- INSTA-POLL -
Poll 10 Results
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Poll 9 Results
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Poll 8 Results
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Poll 7 Results
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Poll 6 Results
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Poll 5 Results
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Poll 4 Results
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Poll 3 Results
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Poll 2 Results
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Poll 1 Results
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General Info on Ultima IX: Ascension
CapnBill (December 8th):
Good news! D3D is already much healthier. There were areas of our texture management where there was a lot of room for improvement. Still not as fast as Glide, but much faster.
Even better news: There are still even more areas for improvement, so D3D is going to continue to improve. We also still haven't heard back from all our D3D sources; so no doubt we'll get even more ideas. We're exploring ways to get the Avatar to turn with keypresses! We've already got it working; just needs some fine-tuning.
Getting closer on Patch#2. I think all game-play issues have been dealt with (I mean plot problems & design issues). Still working on finding crashers. We plan to turn QA loose on the patch next week!
The mantra for Patch#1 is -ignoremissing. Use from the command line. CD into your U9 directory; copy the U9PATCH.EXE file into that directory. Type U9PATCH -ignoremissing. Verify that your Journal now says v1.05. Guess that's about it for now!
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Cynthe (December 6th):
First, some words about the patch! There is a problem with
it; there's a file "treedat.flx" that wasn't supposed to
change during run-time, but it is changing. This confuses
the patch program, and it refuses to run. Also, as
suggested in some places, if you've replaced your U9.EXE, the patch
won't run. We have a potential command-line fix for this;
we're working to identify what the ramifications are for
this...more to come soon (Today)!!
As most of you have surmised, you can test whether the patch
worked or not by checking the version number in your
journal. The patch does update the version to 1.05; if it's
still 1.03, the patch didn't run.
Some clarification about D3D and the patch: I've seen the
patch touted as the "D3D Patch for U9"; um, uh, it's not.
It DOES fix some D3D issues, mainly the support for TNT2 and
GeForce; but, it doesn't address the lion's share of D3D
performance issues. We're still researching that.
About D3D performance: some early measurements indicate fog
is slowing down our D3D implementation. Glide provides fog
support in hardware; D3D doesn't, so we had to hand-compute
a lot of the fog values. It looks great, but runs slow.
We'll see if we can speed it up, or at a minimum provide a
switch to turn it off. But, we still have major texture
performance problems as well, and those won't be so easy to
fix.
Our biggest issues: D3D performance, and stability. A lot
of people have good stability, a lot don't. Unfortunately,
every machine in-house we test on has great stability (go
figure). We're continuing to work on this.
That's about it--I'll be in meetings most of the day, but
will check the boards as often as I can!
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CapnBill (December 3rd):
Voodoo3 vs Voodoo2: I'm a convert now. I took out my
Voodoo2 last night, and replaced it with a Voodoo3 2000;
what a difference! It's much better, and runs flawlessly at
1024x768. System: Celeron 400, 128MB RAM, 256MB swap file.
Speaking of swap files: We're changing our recommendation on
the web site from "500MB" to 2xSystem RAM. If you set your
swap file to TOO LARGE (ie 2GB or something) you'll probably
get really horrible performance. I tried this once, and
immediately set it back; too large just results in too much
thrashing. Stick to 2X your system RAM.
nVidia feedback: Spent over an hour with them in a
conference call. Lots of useful info! Some short-term
things to try, but we all suspect the real problems are in
our texture management. Direct3D works a lot better with
apps the load all their textures for a "level" up-front,
then
don't mess with them any more. Our continuous changing &
swapping of textures, combined with the way we're having DX6
manage our textures, has D3D pretty harried. The "fix" may
involve changing how we manage textures, or relying more on
DX7, or both. Those are not quick changes...
I'm playing the game myself, at home. Love it! It's a good
sign when, after being immersed in something for two years,
it's addictive to play...whenever I feel down about the
negative feedback (which is, I admit, often justified) I
play the game. I love it! The patch is coming SOON--it fixes a
lot of stuff. Expect another patch not too far behind it
that fixes even more stuff. The D3D fix may or may not come
with that one....we'll see....
Again, those of you who post problems, we listen! And, we
work on them. We've fixed a number of crashes & problems
based on such feedback.
DON'T DELETE OPTIONS.INI! It's your friend--don't delete
it! The game creates a "default" one if you do; but the
default's WON'T be tuned to your system. You'll probably
crash if you delete it. If you do delete it, either
re-install, or run Hardware Setup & make sure every setting
on the dialogs are appropriate for your system.
DON'T INSTALL COMPRESSED TEXTURES UNLESS YOU HAVE A SAVAGE4!
Some cards just don't run with Compressed Textures. Use
16-bit for D3D.
GeForce fixes are known at EA--contact them for advice, or
watch our boards for a post. The GeForce, from what I
understand, supports compressed textures in hardware--a
bonus! But, with current drivers, they won't work until we
either make a code change, or there's a driver fix--we're
working to resolve that, it should appear in Patch#2.
I hear a lot about how the game is more detailed & more
immersive than any other game--but it's slower than any
other game! Yep, those go hand-in-hand. Sad to hear that some
feel the game isn't "optimized"; that implies we didn't
spend any time working on performance. To set the record
straight, we've spent more time working on performance than
any other program I've ever worked on in my 16 years of
professional programming! So much so that we're just plain
sick of it. Gug! In fact, it's performance issues that
forced out much-wanted features like NPC schedules. We
could have added everything we wanted to; but the game just
wouldn't run. We constantly walked that fine line between
features & performance, and made difficult trade-off
decisions at least once per day. If anything, it sounds
like we added too much detail, and too many world model features,
since performance turned out to be such an issue.
Bottom line is, we at Origin are pretty happy with the wa
that balance turned out. The world turned out pretty much
the way we envisioned it, which we often thought would't be
possible; the game taxes current technology, probably way
too much, but is playable on most systems after appropriate
tuning.
Ah, enough harping on the negative! It's Friday! And, its
really good to have Fridays again (7 day weeks pretty much
ruin Friday).
I'll be around over the weekend. Next daily post will be
Monday!
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CapnBill (December 2nd):
More stuff to do than I have time for! We found another
crash bug, thanks to help from you out there!
