods planned by the Beautiful Britannia team.
A modified Ultima 9 executable, used by Beautiful Britannia.
Previous Releases:
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.
Thanks, but the download of Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3 stops before 100% 🙁
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.
The download doesn’t function. Is there another way to get the zip?
Which download? R3?
Yes, R3
Hmmm…that’s odd. I’ve tried the download link twice now, once while logged in and once in an incognito window, and it has worked both times. It also works when I right-click and select “save as”.
Not sure what to make of this. I will give it another try when I get home this evening, to see if it’s the quality of the connection that makes a difference.
I’ve got a poor speed, cause I’m at my moms Farm. 100k/s I tried several times to dowload ist. It stops at a random Size of Download between 170MB an 210MB. Tried a downloadmanager, too. Doesn’t make a difference.
My home connection is a bit on the marginal side, so if I see the same errors there we’ll just assume that it has something to do with too big of a file over too slow of a connection.
In which case, I’ll see about breaking the file up into more manageable pieces.
Thanks and happy New Year 2013!
Have You got the time to test it, yet?
Yes. The problem didn’t manifest for me, but I’ve gone ahead and split up the file into smaller pieces anyhow. They’re uploading now; I’ll post links in a bit.
Okay, here are direct links for the archive chunks. I’ve broken them up into 64MB pieces, which you should hopefully be able to pull down successfully.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
THEY DON’T WORK…FILES ARE CORRUPT…..
Really? That’s surprising.
I will look into it and make and needed corrections.
Hmmn…I just downloaded all five files and expanded them to a folder, successfully. Main executable launches, as well.
Thank You very much!
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.
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.
The file’s gone again, comes up with a 404 error.
Thanks for letting us know, Tim. Seems to be an issue with the host for the content repository I store the files at. Investigating…
And it is working again.
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…
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 😛
Let us know how it goes.
love the origin ultima 8 and v. u9 , it least has a story….
@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!
I think R3 includes the others.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
At this point, I’d suggest ignoring Freedom Mod. Definitely patch to 1.19G or H, and then look at the latest BB build.
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!
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.
This comment might be frowned upon, but I like the visuals of the game as they were created. It’s stuck in a certain time period of gaming which has it’s charm.
However, could the mod maker or someone with the knowledge simply remove the distance fogging from the world without touching anything else? That is my favorite feature of BB, the fogless world. The fog feels like a limitation of the hardware at the time, unrelated to the game otherwise. U9 looks quite fantastic with tuned up visuals using Extended Setup tool and modern anti-aliasing. Just wish the fog wasn’t there! I’d say it’s recommended to play U9 with original visuals if you haven’t beaten the game fully before. Then to go back and replay with BB visuals. But no one would ever wish to play with the fog even the first time ;p
Update to my previous comment:
If you take BB’s u9.exe and drop it into a standard folder of U9 (v1.19H), then guess what? It works! The fog is removed. However, I will say it reveals some details in the distance a bit too much. Trees popping in far off, caves appearing to render in as you approach. This would have been covered by the fog before, so you can’t see it.
What I guess would look the best is perhaps if the fog value was just pushed out further. Maybe like 33% less fog from default (33% more distant). Or 50%. I think that would be the sweet spot.
If it’s just an adjustable piece of code in the EXE, it would be greatly appreciated if someone who knows, or the author of BB, could explain how to do it (hex edit the exe?). Or create an exe and provide a link. That would be amazing!
I can’t get this working at all.
1. Installed the game from gog (game ver 1.19f)
2. Installed the 1.19h patch
3. game ver still reads 1.19f in journal
4. extracted BB files as indicated
5. ran BB2011R3.cmd, says BB is installed, 5 files copied
BB2011R3-install.txt says “Now please start a new the game using U9BB.exe”, but there is no U9BB.exe, just the regular U9.exe
6. so I start the game using that, nothing changed
Wait there is is another U9BB-readme which says ” run the U9Patcher.exe then start with U9.exe”
7. so I ran the U9Patcher.exe
8. start with U9.exe, nothing changed in game
9. I gave up on this