Pic of the Day (click to enlarge)
The beautiful snowy mountains (filled with icehounds, wolves, and goblins) lie between the Avatar and the dungeon of Wrong.
"It has been years since Ultima 8 however. During that time we seen the release of Ultima Online, a title which gained favor among many new fans, yet struck a nerve among many Ultima purists. All of this is water under the bridge however, the real question is how does Ultima IX: Ascension rank amongst both it's predecessors and the current crop of computer RPG's? That question is harder to answer than it may seem."
15:10 - [Neocryte] - Good news for D3D users out there! CapnBill has posted another one of his updates, here it is:
"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!"
"We are very happy to announce the grand opening of two new forums on our discussion boards! After experiencing a great deal of traffic, it soon became obvious that we needed to add new forums, and we have done so by creating a Spoilers & Hints forum and a Technical Issues forum. Now that the Spoilers & Hints forum has been created, we will be converting our other boards into a spoiler-free zone. Whether you have a specific question about something in the game, want to ask a question about hardware, or still want to discuss general game-related topics, there are now more forums for you to choose from!
We have seen that some players have encountered complications attempting to install Patch 1.05. We have found a way to address these issue and make the installation process smoother. Check our Patch Installation Tips, which can be found through our Support link."
06:31 - [Neocryte] - Wee, new counter! :) It's almost time for a new insta poll question. If you have any suggestios, I am always glad to hear them!
December 7, 1999 - Tuesday
16:37 - [Neocryte] - Aarrgghhh, it seems that the god-damn counter is messed up! I am probably going to have to stop using Freeservers one and use Link Exchange... I am having way too many problems with it. :-(
"Since the release of Origin's Ultima IX: Ascension,
many gamers have complained about the game's
speed, random crashes, and other technical woes
that have halted their enjoyment of their latest
purchase. On Monday, GameSpot News spoke to
an Origin spokesperson about the problems and
what the company is doing to alleviate those
problems."
December 6, 1999 - Monday
15:16 - [Neocryte] - A few things... First, Fingolfin's Ultima IX page has moved to a new address - it can be accessed right here. Second, GameSpot UK has posted an article about Ascension's first patch, describing.. umm stuff about it :-)
Also, Cynthe (Amy Sage) did the daily update today:
"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!"
"Having been very critical about the game right after its release, I
thought that it would just be fair to review it again after the first
patch - just to see what has changed and what hasn't..."
12:05 - [Neocryte] - A couple of more articles are available for your enjoyment. First, Game Over GameReviews has posted a review of the game, giving it a 90% score:
"Ultima IX: Ascension is an excellent title and did deserve 98%. However, it has been an intially troubled title riddled with
bugs and almost totally incompatible with D3D. Though I was running it in Glide mode using 8bit textures, I failed to
notice a majority of these problems and a slew of angry readers have chewed me out enough to cause me to lower the
rating to 90%. Once ORIGIN addresses these problems and everyone gets a chance to play this game without any
problems, it's possible that some may even agree that Ultima IX deserves better than what I've lowered it to. The fact of
the matter is that I did play the game and I didn't experience the problems you all did."
Next, GameDaily has posted their interview with Richard Garriott, talking about previous Ultimas, Ascension, and even looking into the future:
"My next big project is X. It is not a medieval sword and
sorcery game. It's kind of a near-future, sci-fi world. I look at UO as
the first baby step into online games. There are some features that
I really want to enhance dramatically as we move into this new
game. For example, one of the most successful attributes of UO is
the personal identity of the characters; you can tell who the
cool players are because they
are well accessorized and they
act well. That’s one of the
features I really want to push."
Also, EvilAvatar.com has posted their final thoughts on Ultima IX:
"It is official, I have given up on Ultima IX: Ascension. I have uninstalled the game, deleted the game directory, packed all the goodies back into their oversize box and put it up on the shelf away from temptation. There just isn't any point in trying to play the game any further. It Does Not run well. I'm tired of fighting with
it, playing with the configurations, and just tired of it being choppy and slow. There are too many other Good games out on the market right now for me to waste one more minute on Ultima IX. Is it a good game? Who knows? It is an Unplayable game in its current state. In a few months, the Voodoo5 boards come out. At that time, I was planning on upgrading my system to an Athlon 700 or 800 and adding an additional 125 MB DIMM. I'll be happy to take another look at Ultima IX in six months, when they have patched the product and I have upgraded my system."
"Overall, the cinematic elements, the grand plot, the outstanding voice
acting, the great graphics, the easy-to-use interface, and the wonderful
music make this an amazing RPG. If the problems with performance are fixed, it will be a game-of-the-year
contender- and a very strong one at that."
Thanks a lot to Hurin for the info! :)
December 4, 1999 - Saturday
11:24 - [Neocryte] - Get ready for this... a huge update from CapnBill, this one seems to be the largest, so you might want to grab a Coke or something, while reading:
"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!"
All rights reserved by Origin and Electronic Arts.