D3D update: The TNT2 Detonator driver fix is being tested;
we ran into another problem on the TNT2 that we're trying to
fix too. Some vendors are helping us with performance, and
we've got Microsoft involved too. I trust we'll be able to
improve performance, but cannot provide any estimates as to
how much, depending on just what the performance problems
are!
List of things fixed in the patches: I looked this over, and
WOW we've fixed a lot. We're dying to get these fixes out
there--we're going as fast as we can.
Random crashers: We've tried to repeat them here (again) and
can't. But, we have identified a couple of employee home
systems that have crash problems, and we'll work on those to
find out what's up.
We still want to hear from you when you have crash problems,
lockups, or plot-stoppers; it is helping us to find & fix
these problems. Also, you should contact EA Customer
Support so they can keep these bugs in their database; they have
been able to help just about everyone who's called.
That's about it for now!
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CapnBill (December 1st):
Today's format remains free-form. Here's where we are today: We've culled your messages for bugs, and we now have a list of well over 100 bugs to work on. We're going back into a bug-fixing mode to work on Patch #2 (Patch #1, currently being QA'd, includes the fix for the TNT / GeForce driver problem, the blocked tunnel problem, and some other crashes.)
Some of you seem to be having very few problems. Some of you seem to be very crash-prone. This is of great concern to us, especially since we're unable to reproduce this here! It seems incredibly system-specific. One of our programmers played at home, and got a lot of crashes--we'll work on using his system for debugging.
Hints on crash-prone-ness: try updating sound drivers. Try updating video drivers (except the TNT).
We're looking at customer support calls very closely. If you're having problems, be sure you let them know. They keep stats on frequency of various types of calls, and specific problems.
A continual debate here: Why was the initial response to the game so negative? Is it really just a pile of junk? Why did all our QA guys and ourselves play through with minimal problems? I have some ideas about this--and some of you are discovering the same thing. Ascension seems to need some stringent system tuning to get it to work well. Once you've made these kinds of changes to your Windows config, or your system, those changes apply forever; and the game runs well & keeps running well. The kinds of problems you're having are the kinds that show up on "veteran" systems, systems that haven't had Windows re-installed lately, that have accumulated lots of different types of drivers & various applications. So, once a system is "tuned" for Ascension, a lot of problems don't show up on that system any more. Of course, we do have lots of bugs to fix, and we're working on that--I'm just musing about an apparent mismatch between the product we felt we were delivering, and the product many of you felt you bought...
Here's an interesting note (just to clear up any misunderstanding): The fall rate of NPCs, creatures, and the Avatar in our world is exactly and precisely 9.81 m/s^2, which is of course the gravitational constant for our planet earth. As for the Avatar not being damaged enough, well, mostly that's by design--Richard & Seth, in the spirit of not wanting this to be an action game, didn't want falling to be a major risk component to the game dynamic. But, we'll re-evaluate the amount of damage it does.... 'nuff said.
If you're crashing when you're first trying to run the game, the culprit may be the movie that's trying to play. Make sure Media Player runs on your system and can play MPG movies. We haven't experienced that here, but enough of you have having this problem for me to seriously suspect something about DirectX. We use the DirectMedia component of DirectX to play our movies, which are just MPGs. You can turn off movies if you want, by setting MoviePath in your OPTIONS.INI file to NONE, or to a path that doesn't exist.
We now have several engineers working on D3D....lots of ideas, still no hard data though.
If you have a DirectX5 driver for your Voodoo card, Install won't run (since Installing DirectX6 or 7 doesn't remove that driver). Remove the hardware device from your system and re-add it, then re-install DirectX7. Install should run then.
Why do NPCs or creatures hang in mid-air? I've seen this, and it's an artifact of the way our creatures do collision. Creatures have an invisible "cylinder" that follows them around; this is their "collision shape". The cylinder for many creatures is larger than their body shape. If the creatures walks to the edge of a ledge, his body will hang off the edge; sometimes, this is so extreme that it looks like he's floating in mid-air. We always wanted to fix this, but this is one we'll just have to live with....
Why do some objects hang in mid-air? Because having every object in the world fall continually is just way too expensive. Objects try to fall initially; if something blocks them, they "give up". Result: some objects end up stuck in the air. Bummer.
Why is swimming so hard? I guess we all just got used to it, but many of you have having trouble with it. The Avatar's collision cylinder stays set to his full body height (vertically) even while you swim; so, his invisible cylinder is taller than his body looks like, so he doesn't seem able to fit through things like he should. I can work on a fix for this, but all the fixes I can think of involve dynamically changing his collision cylinder size, which is very dangerous! Hmm...
Why do we use cylinders for collision? For performance reasons. The game would run at 1/100th its current speed if we really did mesh-to-mesh collision with animated characters....
Thanks again for your involvement in this process. It's helping the product. Thanks for the feedback, even negative. And thanks for the positive notes too! They help keep us going.
I'll be around!
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CapnBill (November 30th):
First, it's really hard keeping up with all the messages; they flow in even while I'm reading them! Thank you all for providing feedback (even though it's not all positive, it's useful).
Second, I want everyone to know our feelings about negative feedback. This game is our baby! We've slaved for years on it, and invested huge amounts of time and sweat & blood into it. We're very proud of it. So, when we hear that a number of people are having a negative play experience, it certainly affects us. We want everyone to enjoy it! We want everyone to get the pleasure out of it that we built into it. If you're not, we're not just concerned; we're upset. And, we want to hear the types of problems you're having, so we have a chance to fix them.
I want to give you all a daily feedback about what we're doing here, to keep you informed. Updates will be in disorganized, brain-dump format. So, here's the first day's report!
Game design issues: The problems we'll be looking to fix in future patches won't be related to game design, unless they're plot-stoppers. In other words, there isn't much we can do about requests for more NPC schedules, etc. But, there are things we can do about blatant bugs (creatures standing still while you hit them, plot-stoppers, etc).
We've identified some bugs in the install programs that can allow you to install the game in an invalid way; we're working on a fix.
We've identified another bug in the Hardware Setup program; it over-writes any settings you made in your Journal Options. So, if you set your Journal to make the game run faster, then run the Hardware Setup program, you game will probably run slower. To fix this, just change the Options in your Journal again. We're fixing the Hardware Setup program; it'll appear in a future patch.
