Escorts, Spawning Camps, Mage Towers Resolved a problem with the system that was used to register the prisoners and escorts on the message boards. Created a message board controller to handle the board registrations, creations and deletions. Redesigned the system to more efficiently register the escorts and prisoners on the message boards. General cleanup of the system to be more efficient Fishing Removed sandals, shoes and boots from the items you can fish up. Players were found to be abusing this to collect leather unattended while below the 100.0 fishing skill level. Rather than apply the attended verification system to less-than-GM fishing, we removed the items players were collecting. Note: This will be under further review in the future. House Placement Re-designed the house placement system to operate more efficiently Removed a complex system designed to account for the tower wings in placement calculations Designed a new vastly more efficient system of calculating the effect of tower wings in house placement. This new process will only activate when placing a tower and will require 1/10,000th the processing time compared to the old system. Notice: This new placement algorthm will slightly modifiy the house placement rules for things such as static items under tower wings, trees in courtyards and the like. Keep in mind that houses placed before this patch could be grandfathered. We will continue to make additional changes to the logic to allow static items under house wings, and in courtyards when not touching the foundation in a future patch. Updated the house demolish gump to reflect this as a warning to anyone deeding a house. Monster AI Performed extensive testing on the monster AI in RunUO. Isolated some processes that can cause increased server processing requirements as we grow. Developed a system of select AI based on the type of monsters. Smarter, more aggressive monsters will be more likely to pathfind using advanced measures. Less intelligent monsters will be less likely to use advanced methods to pathfind. Mining Resolved a performance and cleanup issue with processing when a player mines with a gargoyles pickaxe. Rare Spawns Resolved a problem in which monsters would break a spawning rare before players had time to collect it. Thanks Miller- Items currently connected to a spawner cannot be broken by monsters wandering or engaged in combat. Note: Monsters will still break rare items in your house, so make sure to keep breakable items locked down when you have company over. Pet Transfer Allowed young players to transfer pets to older players, should they meet the control requirements Allowed older players to transfer pets to young players, should they meet the control requirements. Tames Resolved a problem in which tames/summons switching to new commands would send a revealing action to their master. Resolved a problem in which tames/summons switching to new commands would interrupt the active meditation state of a player. Stealing Resolved a problem in which stacked items were reporting their single item weight not the combined total of the stack to be stolen. This was reducing the chance to be caught while stealing to an abnormally low level for items such as gold and other stackables. Stealing a stack of items will result in a chance to be caught directly in relation to the total weight of the stack. Note: If you are stealing from a stack of 1000 gold, and you successfully steal 233, you chance to be caught will be based on the weight of 233 gold. Should you have an item stolen from you, the message you receive will now indicate if the town guards have noticed the theft. "Someone has stolen a ________ from me!" Would indicate the thief successfully stole an item from you without being noticed. "Someone has stolen a ________ from me and was noticed by the guards!" Would indicate the thief stole an item, but was noticed by the guards and could have guards called on them for 15 seconds. Note: These messages are only shown to the victim to reduce confusion in this situation. You may no longer keep your bank open and attempt to steal an item. Using the stealing skill will now close your bank.
Re: Patch 48: February 3rd 2104, Maintenance Patch Given your example, I would edit the first line to say "in relation to the total weight of the stolen stack." The line, as it stands now, would imply to me that if I attempt to steal 233 out of a stack of 1,000, my chance to be caught will be based on the weight of 1,000. If I understand this change correctly (that is, it's based on the second line above), I think it's a great change, and actually adds meaning to the randomness with which a thief attempts to steal part or all of a stack of things.
Re: Patch 48: February 3rd 2104, Maintenance Patch That's one hell of a list of fixes! Can't tell you how nice it is to see a Dev so focused on ironing out glitches and fixing buggy content. Thanks a bunch for your dedication! Just a shame the footwear had to be removed from fishing tables because some people abused it. 'may seem odd, but it provided no end of comic relief to me to pull up old shoes. It was just one of those iconic examples of attention to detail in game design.
Re: Patch 48: February 3rd 2104, Maintenance Patch We will be adding footwear back shortly, we just didn't want to force players to attend fishing to 99.9. By removing the resources that was being gathered(shoes cut to resources) we can continue to allow unattended training of the fishing skill. Once we determine a fix for this while allowing the unattended fishing (to 99.9) we will add the footwear back.
Re: Patch 48: February 3rd 2104, Maintenance Patch That is correct, and why I added the 2nd line. The chance to steal and the chance to be caught are two different processes. The only change in this patch was the chance to be caught based on the weight of the successfully stolen item.
Re: Patch 48: February 3rd 2104, Maintenance Patch Aah, fair enough! I have to admit that I do like the idea of obtaining limited crafting resources via fishing, as I mentioned in another thread. 'would give fishing a little extra something going for it, and make it just that bit more viable, maybe. The option just shouldn't be abused, obviously. I have to admit the thought of someone collecting anything other than fish-steaks while AFK never even crossed my mind.
Re: Patch 48: February 3rd 2104, Maintenance Patch Captain's Log, stardate 2104 It still seems incredible to me that the crew plays that 120-year-old game, but it's a ready diversion from the monotony of space travel, and it's only fair that we play the game of our main deity, Saint Raph Koster. I think you meant 2014?
Wow, lot of work done... Patches, new dungeons....Makes a person wonder if the staff ever sleeps. I hadn't thought of cutting footwear into leather...that aspect of it, I'd forgotten about.... Great thinking of details on that one... Again, thanks so much for the work Westra
I suppose that the footwear could have been abused for resources. Seems like a messed up way to try and do it though. I cut the footwear on my trip to GM on 2 fishermen and only ended up with like 1500 leather. Don't get me wrong however, I too dig the no - shoe change.
Thanks for the constant work and attention you put into the shard! As we grow, we continue to improve!
Two players were caught doing this, one had 30,000 leather and the other 15,000. So it was clearly being exploited to levels we were not comfortable with. This was also due to some fishing LOS issues I want to address carefully. Down the road footwear will return to fishing as that is a classic part of Ultima, however we will make sure it is done well.