2012-07-25 New Poll and Patch Update

Hello everybody,

I recently found where I had already compiled the patched files, and the patch is now being given a reasonably thorough beta testing.  Expect a release sometime in August.

The patch includes the previous fixes for music and the companions.  The major addition with this patch is a fix that bypasses the Rune and Sigil bug altogether following shrine cleansing.  In addition, the Moonglow Catacombs elevator should now work repeatedly, thus allowing players to travel to the Moonglow catacombs as much as they want without having to cheat.  I also finished Dermont’s little schedule so that you should now find him inside the graveyard during the day and in the pub at night.  We did, however, observe a limitation in the scheduling system, sleeping in the game prevents schedules from progressing.  A rather troublesome issue that we will be looking at fixes for in future.

In other news, work on animation editing is progressing quite well. We now have a viewer that can show wireframe meshes from the game carrying out individual animations from the animation files. This is a major step in developing a convertion tool as we now know the animation format well enough to display it.

From our previous poll question, we asked what section of the Forgotten World people would most like to released as part of the first milestone and the overwhelming choice was to hold off and have the first milestone start from the very beginning.  I can definitely see the benefits in doing it this way. We will still release a tech demo before the first milestone to fully demonstrate what we are capable of doing in Forgotten World. We are still a few steps away from beginning true worldbuilding, but it is only a matter of time at this point.

We have made no secret of our intention to implement reasonably developed schedules for all NPCs in Forgotten World.  However, there are more (though less significant) features that we can implement, so in our new poll question, we want to know what minor features you would most want to see in Forgotten World that weren’t there in Ultima IX.

In prior Ultimas, sleep was a requirement for your party, but in U9 there is no need.  Even so, is there a strong interest in adding functioning inns where you pay to stay in a room for one night to heal up and restore mana or just pass the time until day light without using a cheat.

Stealing is something that goes largely undetected in U9, would you most like to have a karma hit whenever you take things from other people?  If we can properly add it, we will probably include hostility from npcs if you steal too often.

The “baking of bread” feature is often cited like a mascot for game interactivity.  This feature is there in U9, but there isn’t much else.  Would you most like to have the ability to “craft” other items?

Another feature that we might include with new dialog for npcs is the addition of commodity trading where you can buy cotton from a farmer in Britain and sell it to a weaver where you then buy thread to sell to a tailor.  Is this an significant feature to add, one that people really want to see or a feature lost in the sea?

We might add a cabinet (immobile) object that would be placed around the game world that could holds objects via a GUMP in a manner similar to a bag.  This would help with performance when collecting objects in a particular location and reduce object clutter. Is this a much desired feature?

Stay tuned for updates on the patch.

– Iceblade