We have a patch that fixes the TNT2 driver problem (the latest TNT2 drivers break the game). We'll put this patch up as soon as it passes our QA process. This patch also fixes a number of crashers; it should improve stability.
We're brainstorming about D3D & performance. As usual, we have identified a lot of possible things we could do to the code to improve performance; but we have no proof that any of them will actually improve performance. We're working with Matrox & potentially some other vendors to identify exactly where the slow-downs are in our pipeline. D3D performance is occupying the majority of our time.
We're looking into finding & fixing memory leaks & crashes. We've found the Rule-Britannia-music-plays-forever-bug, and Audball is implementing a fix. We're addressing several problems in the creature AIs.
(BTW, you can improve performance and reduce crashes by turning off EAX.)
We've found various plot-stoppers (some by you, some by our QA dept) and have fixed them; again, they'll be available in a future patch in the next few weeks.
Performance perception issue: The Install scales the game engine's settings up, based on the type of CPU you have. So, if you have a fast CPU, you'll have more bells & whistles than others, but at the cost of speed. You probably don't notice the fact that your game looks better than someone else's (because you can't see their screen), but you do notice that it doesn't seem to run faster. So, you can just scale down your Journal Options settings for more speed.
Crashers: We really did QA the product pretty thoroughly before we shipped it. Our QA dept worked extremely hard on this. Obviously, and most regrettably, there are still crashers & problems in the game. We're still working on finding them & fixing them. From what we've seen here, and read in your reports, the crashes seem random, and related to low-memory and low-frame-rate conditions; there are currently no reported crashes I know of that are "repeatable" (example: "Every time I click on the lampshade of serenity, I crash"). In other words, the crashes don't seem related to a specific user action; they just happen at random. So, the single most important thing to do to improve stability, from your point of view, is to increase your Windows swap file size to reduce low-memory situations. If any of you experience repeatable crashes, please let us know. We are working to find & fix the "random" low-memory crashes, too.
Well, more tomorrow. I'll try to answer questions as best as I can, and as time allows!
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Cynthe (November 29th):
Greetings!
We have been following closely the responses of our fans, and we are aware of customer concerns, the greatest of which is the Direct3D performance of Ultima Ascension. The game is very important to us, and we have by no means stopped our work in ensuring that game is worthy of the legacy of Ultima.
We have also seen concerns dealing with the newer TNT drivers, and we have found a solution for this. A patch will be released very soon that will fix the TNT driver incompatibility, as well as address issues within the game, including some that we have seen from you. Our programming team is still hard at work improving the D3D support, and has, in fact, enlisted the help of D3D card manufacturers to ensure the greatest improvement possible. These changes will come in a later patch, after we are convinced that we have done everything we can to make sure that everyone can experience Ultima Ascension at its fullest. Please check here for announcements concerning the time frame of the improvements.
We also would like to announce that a FAQ is coming soon, which will provide not only official answers and recommendations pertaining to the game and technical suggestions, but also suggestions from the community as well. This FAQ will be updated frequently as new information is gained.
Check back tomorrow for more information.
-Cynthe
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CapnBill (November 12th):
We are indeed working on our D3D performance even now. Our D3D
performance still is not a fast as Glide. We've completely re-architected
our D3D renderer so that it does all the "recommended" D3D tricks for
performance, and absolutely minimizes the state changes it puts D3D
through; and we achieved only a minimal performance gain. After all that,
our renderer is now a true Direct3D native renderer; it's not just a Glide
renderer ported to Direct3D. We really expected a performance gain from
these changes. At this point, we're working directly with some engineers
at some of the D3D chip manufacturers to find out what's up...but it looks
seriously like CainDragon is absolutely right. The problem isn't the so
much code; it's the type of world scene we're trying to draw. Other
products tend to have a high "triangle-to-texture ratio"; that is, for each
texture in the scene, there may be about 100 triangles that all share that
texture. Ours has about 10! This is a symptom of the large variety of
textures in our scenes. So, it's visually stunning, but D3D just doesn't
seem to know what to do with all these textures. At least, that's our
current theory.
First, we're already implementing a patch that addresses some D3D driver
issues that have come up since we made our "final" version (sheesh!) The
plan is to have this patch available when the game is on the shelves.
Second, part of that patch will be a list of current 3D hardware, and how
to configure U9 to run best with it. Our Installer tries to make its decisions
based on what D3D says the card will do; but the D3D drivers aren't
always accurate in that regard.
Third, we're not purely table-driven; we have a large number of flags in
the OPTIONS.INI file that control various D3D features; and you'll be able
to manually configure U9 for future cards.
But, I have to say, even after months of working on D3D (sigh), Glide
performance is still much better than our D3D performance. We're
continuing to work on that, even now, though...
Screen shots: it is documented.
Facial animation: Yes, our artists created multiple frames of animation for
characters' faces, and we just flip frames to animate them. They're not
sync'd to the sound, but it's pretty effective.
Best moments: I could go on & on. My favorites were the times we'd get
some new feature on-line (like the sky, the sunset, the creature
animations), and we'd all just sit back & stare at the screen in
wonder...we'd never seen anything like it!
Worst moments: I think just dealing with this project's checkered history
& legacy code. It's been fairly frustrating. Some folks feel like "Hey,
you've had 5 years--why aren't you done?", and we're like "But we've only
worked on this for 2 years!" There have been a number of frustrating
times that came from that sort of thing.
Funniest: Some of our bugs were truly hilarious; the talking dog-guard;
giving a butterfly a whole bunch of stuff, and killing it to get them all
back; the flying guards in the castle.
Future: REST! VACATION! Re-acquaint myself with my family.
Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY. We're very proud of our work. Would we
do it again? ABSOLUTELY. But, we'd do it differently!
Fans, by & large, were quite helpful! In fact, we incorporated a number of
requested features, and I think it helped the game as a result.
How many Guardians to change a light bulb: Um, depends on how many
polygons are in that light bulb. :)
400 hours: Sounds maybe a bit high. But, I think well over 100 hours will
be typical, and the game has a lot of replay value. There's no way to do
everything & see everything on your first time through. Feedback from all
testers is "This game's HUGE!"
