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News: December 1999
Select another month's news:
(July-August 1999)
(September 1999)
(October 1999)
(November 1999)
(December 1999)
| December 3, 1999 - Friday | |
20:22 - [Neocryte] - I got off my lazy butt and put up Page 7 of the screenshots! Also, as a reminder, don't forget to download the 1.05 patch, and if you haven't read the AVault review yet, I really suggest you do - it is very well written! Enjoy the pics!
15:38 - [Neocryte] - Adrenaline Vault has posted a review of Ascension... Although the author is a huge fan of the Ultimas, his views on this one are a little pessimistic:
"This has been by far the most difficult review I have ever had to write. Never before have I wanted a game to succeed as much as this one. I've been an Ultima fan since its creation and admire Garriott more than anyone in the industry. Personally, I've had a lot of fun with Ascension and will surely play it all the way through again
once it's patched. But for this review, I cannot recommend it to anyone. It's unoptimized, buggy and just plain
broken in numerous spots. While hardcore players are bound to wade through the muck with their swamp boots
on and enjoy it, they are the exception and not the rule. Regardless of who's at fault--the publisher or the
developer--any title that's been in development for more than five years should ship in a cleaner state than this.
Origin and EA should be ashamed for releasing such an anticipated title in this condition. Their decision is
irresponsible and unforgivable. Like Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Ascension is epic in scope and its story
riveting and touching. But like that tale of forbidden love, Ascension is a senseless tragedy that didn't have to
be."
15:01 - [Neocryte] - Ladies ang gentlemen, the patch is now available for download, woohoo! Read the following post from the main site and download the 1.05 patch (about 4MB):
"We have completed testing on a small patch that addresses the TNT 3.53 driver incompatibility, as well as a few other items listed here. TNT owners are not the only users who will benefit from this patch, and it is highly recommended that it be downloaded. A larger patch is still in the works, which will address the D3D support, as well as a number of issues that we have discovered through following the posts of many in the community who have been kind enough to provide us with extremely useful information. We have also been successful in resolving many technical concerns through troubleshooting. For more information on those concerns and solutions to many common problems, see our support page and FAQ.
DOWNLOAD THE 1.05 PATCH
A new Ultima Ascension support page is live, containing the general performance tips provided earlier this week, and a complete listing of supported Direct3D hardware listed by manufacturer. If these documents do not provide the help you need, the support page also provides a link to our one-on-one customer support."
06:39 - [Neocryte] - Hey guys, Fingolfin is currently working on a walkthrough for U:IX, and has started a nice page, that right has some basic information on stats/sigils/mantras/etc., and even a few easter eggs (kill LB!). Check it out!
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| December 2, 1999 - Thursday | |
17:00 - [Neocryte] - In case anyone is interested, Stephanie from All Games was very kind to send me the log of the chat with Lord British. It's edited very little, so you might think of it as a mess, but without any further delay, here it is.
15:07 - [Neocryte] - Today, our humble CapnBill has posted his third big update, this one actually a bit shorter than the previous posts:
"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!"
Thanks Capn! As for another piece of info, for those of you who missed Richard Garriott's
interview at GameTime, right here is the direct link to the recorded show. Enjoy!
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| December 1, 1999 - Wednesday | |
20:05 - [Neocryte] - Quick update, actually from yesterday :) The official Ultima IX site has created a new section - Performance Tips, describing ways to tune Ascension to run better and smoother:
"Greetings!
We, together with the help of the community, have been evaluating different computer setups and different methods of attaining the maximum performance quality of Ultima Ascension. This information is being compiled into a technical FAQ and optimizing report, and will be available very soon! Our lead programmer, Cap'n Bill, has put together a short list of general performance tuning tips that we can share today, and more comprehensive information will be provided just as soon as we can get the FAQ ready.
-Cynthe"
17:46 - [Neocryte] - Two more reviews are up on the Web, about our all favorite game. The first one is at Daily Radar:
"The simple fact of the matter is that Ultima IX contains an epic story that manages to answer most
of our questions from the first eight games, some incredible graphics, a wonderful interface, and
enough excitement and adventure for any RPG fan. Secrets abound, the world feels alive, and while
the story makes play slightly linear, players can still do just about anything they want. Almost every
item in the game can be manipulated, and the lack of space in the Avatar's inventory will affect how
much he can collect. While it's got its lion's share of problems, Origin's final tribute to the Ultima
series is a must-have for any roleplaying fan. Unfortunately, not everyone can simply grab a Voodoo
3 card if the current one isn't cutting it -- for those without a 3Dfx-based card, we strongly
encourage keeping an eye on www.ultima9.com for updated news on patches. Hopefully they'll fix
the problems soon, because this is one fantastic roleplaying game."
The second review is up at BlinkingDot. This is one is somewhat more pessimistic than the one on the top, hehe:
"To sum up my first impressions; What an excellent game this could
have been. The game itself, the presentation, the immersive
gameworld would have set new standards. But since it is so slow, so
incredibly slow, so outrageous slow, it is a gem hidden in a mountain
of dirt. I really blame EA for rushing out this game. Without the speed
problems, it would have been game of the year, game of the
millennium or whatever - in its current state it is nothing more than a
promise that has to be fulfilled. Rating for the game would be 96%,
rating for the playability 20%, so I should rate it 58% overall. But I
don't. Because gameplay is so much hidden behind all those
problems, I rate it 30% and nothing more."
15:48 - [Neocryte] - Another version of the Runic font is available for downloads at the Miscellaneous Downloads section. This one actually has 5 TTF fonts in it, very nices ones. Created by Jan M. Rower, who sent it to me. Take a look at it... Thanks!
15:32 - [Neocryte] - Another huge post from CapnBill has arrived, describing various bugs and game issues. Here it is:
"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!"
Also, don't forget to check out GameTime today at 6:00pm EST - you can meet Lord British himself online. Check yesterday's news update (closer to the bottom of it) for more detailed info.
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