06) 27th February

Ultima Online Patch Notes for 02/27/1998

  • The harm spell (including on wands) will no longer ignore armor.
  • A fix for timewarps has been put in place.
  • Stats gained or lost from timewarps will return to their normal state.
  • There are some changes to the raw materials of tailoring that go along with their new stackable nature:
    • A bolt of cloth will be 50 yards of cloth, cost around 50gp, and weigh 5 stones.
    • Folded cloth, cut cloth, etc, will now be one yard, cost around 1gp, and weigh 1/10th of a stone.
    • Both are stackable.
    • When tailoring on a bolt, any remaining yardage will be changed into a stack of folded cloth yards. An example: Tailor Joe makes a shirt that requires 8 cloth from a stack of 5 bolts. It will deduct the 8 from the 50 yards from one bolt. That remaining 42 yard will then be converted into cut cloth (ie. a stack of 42 yards of cut cloth). That will leave tailor Joe with 4 full bolts and a stack of cloth (42 yards).
  • A server ranking system will go into place. You will be able to choose to display the available servers based on population or connection speed.
  • Ghosts will no longer be affected by ambient light, and will thus be able to see even in the darkest dungeons.
  • Problems with incognito causing client crashes when combined with polymorph should be fixed.
  • Some line of sight fixes related to seeing through terrain were made.
  • Some further server optimizations were done.
  • There is now an hourglass cursor for some slow processes, such as logging in.
  • A possible fix for timewarping was put in. If this doesn’t work, it will help us narrow down the problem considerably.
  • You can no longer create gate travel gates on top of moongates.
  • The skill atrophy problems should be fully resolved.
  • You should be able to copy player-written books with the inscribe skill again.
  • The archery buttes in Yew should work now.
  • The farmer’s shop in Cove is now a provisioner’s.
  • The populations of creatureson the northern island of Jhelom should be improved.
  • Numerous areas gained music.
  • You can now say “news” to town criers to get a snippet of news.
  • The “0 yards of cloth” bug should be fixed.
  • Guildstone fixes:
    • The second and subsequent pages of roster for granting titles to others should be fixed now to display the correct page title.
    • There is a one-change-a-week limit on guild name and abbreviation titles. This is a real world week, not a game week.
    • A bug in guild abbreviation announcement was fixed.
  • A bunch of skills gained sound effects.
  • As part of the stackables change, a few items have gained streamlined interfaces. You can now use kindling in a stack in your backpack and it will automatically remove enough for a fire and place it at your feet. You can also use a stack of unlit torches in your backpack, and it will light one and move it directly to your hand, or if your hands are full, to your feet.
  • In this update, if the stackables changes test out OK, we will be lowering the weight limit for a container to 400 stones, and lowering the item limit to 250 items per container. We anticipate continuing to lower this to a 100 item limit eventually.
  • Numerous items have been made stackable, including many kinds of raw materials, spell scrolls, and various other types of items. A partial list includes:
    • food items
    • cloth
    • tinkering materials
    • kindling
    • bandages
    • magic scrolls and blank scrolls
    • torches, candles, and oil flasks
    • all reagents including “pagan” ones
    • empty potion bottles and empty vials
    • lockpicks and other miscellaneous items
  • A new UO.CFG option has been added to let you manage your windows better. To get the confusion out of the way, OSI terms the various free-floating interface windows in the game “gumps.” 🙂
OffsetGumps=yes|no|on|off
If you set this to on or yes, when you open a container window it will offset from the place where the last one opened. If you set it to off or no, then container windows will always open as they do now, all on top of one another.
  • A similar toggle now exists for minimized windows:
AutoArrangeMinimized=yes|no|on|off
This toggle will turn on automatic arranging of minimized gumps to preset locations, rather than stacking them all in the corner.
  • You will be able to open locked house doors without having to dig out your key, if you have it in your possession.
  • Houses will no longer be allowed on furrowed cropland.
  • Various NPC types which were killable in towns will no longer be.