Old U9: It was, well, kind of sad compared to the current one. We have it
around....maybe LadyMoi can do something.
Older Ultimas: I think every Ultima team works about as hard on their
Ultima. Given the technology of the time, each Ultima has pushed the
envelope as far as possible, and this one's no different.
Sadly, Chuckles isn't in the game....but we thought about it!
Most powerful weapon? Well, it's the <$@#!@#$> (censored for spoiler
reasons). :) And you can quote me on that!!
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CapnBill (November 3rd):
We've got two guys (one of them is LB!) who run with dual
Voodoo2's in SLI configuration, no problems. The main
advantage we've seen is that it lets you crank up to
1024x768. With only one Voodoo2, you can only go up to
800x600. There doesn't seem to be a speed advantage either
way.
I've had multiple versions of Windows2000 Beta on my system, pre-release candidate this & that. At one point, I had a version that ran D3D pretty well. My system still runs quite well with the Glide NT drivers, on my Voodoo2; I still like my Windows 2000 installation, but apparently not all of you are that fortunate.
The latest version of Windows 2000 requires specific D3D drivers to be present before D3D will run on it; so I haven't been able to run D3D on my system for some time. Also, no version of Windows 2000 I've ever had supported the SBLive; I run with an Awe64.
Anyway, sorry to have created so much confusion. Durham's right; don't go with Windows 2000 until you're sure it supports your hardware. But, it's moot; the OS isn't out yet. As for EA "officially" supporting Windows2000, hmmm...I don't know either way. But, I predict the game will work fine on the final release version of Windows 2000!
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The1Mango (October 25th):
Demo:
Our exclusive deal with CGW was only for US. We distributed
the demo to all our international territories and told them
they were free to give it out to all the game mags, as long
as it wasn't released earlier than Nov. 1st. It's really up
to the PR/Marketing folks in each terrority to get it onto
demo discs. I'm assuming that the very large size of the
demo was a limitor as to how many mags would take it. I'll
confirm this though and get back to y'all.
Yobgod is right in that since the game is one continuous
world, it is impossible to break it down in to level chunks.
The whole game will still be on 2 CDs.
We are going to be exploring more ways to make it smaller,
but that'll have to wait until we sign off the final
software! :)
Oh, Canada:
I believe that all EB stores, US and Canada, essentially
have the same distribution, so I'm assuming that it will show
up on the shelves the same time as the US. As for the
online vs. retail issue, that's a tough one. Usually what
happens to me is that I get to the store to find out they
have sold out already and wish I had ordered it online. :)
Misc:
I've tried to hit everyones questions, but let me know if
that's not the case. I'm sorry I can't reveal the exact ship
date, but I can tell you things are going well and you won't
have to wait that much longer!!! :)
I hope you all are able to get your hands on the demo, I'm
really looking forward to your feedback. Please just keep in
mind that a lot has changed since we sent that demo off to
CGW, so hopefully any of the issues you may have have since
been addressed.
Long live the Dragons!!!
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CapnBill (October 23th):
(Hope I make sense here--we're pretty darn tired these daze)
The game will run at least as well as the demo. We put the
demo out before our final round of debugging, and we've made
some performance changes since then (nothing major, just
minor tweaks).
As you may surmise from that statement, the demo is a tad
buggy. It has load/save, but it's a little unreliable, so
don't be surprised if your savegames exhibit some strangeness
(like rats making goat sounds, one of our favorite bugs!)
Also, our D3D support in the demo wasn't fully mature at that
time.
Another thing to remember about the demo is that, by its
nature, it doesn't contain some of the showcase features of
the game (we couldn't put the Britannia map in the demo, so
it doesn't contain many NPCs or conversations). But, the
demo is >>very<< fun, and does give you an idea of what it's
like to play the game! So, enjoy!!
One more thing about the demo. We initially thought the
demo was about 10% of the game. Then, we thought it was more
like 5%. Well, our current estimate is more like 2 or 3%!
The game is HUGE.
Again, I can't give an official release date here. But, I can fill you in on where we are now! The source code is now locked; the only changes we're making are critical changes (crashers, plot-stoppers). The maps are locked too; the only changes made are critical ones. We're all pulling long hours; everyone is on 24-hour call. Even Richard is pulling all-nighters, playing through the game & making sure the balance is right.
Bottom line: WE'RE DAYS AWAY!!!! After that, it's packaging & distribution, then to the shelves.
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CapnBill (October 17th):
The demo was done well before the game was finished (it
still isn't quite finished!), so I certainly wouldn't
recommend trying to transfer your save-games from one [demo] to the other [full game]!
Yes, we do have it in! [Screenshot-capture utility]
Also, you'll all be interested to know we finally got our
multi-res support running properly. UIX looks FANTASTIC on a
TNT2 at 1280x960!! (Of course, it ran a tad chuggy in that
configuration). Generally, we've found that a Voodoo card at
800x600 suffer from no slow-down at all; and, the Matrox
G200 in my office ran at 1024x768 with no problems. The
higher resolutions really showcase the quality &
high-resolution of our art!
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EA Online Store (October 12th):
The following items will be shipped with Dragon Edition:
A Cloth Map of Britannia - This high quality cloth map is a limited edition item.
8 Tarot Cards - One for each of the 8 sacred virtues, so that you an foresee the destiny of yourself or others.
Ankh Pendant - Wear this 1 inch gold pendant around your neck to show your virtue.
The Ultima CD Collection - Contains Ultima I through VIII, including Ultima VII add ons: Forge of Virtue and Silver Seed.
Original Music CD - Containing original scores from the game, Created by a 50-piece professional orchestra.
High Quality Illustration Reprint - Depicts the conflict between the Avatar and Guardian, created by long time Ultima artist Dennis Loubet.
Deluxe Manuals - With an imitation leather cover.
Lord British Certificate - A personal thank you to the fans of the Ultima series from Lord British.
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Menion Leah (October 1st):
I have some great news about U9! I am a manager for Electronics Boutique, and I just returned from our Fall Manager Conference in Orlando, FL. Richard Garriott presented U9 in the EA vendor class. He had with him the official cloth map, and I must say it looks very nice. It is pretty close to the maps we have seen thus far on the net, but the land mass looks bigger than the shots we have seen on the web and there are more islands and such.
