Forgotten World Releases Patch 1.19H for Ultima 9

Hot on the heels of the GOG release of the game and the launch of the Ultima Codex’s Ultima 9-specific subdomain, Iceblade from the Forgotten World team has posted some exciting news: the latest Forgotten World patch, 1.19H, has been released:

I’m sure you have all heard of the final GOG release for the Ultima series with Ultima IX. Unfortunately, it lacks our patches, but that can be easily rectified by visiting our downloads page or our page over at the Ultima Codex. Speaking of patches, we are releasing our next patch: 1.19H. In addition to prior fixes for music and companions, there are fixes for the Moonglow catacomb elevator, the demon death bug in Valoria, and Dermot hanging out at the pub all the time. Finally, there is a fix or rather a workaround for the floating rune/sigil bug, so now if you start a new game the runes and sigils will now appear on top of the shrines after cleansing.

The floating lady in Dawn is evidently also fixed in 1.19H, at least according to a report from Sergorn Dragon. Or, rather, she is cured of her tendency to fly off into the sky, but remains buggy in other ways (though this is also the case for GOG’s nGlide-wrapped version of the game).

This is big…heck, this is probably the biggest single patch ever released for Ultima 9. Not in terms of size; the patch weighs in at a bit under 1 MB. But in terms of content affected and errors corrected, 1.19H is huge. And yes, per Iceblade’s remark, you can find it for download at the Forgotten World project entry right now.

So, what’s in store for Forgotten World now, with the elimination of the most glaring bug plaguing Ultima 9 on modern systems? Rest assured, they aren’t going anywhere yet:

As for future patch targets, I have noted an additional 101 different bugs, issues or aspects that I will address during the course of this patching project. Some bugs fixes will range from the minor like the rat-Mayor scene to the crippling such as the breath issue getting into Serpent’s Hold. There are also a number of polishing issues that will be dealt with such as changing the hostilty of guards in Wrong after cleansing and moving npcs to more appropiate locations. There are also some balancing aspects that will be corrected such as removing skeleton spawn points and adding a few extra bags. In addition to these issues, I have an idea that I intend to implement for most npcs that will eliminate the troublesome pathfinding issues that plagues npcs in Britain and Minoc as well as deal with the problem of shopkeepers grooving out drunk on their counters.

This might seem like a lot of work using my previous methods; however, significant progress has been made with our world editor. Hawkwind has developed a workaround for the nonfixed writer issue where some rewritten nonfixed files would produce a crash when played with the game. This solution will result in larger map files and savegames for the the next several patches, but this is a minor issue with modern harddrives. In addition, object editing is now essentially complete. I can take any object in the game and change its orientation and position, check or uncheck any flag, and alter/add/remove any property. It isn’t the most user-friendly yet primarily in the area of properties, but the functionality for editing is there. Some additional information is needed is for most properties to have completely defined parameters, but almost all properties are now labeled with most having some definitions for their parameters. The next area of focus with the editor will be the adding of new objects into the game world. While Hawkwind progresses there, I will be putting the current version of the editor to good use on some of these bugs, so stay tuned over the next few months for news on patches.

In other words, expect to see much, much more from Forgotten World in the future…and then hopefully on a more frequent schedule!

12 Responses

  1. Sergorn says:

    Perhaps mentionning “fixing” for the Dawn Lady is a bit of a mismoner because she is still buggy, but at least you can talk to her.

    Basically I booted the GOG version, and flew to Dawn with the the fly.
    Well she was there allright and I could talk to her. Altough after talking to her, she lie and kind of bug (the stries to get up and lie down again over and over. But you CAN talk to her.

    Then I switched the game to D3D… and she went up up away to the sky

    Then I installed the 1.19H patch… and she worked in the sense she had the same regular bug as seeing her in Glide.

    -Sergorn

  2. jaesun says:

    Yeah I was going to ask if they tested this in Glide. Since that’s what the GOG version is using.

    • Sergorn says:

      The patch works fine in Glide as far as I can tell. The ini optimisation though, I wouldn’t recommend.

  3. So just to be clear, can the 1.19H patch be applied directly to the GOG.com version without any interim patch applications?

    Thanks

    • Sergorn says:

      It can, and shouldn’t cause any issue. It only replace a few .flx files so I won’t interfaere with anything.

      However some of the fix might only work with a new game and not an existing save. I know it’s the case for Jaana and Mariah (they’ll only pop up if you started a new game from scratch), but not sure about the Rune/Sigil fix.

  4. Dungy says:

    Excellent work like always. Those are some pretty annoying bugs fixed.

  5. Pix says:

    I’ve been working on adding FW to the the Ultima Patcher and I ran into a potential issue for GOG users installing this. By default, U9 hasn’t been set-up to run with admin rights which means that for people using Win7/Vista any in-game file modifications are going into the virtualstore directory. For me this included highway.dat (modified in FW) and Options.ini and may affect some of the other patched FW files depending on how far people have played.

    If those files have been modified in game then changing them in the U9 installation directory won’t have any effect as it will pick up the old copies from virtualstore instead. The easy fix is to change the U9 shortcut to always run as admin. I’ll make sure the patcher looks in both locations to avoid having to do this.

    • Pix says:

      I should mention the snag to running as admin is, you will lose your savegames unless they are copyied them back out of virtualstore manually….

    • This is a generic problem with Win7/Vista. If you don’t install to the Program Files directory, it won’t use the virtualstore. I know its been complained about to GOG before, but they should default to C:\Games or something instead of C:\Program Files\GOG.com, which screws up a lot of games like this…

  6. Lucian says:

    Hi!

    I installed 1.19H to the GOG version (overwrote the files) but the journal still shows 1.19f. I’m not sure if it’s normal or i messed up somewhere…