2012-08-26 GOG and New Patch

Hail Milords, Miladies and Freedmen

I’m sure you have all heard of the final GOG release for the Ultima series with Ultima IX. Unfortunately, it lacks our patches, but that can be easily rectified by visiting our downloads page or our page over at the Ultima Codex.  Speaking of patches, we are releasing our next patch: 1.19H.  In addition to prior fixes for music and companions, there are fixes for the Moonglow catacomb elevator, the demon death bug in Valoria, and Dermot hanging out at the pub all the time.  Finally, there is a fix or rather a workaround for the floating rune/sigil bug, so now if you start a new game the runes and sigils will now appear on top of the shrines after cleansing.

Of further patching interest, we have found a performance configuration that will help those suffering from heavy crashing with certain aspects of the game. These settings are shown at the bottom of this post. While the settings won’t stop crashes, it should reduce their frequency and make certain parts of the game less prone to crashing.  These settings are most useful for those suffering from ship travel crashes and Moonglow-Tydus crashes.  Unfortunately, you might suffer a small increase in the frequency of crashes from taking stuff in and out of your inventory.

As for future patch targets, I have noted an additional 101 different bugs, issues or aspects that I will address during the course of this patching project.  Some bugs fixes will range from the minor like the rat-Mayor scene to the crippling such as the breath issue getting into Serpent’s Hold.  There are also a number of polishing issues that will be dealt with such as changing the hostilty of guards in Wrong after cleansing and moving npcs to more appropiate locations. There are also some balancing aspects that will be corrected such as removing skeleton spawn points and adding a few extra bags.  In addition to these issues, I have an idea that I intend to implement for most npcs that will eliminate the troublesome pathfinding issues that plagues npcs in Britain and Minoc as well as deal with the problem of shopkeepers grooving out drunk on their counters.

This might seem like a lot of work using my previous methods; however, significant progress has been made with our world editor. Hawkwind has developed a workaround for the nonfixed writer issue where some rewritten nonfixed files would produce a crash when played with the game.  This solution will result in larger map files and savegames for the the next several patches, but this is a minor issue with modern harddrives. In addition, object editing is now essentially complete.  I can take any object in the game and change its orientation and position, check or uncheck any flag, and alter/add/remove any property.  It isn’t the most user-friendly yet primarily in the area of properties, but the functionality for editing is there.  Some additional information is needed is for most properties to have completely defined parameters, but almost all properties are now labeled with most having some definitions for their parameters.  The next area of focus with the editor will be the adding of new objects into the game world. While Hawkwind progresses there, I will be putting the current version of the editor to good use on some of these bugs, so stay tuned over the next few months for news on patches.

Finally, if you haven’t yet, please vote in our poll.  The results have remained very close, so I curious to see which feature will win.

Performance Settings.  Past the following over the performance section of your options.ini.  Also, go to the Sound Section and change the StreamDuration to 3000.

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; Max # of mesh instances created per frame.
MaxInstancesPerFrame=2000
UseTerrainDetailLevels=0

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– Iceblade