He also had with him a mock up of the official box. It looks good! It looks like an ornate book with a window in the front showing part of the 'acending Avatar' picture. The front flap of the box opens up and the full picture will be visible (along with multiple pages of screens and info). He also talked about the Dragon Edition, and it will be very nice. It includes all of the items mentioned so far (map, virtue cards, soundtrack CD) as well as a leather bound spell book (he said it would be an leather type material), a gold Ankh (suitable as a pendant), and "a couple of other goodies". He did not elaborate further on what these 'goodies' would be. The other Ultimas will also be in there. As to whether they will be modified to work with Win95/98, that is still unclear. The Origin rep that was with him said that it would be the same as the Ultima Collection, but that it was an updated version of that CD. Personally, I don't think any code modifications have been made. Possibly just a new configuration tool or something.
The demo, according to Mr. Garriott, will be on either the November or December issue of CGW (It ain't on the November issue, that one is out already. -Jazar). He said the issue would be out the first of November. He also said that the demo would be available for download right after the mag. hits the newsstands, and that he thought it was about 200 megs! The game looks wonderful. I am what you would term a 'hardcore' Ultima fan, and this game is a true Ultima in every sense of the word. The interactivity is wonderful. He showed the demo of the Avatar's house, and everything works and can be manipulated. Most of what we saw has been seen in the MPEGS that are on the web. He did, however, do a few little activities that show how realistic the game is. While he was showing the bow in action, he did a little target practice on a few butterflies that were fluttering around! He also went swimming and there were fish under the water, and a couple of geese cruising around the surface. He proceeded to shoot them as well, to demonstrate the interactivity. When he shot the geese, they squawked and rolled over on their sides and floated on the surface. There was more, but most of it we are already aware of.
One other thing he talked about was the estimated play time. He said that originally they were estimating 40 to 100 hours of play. Now, he said that it will be more like 40 to 400 hours of play! He said the game was huge and very intricate, and that this was much more apparent now that they had an opportunity to play the full game as opposed to bits and pieces. He also said the demo itself would be around 9 or 10 hours of play! The most exciting news, however, is the fact that the release date is November 23! He seemed very certain that this was the date, so I feel that it is pretty solid. As is always the case with release dates, however, I assume it could change. If I think of any other info I will let you know...this is all from memory and I am pretty tired. Just to say once more, the game just looks incredible and now that I have seen it and talked to Mr. Garriott, I have no doubt in my mind that this will be the crown jewel in the series. It will be a fitting end to the 'Trilogy of Trilogy's' and it definitely deserves the name Ultima.
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Jaccl (September 26th):
The game has been tested on 4MB Voodoo cards and will run but the performance cost is pretty substantial. There is just too darn much texture swapping.
You not only can swim but you will have to at times. And as a matter of fact armor can have an effect on your swimming ability (Capn Bill snuck that one in) :). Anything more would be a spoiler . . .
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CapnBill (September 19th):
Yes, some of our trees are of the 2D-ish variety; the
artists created a couple of tree-clump objects, to reduce
poly count in forest areas, and the worldbuilders placed them
mainly in areas where they'd add visual appeal as sort of a
backdrop to some of the forests, and favored true 3D models
in forests you can walk through. The effect isn't perfect, I
admit, but we all think it looks pretty cool. Our poly
count was just getting too high.
Some of the trees in the screenshot you're looking at are
just lower levels of detail ("LODs") of our 3D models; at
sunrise & sunset, the polys on those LODs become
overly-apparent. Again, this doesn't look as good as it
could; but, it improved performance. Maybe we'll revisit the
LOD distance for trees like that, to see if we can push it
out a bit.
Water color: a few months ago, we brightened it up a little;
it made it look a lot better in dungeons, but now at night
it looks sort of nuclear glow-in-the-dark-ish. We're
planning to tune that, just haven't got to it yet.
We very recently added the ability to sleep & pass time; if
you lay in a bed or on a cot, time passes faster, and you
recover a bit of health.
---
CapnBill (September 16th):
- On 3dfx vs. D3D screenshot comparison:
Sorry, but release of screenshots or other materials by the
dev-team is taboo! I'll pass the request on to marketing,
though...
- On Spanish version of Ascension:
At this time, there are no plans to localize for
Spanish...but things do change, so don't give up. All I know
for sure is it won't be part of the initial release.
- On music heard in the trailers:
I think it's safe to say that none of the music you've heard
in any of those trailers is in-game music. Our in-game
music is much better.
- On earlier question of what is more important:
You're all on track. There is no "one thing" that will help
your performance--you need all components (CPU speed, RAM,
3D hardware) to meet the recommended spec to get
above-min-spec performance.
Moving the clipping plane out does increase your RAM
requirement, as well as putting more of a load on your disk
I/O and 3D hardware. Typical RAM usage is around 35 - 45 MB
of physical RAM. I've seen the game use as much as 70 MB of
RAM with the clipping planes pushed out, running around
Britain! But that was on a higher-end system.
- Clouds and stars rotation:
(This one is close to home, since I wrote the sky logic.)
The sky does indeed rotate during both day and night; at
night, its rotation is slowed greatly, you don't really even
notice it. In the day, it allows the impression of clouds
moving.
We considered having separate layers for clouds, moons, sun,
stars; but, one of the main barriers to this was texture RAM
(our full-resolution, 16-bit sky already takes up 1.7 MB of
texture RAM!!) So, we backed off on that. Also, using
multiple layers would have made it more difficult to create
our awesome sunrises & sunsets.
- Concerning gamma correction:
We're considering that, but we're drowning in bugs!
However, U9's lighting is tuned to look best at Gamma
settings lower than most defaults, say about 1.1 or 1.2 (I
think most cards default to 1.3 or, old Glide cards used to
default to 1.7). Anyway, too dark isn't usually a problem
for us at all.
- About save game slots and sizes:
Save games are anywhere from .5 MB to 4 MB, depending upon
how far into the game you are. Average seems about 2. There is no limit on the number of slots. Richard is
playing through right now, and he's up to 70 (he ran out of
disk space)! We recently had to add a "delete" button for
save games, since they were piling up...
