Nitpicks from 2022 Playthough

[Knight Captain]

Siranush's house has all the items needed to make bandages, but no shears.

[Knight Captain]

A shame the Moon's Eye in the Dream Realm doesn't have a vision to go with it.

[Knight Captain]

Windrunner should be MET by talking to the Forest Master.

[Knight Captain]

I thought Reaper trees did not walk?

[Knight Captain]

On Shamino's map of his castle, he has one of the staircases going down instead of up. Nor does he list his throne room.

[Knight Captain]

One of the notes in Shamino's castle has "havelooted" without the space.

The dragonslayer sword is a unique item, but it does not seem to have any place in the story, nor does it seem to do special damage to dragons.

Also, why isn't magic armor more common in a land of mages?

[Knight Captain]

One of Batlin's henchmen in Shamino's castle has no weapon, none have armor. I would have expected some furs on them as well.

[Gotcha!]

I could counter so many of these, but life's too short. xD

[Knight Captain]

I'm finding even my reimplementation of the ice raft is broken. So I've got to comment out some of my usecode to get things going.

Why does the energy field sound effect keep playing over and over? It shows "Single Sound Effect" but the sound just loops forever.

[Knight Captain]

A number of these can be fixed just by editing the NPC using ES, no usecode required.

For example, adding plates to dinner tables where NPCs EAT (not EAT_AT_INN), or adding weapons or armor.

[Knight Captain]

Is there a way to set OKAY_TO_TAKE on items in the game world? Specifically but not exclusively items in containers, like barrels with food in them.

With the appropriate flag on, I can get the Party to admonish me for stealing in SI, but the number of random food items they take offense to is probably the reason the SI devs turned this off.

[Knight Captain]

Vasculio is far too easy to take down, especially compared to Aram-Dol.

[Knight Captain]

OphidianBook Quality 77 "The True Believers" found in a house inside Skullcrusher transports you to Isle of Crypts. I don't think that is supposed to happen this early in the game. Batlin isn't dead yet. Edit: Bug in my Usecode.

The usecode for the shape does not have the qualities in order, almost like they were haphazardly adding them over time.

[Knight Captain]

There's also a copy in Spinebreaker, after Palos' mini cutscene, in the room with all the bed and explosions.

[r_h_o_n_a]

Thrilled to hear you're still working on your mod! I first read about your plans for it a few years ago and was super excited to see how you'd be incorporating the rich additional elements and unimplemented plotlines. If you need/would like additional playtesters, I'd be very keen to volunteer

Your comment regarding Vasculio being too easy to beat is pretty spot-on. Even if you don't have the Magebane, he's still just not that tough. That also made me remember another aspect I'd always considered made the game far too easy: the way one can accumulate pretty huge amounts of food and money from very early in the game. I'm tempted to work out how to make modifications to rebalance all that. Tangentially, I'm also curious, are you doing anything with regard to stoneheart/bloodspawn? The implementation of those in the original has always irritated me. Beyond The Serpent Pillars is very clear that bloodspawn can only be produced by mixing stoneheart "with the blood of the caster!" (italics and exclamation point in original), but there are several places where there's pre-prepared bloodspawn that's perfectly functional, whereas you can only find like six pieces of stoneheart in the entire game. This is something I'm keen on - I'm getting rid of every piece of bloodspawn in the game and replacing them all with stoneheart, so the Avatar has to make the bloodspawn themselves.

I'm very eager to see what your mod's like - best of luck with the ongoing work!

[Knight Captain]

Yes, that would be appreciated. Alas I got sidetracked into doing things like reimplementing basic functions like the doors, and adding cute things like a novel use for dirty diapers.

I am still kicking myself because we had a claimed professional writer offer to help, and I foolishly shooed him away. I regret that.

Rather than rush back into coding bits and pieces, I need to write the plot docs both for the pre-Batlin and post-Batlin world.

[Knight Captain]

Right now, I've got the post-Batlin massacre stopped but no real changes past that. I don't want to spoil some of the details though.

Pre-Batlin:
Additional unique items will be added to the party, to allow for more Teleport Storm quests. These are nitpicks from both Bootstrike.com and some prior threads here:
http://bootstrike.com/Ultima7si/Online/nitpicks.php
https://exult.sourceforge.io/forum/view ... ?p=1766407
In fact, looking over some of the art, I had forgotten I had made some of this stuff. I wish UltimaCodex had some art to look at for UU2 items.

