Ultima Online Patch Notes for 03/18/1998
- All “tell” messages from GMs will now be yellow.
- Numerous more areas have gained music.
- The help menu has been revised.
- The “white hair” problem will be fixed. It is purely a client display problem, so affected characters have suffered no adverse effects. White hair will revert back to its normal color when the fix is available.
- Flame traps have gained sound effects.
Last minute changes:
- Guarding now expires if the pet moves too far away from the guarded item.
- Opening the paperdoll of a guarded player is no longer a criminal action.
Login process
- Passwords on a character level have been disabled; we have been getting too many calls from those who have lost their password.
- The server ranking system will always show Test Center last, to avoid confusing it with a regular game server.
- All previous updates have been consolidated into a single patch. This patch is approximately 370KB.
Creatures
- Wild creatures
- NPC behaviors have been optimized and sped up. Aggressive creatures are now more immediately aggressive.
- The number of creatures in the world has been increased; in addition, creatures in stables and invulnerable creatures (such as vendors) no longer count against creatures in the world.
- Slimes now have a chance of splitting into two slimes when struck.
- Some creatures now have acidic blood that can dissolve your weapon when you strike them, damaging the weapon slightly.
- Human and humanoids alike will be a bit more talkative in combat.
- The jungle south of Trinsic should have improved creature population.
- Pets
- Changes to stables:
- Any of the friends or bosses of a pet can now retrieve it from the stables, instead of only the person who stabled it there.
- All stables will have their contents wiped.
- Stablemasters will have a limit on how many creatures they can stable.
- Stabled animals will be destroyed after one real life week of being left in the stables.
- Stabling pets will charge money first from gold on hand, then from the bank.
- Changes to pet guarding:
- Pets will be immediately aggressive when a guarded object is used or taken.
- Guarded objects and people will have [guarded] over their head when looked at, and approaching them will give you a warning.
- You will not be able to guard items that are in towns.
- Items that are in towns will be considered not to be guarded when they are left there or if they move, when they walk there. The [guarded] tag will go away to indicate this. When they leave towns, the tag will be restored and all previous guarding will resume.
- It will no longer be possible to guard items in containers.
- You will not be able to guard living things other than players and other pets.
- Getting or using a guarded item will now flag you criminal. (This includes using doors, for those who wish to guard their houses with pets/hirelings).
- Pets will no longer be able to fetch things that weigh too much for them.
- Changes to stables:
- The number of creatures in the world should be drastically increased overall by the above changes.
Magic and magic items
- The spellbook should now be able to handle stacked scrolls.
- Wands will now invoke the notoriety query window.
- An exploit with polymorph has been fixed.
- Problems with excessive damage for wands will be fixed.
Optimizations and performance improvements
- We will be testing new code that may significantly reduce the bandwidth requirements for play, thus helping performance.
- House decay rate has been doubled (it is now approximately 11 days from perfect condition to its destruction).
- The problems with campfires not burning out will be fixed, and existing abandoned fires will start to burn out and clean themselves up.
- The limit on items in a container will be lowered to 125.
Skills
- Learning skills by watching will be limited to one tile distance.
- The peacemaking skill will only send messages to those who are in combat mode.
- Problems with copying books with the inscription skill should be fixed.
- Tailoring:
- Failure will now leave the correct amount of cloth scraps.
- The loss of cloth at failure now depends on the item that the player attempted to make.
- You can now sew cloth scraps back into a bolt.
- The ratios of wool, cotton, yarn, and thread needed to go from raw material to finished cloth should be correct now.
- Shuttles of thread now stack, and have been renamed to spools.
- Both sides of looms are usable now.
- Using thread works correctly, as does yarn.
Guilds
- Guildmaster’s titles should now show over their heads like regular guild-granted titles.
- Entering “none” for a title strips the title from that player.
- The listed order of members in a guild is now fixed, and the list will not rearrange itself.