- Concerning international versions:
We're localizing for French and German; translations will be
complete, both in text and audio.
- Concerning the camera's interaction with the clipping plain:
Yes, if you pull the camera far enough out, you can actually
lose sight of the Avatar. But, there are limits to how far
out you can go that prevent this.
- About dungeons:
The dungeons actually have a lot of variety; the designers &
artists have given each one its own personality, so to
speak. They don't have "levels" in the classic sense; but
some of them sprawl pretty broadly, with numerous rooms &
chambers.
- Relating to the confinement of the U9 world:
The main world map, Britannia, has no areas that you're not
intended to eventually explore (unless you count underneath
the ground, or behind walls, etc). You can stack things up &
climb them; but I wouldn't advise piling up too many objects
in one area, for frame rate considerations.
- AI intelligence and pathfinding:
Well, we wanted NPCs to respond to weather; and, a fair
number of them do indeed respond to day/night cycles. But,
I'd expect to see a lot of NPCs getting mighty wet! Just
another of those things we weren't able to get to.
- Pathfinding is working pretty well these days; but we still
minimize its use because it can consume a lot of frame rate.
People do move around, but not all at once, generally.
Creatures are able to find their way to you pretty well, too.
---
Jaccl (September 10th):
Around here we usually call it 'The U9 engine', not very imaginative I
know. :) The inhouse editing tool we use to build the game is called 'Ankh'.
Right now we are focused on finishing U9 so I couldnt really speculate on the
future if the engine. We'll just have to wait and see.
---
CapnBill (September 8th):
We have indeed been tuning this (time) value. Currently, one
Britannian day is exactly 216 "real" minutes (3.6 hours). We
found the 72-minute day to be too short, so we made it 3
times longer.
Our engine is a completely free-form engine! The only
limitations to your movement are the slope of the polygons
you attempt to move onto, and the height of a vertical rise
(ie you can only climb a ledge that's so high). We strive to
make it as realistic as possible, and to also give you as
much freedom as possible.
You can also move objects around in the world (such as
chairs), and use them to climb over obstacles. Our collision
system uses the geometry of the in-game art for collision
detection, so if anything in the world moves or changes,
collision changes with it.
---
Jaccl (September 5th):
Well some bugs take a few minutes to fix, some bugs take a few days. Some bugs get fixed by some other bug fixes and some bug fixes make more bugs. So unfortunately at this point there really isnt a way to 'countdown' in the fashion you describe Twiggy. Right now the growth of the bug list is a good thing. It means that problems are being caught and addressed.
We have managed to squash ALOT of the engine bugs this week and many many smaller bugs. QA continues to echo their original assessment which is that U9 is the most stable and bug free Ultima ever at this point in development. We are working hard to keep that true all the way to ship!
---
CapnBill (September 3rd):
Sure, we love OpenGl! The reason we support Glide is because of its early availability and ease of use (it supported many effects we wanted well before D3D made them available). We went with D3D as a hardware-independent solution because of...well...it seemed a good idea at the time, and other EA products were doing it...oh yeah, and Microsoft was supporting D3D more strongly than OpenGl at that time, so it looked like D3D was going to be a winner. Also, it appeared that most hardware vendors supported D3D more than OpenGl, and we wanted Ascension to run on most hardware platforms. I'd venture to say that is still the case (though I'm not the expert). I'm sure our D3D programmer wishes we'd gone with OpenGl instead; getting D3D to work in any universal fashion across various hardware platforms is very difficult. But now that our D3D is just about there, we have no compelling reason to support OpenGl.
---
CapnBill (September 3rd):
I'll try to post some of these as they come up. Another
somewhat humorous bug that we fixed a few weeks ago was that
fish had a tendency to swim up onto land! They'd approach
the edge of their little pond, pause for a bit--then dart up
onto land, and cruise across the terrain. Scary.
And, yet another one: our engine is coded such that, if it
tries to draw a piece of art that's missing, it substitutes
an obnoxious pink cube; the idea is to force us to address a
lack of art. So, on the Earth map, there was a creature that
was missing some art; the result was a huge pink cube was
waddling across the grass. Then, it noticed me, got excited
(apparently), and waddled quickly over to me & began
attacking me! I killed it, but was forever stuck inside this
gigantic pink box. (We fixed this one too--but it's very
memorable).
---
CapnBill (September 2nd):
We would really love to put it; it would help our
performance. BUT, our mesh format is a hybrid designed for
use with Glide & D3D; it would involve a major rewrite of our
transform pipeline, along with our meshes, along with our
art importer, to allow geometry acceleration. Trust me, if
there were any way to put it in, we would have--we just
cannot at this point, without delaying the product more
(something we're absolutely not willing to do). Sorry for
the bad news--but, our frame rate is much better, the game
runs pretty well; and you can adjust your settings to get
just about as much speed out of it as you want!
---
CapnBill (September 2nd):
I can help out some here. Our main areas of difficulty are:
- Save/Load: this is always a problem in any game. Getting it stable is very difficult. Example: save a game, then load it. The giant rat now makes goat sounds. Grrr...
- D3D: a few card-specific issues remain (alpha-testing on some cards doesn't work as advertised, for example)
- Interface: our interface is fairly easy to use, but complex to implement--there are a lot of tiny little interface problems to fix.
- Here's my own personal demon: sometimes, people will fall partway into the floor or the ground and get stuck there! We've had this bug for months, but haven't found it yet. It's a tough one! There are a million other bugs like this; things that have been plaguing us for months...but, we'll squash 'em all eventually.
- Combat: we continue to tune & refine our combat; we're adding little touches here & there, and the creature AI can never be good enough, so there's always work to do there...
- Spells: various little issues, mostly tuned & working fine. Bug count, including those that have been fixed, is now up to around 2400...and climbing...this game is huge! But, it's shaping up really well, too--the polish is really showing.
---
CapnBill (September 2nd):
Well, our D3D is pretty far along now. It looks really
good! In fact, it looks better than Glide in some cases.