The Fishnet Stockings will be a plot item to track down, starting with finding them on Shmed's body.
The whole Frigidazzi / Selena subplot will have some further details behind it. It's not really clear what happened there.
All Teleport Storm quest items should be solvable in the plot items scroll.
Selena as a proper mage should have a house.
Will the "sorry-looking cat that glows" make an appearance?
Plot-dead characters should have their corpses cleaned up. Kalen, Lydia, Shmed, etc.
Johnson in the Goblin Camp should become a full party member, and make it back to Monitor.

[Knight Captain]

Post-Batlin:

Shamino will become the MageLord, which will be quite exciting as Ernesto notes. The Council of Mages should also be replaced. Expect some of the hardest battles to happen with magical creatures here.
Dupre will become the Lord of Monitor. All NPCs will have to be changed to their clan shapes (hence the different colored bears, etc).
Iolo will become the Living Oracle of Fawn. And Fawn will be the worst hellscape of the three cities. It already is a prison, with only one way in and out.

Cantra, Andrio, and maybe another NPC should join the party. One of the things I love most about U6+U7 is the interplay between the party, and Automatons just don't have that feeling. I'm also planning on raising the party member limit to 6, if not higher.

I hope to have Automatons have the ability to rename themselves via conversation.

[Knight Captain]

I also have to track down approval to include an OGG file of someone playing a song on the piano.

Your comment regarding Vasculio being too easy to beat is pretty spot-on. Even if you don't have the Magebane, he's still just not that tough.

His stats aren't terrible:
Strength: 30
Dexterity: 20
Intelligence: 30
Health: 30 (This could be raised to 60.)
Combat: 20

A blue cloak or suit could also raise his defense, making him even stronger.

That also made me remember another aspect I'd always considered made the game far too easy: the way one can accumulate pretty huge amounts of food and money from very early in the game. I'm tempted to work out how to make modifications to rebalance all that.

Selling dead pikemen always worked for me. There are enough for multiple trips into western Furnace to fully armor the party. Changing npcRenfry to give only 50 monetari could help.

As for the food accumulation, the resurrection of any party member also fills their stomach. I believe the resurrection of the Avatar also fills everyone's stomachs as well.

There may be an Exult divergence in handling of the items given in spawned enemy bodies. For example if you kill a goblin, notice how they have the same single frame of a food? And trolls always have the 4 gems or none, and 10 gold or none?

In some play testing of the original game in DOSbox, goblins in the forest give about 4 food, with different random frames each time in the same body. Apples, a pumpkin, and one mutton. On another, bread, sausage, grapes, yellow cheese. Also if you go far enough way the body will disappear, but the contents in it will be dropped on the ground.

Trolls will give different coin amounts in SI in DOSbox, but will always give either 10 or 0 in Exult. It seems Exult ignores or mishandles the "chance" percentage, you always get the maximum or nothing. Even in the originals, gems were treated differently than coins, and work closer to binary. You either get all 4 or none. No idea why these are handled differently.

Exult generally follows the originals as closely as possible, so I don't think the gems will be "fixed" the way coins should.

Tangentially, I'm also curious, are you doing anything with regard to stoneheart/bloodspawn? The implementation of those in the original has always irritated me. Beyond The Serpent Pillars is very clear that bloodspawn can only be produced by mixing stoneheart "with the blood of the caster!" (italics and exclamation point in original), but there are several places where there's pre-prepared bloodspawn that's perfectly functional, whereas you can only find like six pieces of stoneheart in the entire game. This is something I'm keen on - I'm getting rid of every piece of bloodspawn in the game and replacing them all with stoneheart, so the Avatar has to make the bloodspawn themselves.

It is possible the included docs with the game are less than fully accurate, since Erstam was the author. He is not known to have blood-letting device, nor mention the forbidden reagent. His knowledge may be via Pothos, who is not a strong enough mage to use stoneheart/bloodspawn.

In Vasculio's area, there is a book on a caged skeleton that mentions how important the victim's blood is to Vasculio. Assuming Vasculio is an undead liche whose body does not create blood on its own, he would need others for blood to create the reagent. This is also why the Gwani are kept there. I don't think the generic "vampire" drinking of blood is enough to keep the liche animated.

That is a valid point regarding the lack of stoneheart. This could be fixed by allowing the use of pickaxes in certain areas to generate the shape in the same way you can mine in BG. Or it could be spawned via egg, similar to blood moss in the swamp south of Moonshade.

[Knight Captain]

Regarding my usecode, I need to comment out some of the functions related to doors and switches for now, recompile, and test.

