2013-01-16 Still Here

Hail and well met,

So around October, I found myself sucked into community for Star Citizen.  Luckily that subsided a few weeks ago and I’ve returned to Ultima.  So what have I been doing the past two weeks:  Ultima 7.  Never played it before and aside from needing some better quality music in the background, it has been a very enjoyable and immersive experience.  I didn’t even join the fellowship until day 20 with most of those first three weeks filled with dungeon diving, exploration, and side quests.  In addition, I spent a great deal of time collecting and organizing a massive hoard of “loot”: armor, weapons, and torches…food :D.  I also spent some time working on making the Castle of Fire my personal home in Britannia costing a grand total of 3500 gold: 6 bedrooms, a rooftop kitchen complete with a functional baking oven (and I’ve got a ton of Flour), two armouries, a sowing/painting room, an alchemy lab (shame you can’t make potions like in U9) ;), and a glass-enclosed dining room… and did I forget to mention covered cannon mounts.  I know it is a little unrelated, but I went ahead and posted a several of screenshots of my U7 abode (Exult is awesome, btw). First four images of our second gallery (of our miscellaneous images album).

You guys know I can’t wait for a time when I can add objects directly to the U9 maps.

So what else, well I have been looking over my town designs and I’ve started working on a basic city layout for Trinsic using top-down images of in-game buildings.  It’s just something more usable than the simple, hand-drawn layouts I’ve currently done for several towns.

While FirstKnight remains ever busy IRL, he has still managed to make some excellent progress on the Eastern Expansion for Beautiful Britannia and work on Cove is progressing quite nicely.

Hawkwind has remained rather busy as well for the past several months, so little additional update on the editor.  Still it works for editing nonfixed objects, which is what I need for patching, so I’ve got something to keep me busy…. once I’ve conquered U7 ;).

Oh, and it has been brought to my attention that I neglected to add our latest patch to our downloads page: 1.19h.  It has been out for months now, so nothing new for those who found it over at our Codex page.

And do you remember that commentary I started.  Well I’ve gotten the itch to continue.  I’ve updated and fixed the first two posts and I have already written the core of my next entry that focuses on U9’s magic system.

And for our poll: it looks like Skeletons prove as annoying as ever and so that will be my next task… simple spawn point deletion.  I think the delete works, but it doesn’t I can easily remove the property.  Then I’ll see what I can do with Moonglow fixes, but there are a few things I won’t be able to implement just yet like alchemy sets.  Still I should be able to fix a few of bugs here and there.  And maybe one of these days I will figure out why the Tydus camera tends to crash.  And I will also be taking a closer look at the Covetous elevator.  That thing sure is a lot more complicated than the one in Moonglow.

So speaking of magic and mages, our next poll question is about U9’s magic.  While our plans for changes to Ultima IX’s magic system and spells are limited mainly to background text and story-related alterations, we do intend to at least make magic something more useful in the game.  So what would you like to see done to make magic more interesting?

• Tougher combat – Make the enemies tougher and increase the number of opponents you may face at particular areas.  This tougher fights should request in a greater application of strategy and would at the very least make magic a viable option for taking out certain opponents.  For instance, you come across a pack of 6 wolves, you could cast a charm spell on one or two of them or throw a fog to allow you to reduce their numbers or spam with lightning to take several out at range.
• More puzzles that require spells to pass – Add additional puzzles where telekinesis, gust, ignite, and douse are required to further you route through a dungeon. While this would certainly include puzzles that involve casting telekinesis on a switch, there would be more complex puzzles involves lighting and dousing torches that fit a pattern or must be done in a certain sequence.
• Magic as an alternative for getting through dungeons – This option would entail having magic be useful to get around a puzzle or obstacle that could be completed by non-magical means.  Dealing with the guards in Wrong is a perfect example:  you can kill guards with melee weapons or bows or you could cast lightning or fireball; or you could run and sneak your way past them or use invisibility potions, freeze or charm to avoid fights.  Another example, might be using telekinesis to flip a lever for a bridge rather than having to travel around to the other side through a much longer route.  A reverse example might be solving a complex magical puzzle for a shortcut or taking a much longer route.

So like the virtues, there 7 combinations of poll options with an option to not make U9’s magic more useful.  Also there is a none of the above option for those who have no preference or who have a different ideas about what should be done with U9’s magic system and implementation.

Until next time.

– Iceblade