The only visual difference is in fog; D3D doesn't support
true pixel-by-pixel fog, it only supports vertex fog. There
isn't a huge difference; but Glide fog just looks a little
more realistic.
Performance: Glide still beats all our D3D cards in 8-bit;
in 16-bit (which is required by a lot of D3D cards), the
Matrox G400 is the champ. The TNT2 is pretty cool too. Both
these cards beat a Voodoo2 running 16-bit. But neither is
as fast as a Voodoo2 (or Voodoo3) running in 8-bit.
But, we're still tuning D3D speed, so these results aren't
final by any means!
---
DurhamDragon (August 31st):
The Japanese computer magazine 'DOS/V' scored an interview with Richard Garriot himself in their September issue, in which he revealed several details about the special edition of U:A. According to the interview:
- The special edition of U:A will be called the 'Dragon Edition.'
- The Dragon Edition will contain a leather-bound manual, a cloth map, and eight tarot cards
---
CapnBill (August 25th):
Sorry, but we're so completely buried that it looks unlikely
that we'll be able to fit it in. But, on the up side, the
game is shaping up well! Sorry for the bad news.
---
Yobgod (August 25th):
Monsters: many. lots.
Spells: 32-40 'circle' spells (8 circles w/ 4-5 per circle)
[The discrepancy comes from confusion over whether
or not 'ether' is an element.]
Additionally a small number of 'linear' spells
(circle zero/cantrips/etc) and a number of 'ritual'
spells (more like magical recipes).
Skills: There is a weapon skill for each of the classes of
weapon (one-handed, two-handed, polearm, missile, barehanded)
with ,I believe, 4 skill levels. (Novice, Apprentice,
Journeyman, Master or equivalent). Skills will not be
required for most in-game activities.
---
Ralph Dragon (August 24th):
The menu is IN the game, though not in the form of a list
before the game starts. I liked the old menu, but in UIX it's
being presented in a most splendid fashion. You immediately
"Journey onwards", and your load/save can be accessed through
your journal (a book) so your never taken out of your
fantasy setting and exited from the game to a menu or screen
to save/load and have your experience ruined by that
transition. And when you want to "Create a Character" you
simply walk through a park with trees to a wagon and a Gypsy
that will ask you the questions and create your character.
Just a 3D rendition of the traditional Ultima scene. Which
reminds me, I do believe that I suggested such a thing a long
time ago (the thing about walking through trees/park to a
wagon and the gypsy) I may have predicted what they were
going to do or even better actually inspired them!
---
Yobgod (August 22nd):
...RG has probably been thinking of ideas since U8.
...Work on U:IX was then started about 5 years ago, but that
is not the same game that they're working on now.
...personnel changes and changes in technology pretty much
led them to start over completely about 2 years ago.
...then UO went into development and was taking more work
than expected, so much of the U:IX team was pulled off to
help finish UO on time.
...once UO was released U:IX finally got its team back to
work full time on the U:IX of today.
So, the current U:IX has been in full time development maybe
a year, but its been in development for more like 2 years,
and various other abandoned versions have been worked on for
over 5.
That, roughly, is the story as we know it.
People who've actually lived through parts of it will
certainly know in more detail...
---
Jaccl (August 17th):
The game and editing tools are written in using a
combination of C++, straight C, and assembly. All of the
programmers use MS Dev Studio 5 or 6, but we do periodic test
builds using other compilers.
The artists do most of their modeling and some animation in
Lightwave. The majority of the animation has been created in
3D Studio MAX. The artists also use Photoshop for everything
imaginable.
The game is built using an inhouse editor. It allows the
entire development team to edit the game simultaneously.
There are also special tools for importing 3D objects and
animations, and managing sounds in the game.
---
Yogbod (August 12th):
What we know about "the storm":
There is a single storm that wanders about over the U:IX
map.
It features light drizzle around the edges and heavy rain
and thunder in the center, so if you were directly in its
path the sky grows slowly darker and a light rain begins to
fall which then intensifies until you're in the middle of a
raging storm. The rain then tapers off and the sky clears.
Interesting effects than then occur from different
interactions with the storm. If you just brush the edge you
only get a light shower, but if you end up in the middle of
the storm and it happens to travel with you (or park over
you) you could be in for a prolonged rain.
There may be rainbows.
The raindrops trace paths from the storm to the ground, and
are blown by the wind, but do not do anything when they hit
other than generate a "splash" that we are aware of. (So the
ground does not become wet and you could not catch then in a
bucket.) This does mean that you can shelter under bridges
and trees (And you'll never get that weird "it's raining in
the house" effect that occassionally tried to pop up in U7.
If the storm were overtop of you during the evening, the
sunset should not be visible, as the clouds will be in the
way. It may be possible to see some of it (as its effectively
painted on the sky) through the storm (which floats under
the sky).
Hope this helps! That's what we know so far...
---
CapnBill (August 10th):
That is, in fact, how our options screen works. You can set
your clipping planes via slider bars; and all other options
(lighting options, etc) are varied by selecting one of 4
"classes" of machine: min, recommended, fast, and really fast
(I don't remember what the exact names are). Selecting a
slower class of machine adjusts your options for more speed;
faster classes will run slower, but look better.
Currently, you can't re-use arrows. You see, your bow is so
powerful that arrows hit their target with such great force
that it actually damages them, rendering them non-reusable.
:)
---
CapnBill (August 10th):
Our Setup program will detect your hardware & make the
adjustments for you. I believe it will set your computer
(PIII 500, with 128MB RAM and a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra) up
just one notch below "max", and it'll run well on your
system. Investing in more RAM probably would help your
performance, too.
Here are some other tips we've found; but, be warned, these
are not for the faint-hearted:
1) Go into your Control Panel; select System, then click on
the right tab ("Performance")
2) Click on Virtual Memory
3) Select "Let me manage my own Virtual Memory settings"
4) Select a location for your Windows swap file that's
optimal (see below); then, for Minimum size, select 500, and
Maximum, select 500 (this forces Windows to create a
non-varying massive swap file that's 500 MB in size!)
We've found that pre-allocating the disk space for this swap
file tends to improve Ascension's performance. Another even
larger gain can be had by selecting your swap file's
location wisely as follows. If you have 2 physical hard
drives (not 2 partitions on the same physical drive, but 2
actually different physical devices), put your swap file on a
different physical device from where you install Ascension.