[r_h_o_n_a]

Well, I'm no professional writer, but I'd be glad to offer what I'm able in addition to playtesting I'm good with written English (doctorate) and have been mildly obsessed with the whole Ultima series since I was about 6. Serpent Isle has also always been my favourite and is the one I'm most familiar with, hence why I've also been working on my own mod for it (a translation, primarily, incorporating some new shape and portrait art but hopefully also some tweaks and new segments under the hood once I've gotten myself more familiar with how to work with the usecode). While I haven't gotten to developing new plot myself, you clearly have a lot of awesome plot ideas - fleshing out the plotlines around Selina in particular sounds super interesting, as does the post-Batlin period in all three cities (Fawn in particular should be wonderfully terrifying, given how sadistic and gruesome Mad Iolo clearly is) - and I'd be glad to take on the writing of NPC and party member conversations for your plot beats.

I've tinkered with a bunch of art for my own mod as well, including some minor aesthetic repairs. Fixing inconsistencies between various shapes and their paperdolls, making some shapes more visually distinctive (the Silver Seed is now an acorn as mentioned by Isstanar, the various bird eggs are now properly egg-shaped, dedicated art for the Hammer of Dedication and Erinon's Axe, etc.), making paperdolls for a few plot-vital items, that kind of thing. Here are some of these; feel free to use any or all of them.





Whatever shape or paperdoll art you might need for new objects you'd like to add in, I'd be happy to do stuff along those lines too. In any event, let me know if/when you'd be comfortable allowing me access to your mod data, and how would be best for me to access the files (I'm happy to keep them confidential). If email's best, my address is qeslagh at hotmail dot com.

Agreed 100% regarding the interplay of the party and the absence of that from SI. It was always fun in U6 and BG, and the range of people you could get to join was particularly impressive in U6. The lack of diversity in SI party members always disappointed me, and of the ones who *can* join, most won't rejoin once they leave (or die, in Boydon's case). How about Edrin? He seems not to have any great purpose (other than in the Dream Realm, of course) after turning back from a parrot. Or maybe even Kapyundi, the Gwani hunter, who perhaps could offer to join when you go on the ice dragon hunt.

Re: money, reducing Renfry's payment to 50 monetari sounds like a good plan, especially given how high the exchange rate is on monetari. I'm also pondering three additional changes in my own mod: (1) stopping the teleport storms from supplying jewellery; (2) working out how to make the Bull Tower guards demand all four gold bars from the Mint so you can't sneak three of them over to Bucia to exchange; (3) making the False Coin spell only duplicate a stack of coins, rather than multiplying it by six.

Re: Selina's manor - if it were me, I'd reappropriate Stefano's manor for this purpose. Stefano already has a house out in the western woods. He's not a mage and has a dodgy reputation in Moonshade into the bargain, so I doubt he'd be sufficiently tolerated by the mages to own a big manor right in the heart of the city. On the topic of manors, though, there are many other mages met or mentioned who also don't have them (at least Ensorcio, Maleccio, Trulacci, Lorthondo, Teldrono... I know the last two live in Freedom now, but they didn't always), and I'm considering building another couple and maybe weave them into plot somehow. The stone-walled tower to Moonshade's far northwest and the telescope tower north of the rangers' barracks strike me as good spots to expand on.

Re: stoneheart/bloodspawn - good point about Vasculio's likely use of blood from his captives for this purpose (though not from Gwani; Vasculio's journal explicitly notes the requirement for fresh *human* blood, so he really probably is just drinking the Gwani blood). In any event, being able to mine stoneheart would be great: that'd also allow a use for the pickaxe beyond being just one more low-level weapon. The usecode for the Monk Isle berry bush might be a useful springboard too, making a similar finite limit for how much one can obtain from any one spot. I just did some fiddling to add stoneheart veins to some of the stalagmites, and showing them progressively more broken up; for the implementation I'll poke around in the usecode and see if I can learn something from the berry bush.



Again, feel free to use these shapes yourself if you like, though no worries if not

[Knight Captain]

Thank you! I've emailed you as well.

I was under the impression that Stefano's manor is actually Ensorcio's.

At the moment I am still debugging my mod code. For example, tonight I had to comment out the rewritten code for getTrialNPC because it was causing a hang at the moment that the non-trial Party walks into the box in the Fawn Trial. And I've commented out two of the eggs for the arena in Furnace because it was causing the gladiator automatons to not come out, nor the entry gates to close.

[Knight Captain]

I answered your three mod questions here: https://github.com/exult/exult/discussions/265

[Knight Captain]

Nitpick followup thread: https://github.com/exult/exult/discussions/267

[Vasculio294]

If I'm not mistaken, that manor belonged to Ensorcio the exile. Dream Realm reference. Might have to double check Stefano dialog

[Knight Captain]

Yes, it's even listed under both Ensorcio and Stefano on the original design of the city. Check out the GitHub thread.