01) 12th January

Ultima Online Patch Notes for 01/13/1998

• Archery
  • The minimum range has been removed from all archery weapons.
  • The damage on all archery weapons has been increased.
  • The firing rate on regular bows has gone up substantially.
  • The firing rate on regular crossbows has gone up somewhat.
  • The range on bows has been increased.
• A new UO.CFG toggle has been added to help those who have slow draw times on their systems. You can add the following line in order to enable frame skipping:

FrameSkipping=on

This will make the client attempt to skip draw frames when the time spent drawing becomes too high. (You may notice an improvement in performance when in crowded areas). Note that this can also cause “stuttering” in the image if your video card simply cannot keep up. Valid text for the toggle is “FrameSkipping=[yes/no/on/off]”.

• The incognito spell has been removed; it is still castable but it has no effect.
• Fire fields now affect the caster’s notoriety when people walk into them.
• A weight problem when a portion of a stack of items was removed has been fixed.
• NPC and creature following in general, and particularly across server boundaries, should be much improved, with little to no delay.
• A problem which made shop pictures and text get out of synch was fixed.
• Houses can no longer be built on any solid dirt terrain, such as roads.
• Pack horses and pack llamas should have correct names in shops now.
• The words “animal” and “animals” are no longer valid keywords for training in animal taming. They are valid for animal lore, however. You can still use “tame” and “taming” for animal taming.
• Provocation on shopkeepers is not only illegal, but won’t work anymore, and will call the guards.
• Pets purchased from animal trainers now gain their owner’s notoriety immediately.
• Houses in illegal locations now decay away very quickly.
• We’ve heard that some suspect the reason they do not get to report bounties is that they right-click on the window (say, by trying to run) by accident. We’ve put in a message so you can tell if you did indeed do this, to try to narrow down the problem. If it turns out that this is indeed an issue, we’ll see about making it not closeable by right-click.
• The notoriety effect of stealing has been tweaked somewhat so that it happens regardless of success or failure.
• The criminal flag duration is now 2 minutes.
• Vendors which have wandered will pop back to their home when the server comes up.
• Changes were made to help server load when dealing with large amounts of player houses.
• The delete key in writable books should work correctly now.
• Gameboards will have their pieces and locations wiped when in containers (you won’t be able to play chess from inside a backpack anymore).
• Changing sound volume in the options window now plays a sound at the new volume.
• Delays on spellcasting will be put into place; the higher the spell circle, the longer the delay.
• Theft of items worn by specific types of NPCs will no longer be possible.
• A problem with pricing of stackable items was fixed.
• Various issues with vendors were fixed:
  • They can no longer be provoked.
  • Problems with moving an item from a vendor’s inventory into a stack have been fixed.
  • Moving vended items into a trade window has been fixed.
  • An exploit that permitted theft of magical items from vendors has been fixed.
  • Problems with vendors and scrolls have been fixed.
  • Earthquake will no longer work on vendors.
• Guards will no longer be enticeable.
• A fix for timewarps is in testing.
• Ghosts no longer have footstep sounds.
• Two new UO.CFG options have been added that adjust the duration of player and NPC speech. BarkTimeModifier sets how long all speech remains on screen (default is 4 seconds) as a percentage. The default is 300% as long for speech (12 seconds). ScaleBarkTimes is a toggle to adjust whether or not the duration scales based on the length of the text displayed. The below are the defaults:

BarkTimeModifier=300

ScaleBarkTimes=no

• We’ve also gotten a new UO.CFG option to assist the colorblind. This will let you adjust the combat cursor color when in combat mode. The numbers are somewhat difficult to set, so you may wish to experiment. Two sample values:

CombatHueColor=31 will give a bright blue, 15 bit color 555 RGB

CombatHueColor=992 a bright green

• A fix was made to night sight potions.
• Shopkeepers will no longer buy locked containers.
• The mage hat that alters attributes will now have a unique name to make it different looking from regular mage hats.
• People with bounties on their heads will indeed die when killed and their head is claimed, instead of staying alive but badly wounded.
• Idle fidget animations will be reduced when large numbers of players are on screen.
• Problems with putting too many people in a house will be fixed.
• The skills window will show your skills with a decimal point, so you can track smaller changes.
• Doing damage (with a spell, or an attack) will cause hide and invisibility to stop, rendering you visible again.
• Field spells will now function properly with bounty hunting.
• Earthquake damage will be restored to its previous levels.
• Modifiers to damage based on armor type worn will be removed. Currently, differing attack types cause differing amounts of damage based on what sort of armor they hit. There is an error in this which has resulted in a particular outfit giving unnaturally superb protection, so we are removing the modifiers.
• Houses in invalid regions will decay away very quickly.
• A problem with magic scrolls sold by vendors will be fixed.
• People with bounties on their heads will only suffer stat loss (and loss of their head) once.