2016-12-27/28 Next Patch Details

As I have previously mentioned, I will be providing two “Final Ultimate Patches” for Ultima IX.  I have just drafted the list of 52 items for development for the first of these patches.   It will cover all of the remaining correctable Serious Faults and Major Bugs in Ultima IX.

This list contains 8 Serious Problems, 12 Major Bugs, 13 Minor Issues, 14 Aspects for Polish, and 5 Parts that will have additions made.  While this seems like a large list in and of itself, it is board in scope and difficulty, which can be broken down into 5 categories.  There are 20 issues that involve heavy scripting changes/examination and 13 issues that require only minor scripting work.  For the remaining issues, they are primarily fixed via worldbuilding (adding/changing objects and their properties), of which, only 6 involve major work of this kind with 12 that only require adding or adjusting a couple of objects.  The last issue is where I changed the type name for an incorrectly named object.  

I will point out that this list includes cleaner implementations of features already corrected in previous patches, so portions of this work have already been partially or fully completed.

I will be focusing on these issues over the coming months spending at least an hour on them everyday to ensure the patch is completed within a reasonable timeframe.  I plan on attempting to complete the full, final, npc-scheduled patch by around this time next year.

I have also added a segment under Information > Status that I will update often with my current progress for this next patch.  In addition, I talk more about this new status page and the patch details in the second Patch update.

Finally, the news module I have been using is no longer functional from the backend, probably due to an incompatibility introduced by recent update to the site software.  I have obtained a new news scroll module that I hope is more functional.  Please let me know what you think about the presentation of the latest news.

– Iceblade