I found that this technique gave me a major performance
boost. If you have SCSI drives, this technique will also
take maximum advantage of the better performance of your SCSI
architecture (this is the one situation we've found SCSI to
provide noticably better performance than IDE with
Ascension).
If you have problems with these settings, just go back into
the Performance tab, and select "Let Windows manage my
virtual memory settings" to put it back the way it was.
Hope this helps!
---
CapnBill (August 10th):
You can, in theory, extend the clipping plane out really
far--but we have run into crashes at extreme distances,
usually due to some buffer overflowing or such. We don't
bother tracking those down, because we anticipate anyone will
be playing at those distances.
However, we will QA the product with at least one machine
that has the clipping planes pushed out further than our
current defaults, to make sure this is do-able on
state-of-the-art hardware.
Regarding height, hmm...we don't really have a height
limitation. The terrain on the varies greatly, from the
ocean's deepest points to the highest peak...but I don't know
just now how high that is.
Our viewing area isn't a pure rectangle, nor a circle. It
extends outward in a circular fashion around you a certain
radius; but it also extends outward in front of you, based
upon how far out your clipping plane is set.
---
CapnBill (August 8th):
The LODs on buildings and characters change at a distance
that even we cannot detect. In fact, we tried taking them
out lately, suspicious that they weren't helping; and, though
we couldn't see any visual difference, there was a
noticeable frame rate hit, so we put 'em back in.
The only LODs that you can really see popping are trees--and
we'll probably push their threshold distance out before we
ship.
---
CapnBill (August 6th):
Our sky is taken from a digital photograph of the Austin sky
over our own heads! Hence, it looks quite realistic; but,
it only has the one "cloud cover" appearance. It does,
however, smoothly transition to a dusk and night (starry)
appearance, and back to dawn and day.
We've been in the world quite a bit, and have never grown
tired of it!
Honestly, I don't think the hardware exists yet!! If you
crank lighting up to maximum fidelity, push the clipping
plane as far out as you would reasonably want to, play as
many 3D sounds as you want, etc etc---it'll consume about as
much CPU power as we can currently throw at it.
BUT, having said that, a PIII 600 running Windows2000
Professional, with 512MB of RAM, would be a pretty good
start! I think, with that setup, you'd be able to crank up
most game settings and still get decent performance.
---
Durham Dragon (August 5th):
You can go into first person view to look at things up
close, but I don't believe you'll be able to move around in
that mode. The game was designed as 3rd person, so combat
and other activities would be awkward in first person (for
instance to put an item in your inventory you'd normally be
able to drag the item over yourself).
---
CapnBill (August 2nd):
Some of you feel that U9's technology is "dated" in some
way, since you've heard it was specifically developed for
Glide, and it runs Glide faster than D3D. Not True! Here's
the corrected info:
U9 does run on Glide faster than it does on D3D, with most
D3D cards that came out in early 1999 (thus, TNT2
excepted--haven't benchmarked that yet). The reason is that
the D3D cards we've tested most extensively tend to be
>>competitive<< with 3Dfx's, in terms of raw hardware
performance; but, running in D3D tends to be inherently
slower, because D3D is a multi-platform API, and Glide is
tailor-made just for the 3Dfx family of chips.
Second, our rendering pipeline was actually designed
specifically for D3D--part of our re-write heck of last year
involved re-writing the renderer for D3D, and optimizing all
data structures & algorithms for it.
So, fear not! U9 contains one of the most state-of-the-art
engines available, and we're taking great pains to optimize
its performance on the widest possible set of hardware
platforms!
Currently, our best estimates of our performance bottlenecks
show us that we're mostly CPU bound; we're not very
fill-rate limited. So, running at higher resolutions should
be no problem! Of course, we haven't really tried it yet, so
we'll just have to see. We're definitely going to support
higher resolutions, though; the exact resolutions supported
will be determined purely by the capabilities of your
hardware.
---
CapnBill (July 30th):
Renderer: We support both Glide (3Dfx's native API) and D3D.
Scalability: We have a huge amount of scalability. You can
adjust how far into the world you see; you can adjust quality
& accuracy of lighting; you can adjust the number of sound
effects that can play; and, lots of other stuff!
Animation: Yes, it's skeletal! Characters are made of body
parts held together in a hierarchy. Equipping characters
involves actually swapping body parts; this allows the Avatar
to equip the boots from one set of armor, the gauntlets from
another, the chest plate from another, etc.
3DNow: We'll have to see. We do now have a new programmer
who's available to work on this and the Pentium III (aka
Katmai, aka MMX2) optimizations; but, time is the problem.
We'll have to see!
Release date: Can't make any release date estimates on this
board (that's for the marketing team); however, I can say
that we're close; we have very little time left (measured in
days!!) to add any new functionality, and we're about to
shift into full-time bug fixing, which will take a few weeks
to complete. After that, there's CD printing, boxing,
manuals, translations, etc; hey, we're close!
---
Game Features:
Ultima IX: Ascension is the last chapter in the Ultima Series (or is it?). The Avatar
returns back to the land of Britannia to restore the eight sacred virtues: honesty,
justice, sacrifice, valor, compassion, spirituality, honor, and humility. The game
features:
- Beautiful 3D world of Britannia - I suggest you check out the videos at the Downloads section.
- 3D THX sound along with thousands of recorded dialogue lines.
- Interaction with NPC's (non-player characters) is amazing - character's mouths, eyes,
and bodies move realistically.
- Truly life-like environment with weather changes, day/night cicle, and hundreds of items.
- Lots of cool spells and enemies to engage.
- Awesome cut-scene videos.
- Entangling plot of Ultima Series.
The date of release is yet unknown, and so are the requirements. From what I have heard though, the game
should run quite well on a Pentium II 300 with a Voodoo2 3D card. Ultima IX will have both Glide and
Direct3D support, but I suspect that Glide will probably look much better. Origin is planning to
release a demo just before the game is ready for shipping, but they are not completely sure yet.
Read the message of Lord British
to see what he has to say on these subjects.
Most of your questions can be answered at the Ultima IX Discussion Boards.
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