Ultima IX is Awesome Now

Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at 1:24 PM

I've gotten GoG Ultima IX in an awesome state so I can play it and maybe finally get past the third dungeon for the first time ever. I really want to beat it this time. I even have a Joy2Key mapping for it that is awesome, and I've even fixed the avatar's body stretching sideways and looking wide. When I say 'I fixed' I mean I downloaded awesome fan patches.

A portal has opened along the park path near the pond during the rainy evening.

My favorite thing as a kid was climbing over the various "impassable" mountains around britannia. I climbed from paws up to yew at the start of the game, and in yew they were acting like I was further in the game. it was the first time I became familiar with "sequence breaks". ultima IX being linear was its biggest design flaw, since the previous games were far more open. This is when I first realized I like being a "ranger"/explorer.

Climbing the rocks where you probably shouldn't go.

Notice how in the other screenshots, not having the armor and weapon bars at the top, makes it feel WAY more expansive and awesome.

The Avatar carries a lantern through the spooky tree path in the evening during the rain.

I have Joy2Key set up with my XBox One controller for Windows. This means I can use the D-Pad to hot swap for items in my hotbar, meaning I can get out a lantern or bow any time I want. Also, the right thumb stick pressed in several times can change the weather, so I can get this look.

The Avatar stands in the town square of Britain during the day, walking along a cobblestone path.

I wanted to check out Britannia ahead of my real playthrough to make sure the draw distances didn't cause problems. I can't tell if this is prettier because of the resolution or because of the Beautiful Britannia R3 I installed.

The Avatar speaks to a lady in Britain town during the day. The lady is complaining about immigrants. Sounds nauseatingly familiar.

Bilinear filtering on tree bark. Blurry, not like Minecraft (point-filtered/nearest neighbor).

Bilinear/trilinear texture filtering is causing this blurry pixel look. How can I turn this off? I want closest/nearest neighbor/point filtering. I even tried in the Nvidia Control panel but couldn't figure it out.

The guard looks awesome.

Tell me this game doesn't look AWESOME. You can't because it does! Note how the characters use the PS1-era segmented models instead of the more modern skinned mesh renderers, where the npc is a single mesh that deforms with bones. No bones here!

Exploring the ashy mountain area.

It would be cool to do a fun game where I post screens of small areas in U9 and see if people can identify the spot. Can you identify this location and facing direction? Breath of the Wild had a questline where you had photos and needed to find where they were taken, and I kind of love that mechanic.

Standing on a dock with a town in the distance (Trinsic? I've never gotten that far yet!)

U9 Extended Setup Utility makes it easy to set the draw distance farther.

Game crashes only happeny if the draw distance is too far.

Having a middle/far plane draw distance that is too far can crash the game. I THINK it's like, some NPC is being loaded that's running a script that needs the player close, but you're way far away, so it crashes. I think this because if the draw distance is too far, the world shakes, as if I'm next to a cyclops or something, even though the closest one is a billion miles away. I can even hear dialogue randomly.

My Joy2Key settings.

My current gamepad settings. A bit strange that some buttons can be double tapped or held longer to do different functions, but it all works pretty smoothly.

Rain in the park and the moongate, late evening.

I love being able to look up at the sky in games and run around in 3rd or 1st person. You can play in 1st person if you press the K key - camera mode. never knew this! If only I could disable the cursor, it would be perfect.

I have the GoG version installed, then I installed the official 1.18 patch, then the unofficial 1.19f patch, then the Forgotten Worlds unofficial 1.19H patch. Then I got the unofficial dialogue, monsters, and economy patch but did NOT install it so I can have a vanilla first playthrough.

Then I installed beautiful britannia v3 and tried its recommended config settings, but I got less than ideal frame rate (it wanted me to use Glide, not DirectX).

Then I downloaded the Ultima IX Extended Setup Utility and set that up in the U9 game folder. Then I used the nglide_config file to set the resolution to 1920x1080. then in the ESU in Game Settings I also set it to 1920x1080x32, the topmost one of those on the list. And I set the Game Rasterizer to "DirextX 7 or higher" renderer, which massively improved frame rate with the farther draw distances. Then in Performance Settings I set the Far Clipping Plane Distance to 20000 and Middle Clipping Plane Distance to 10,000, but I also set up hotkeys to adjust this in-game if needed.

Then I used Hex Editor Neo to change a little string of hexes in the u9.exe to eliminate wide stretching. Instructions are online for this. It may be unnecessary, but maybe it is necessary.

I added a key to hide the HUD, but I can't disable the crosshair even though I want something tiny or non-existent.

And does anyone know how I can turn off texture filtering? I prefer closest/nearest neighbor/point filtering, a la minecraft, where each square pixel is clearly visible. As a new pixel artist, i want to see the work and study it.

Ultima IX is a great game, if you disregard the alterations it made to the traditions of the series (being linear, messing with canon/continuity). If I could make those two changes, this installation of Ultima IX would be galaxy-tier.

Here's the original fb UDIC post.

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