Incline Dark Heart of Uukrul Discussion Thread

[Fiordhraoi]

So I know this is a somewhat late addition to Vanshilar's good work, but I've been playing with Uukrul in a memory editor on and off for a while now. Some things (Psychic/Virtue points, health, etc) are pretty easy to find. Some, however, always eluded me.

What I've found is that for many of the game's values, the game stores them in memory in the REVERSE byte order that you'd expect. It also seems like it's not quite a standard hex.

For example, looking at my Priest's experience right now, it's hex value is

29 10 53 00

But the decimal value as displayed by the game is 531029.

Fortunately, it's rather easy to find once you find it on one character - from the byte that holds the first letter of the characters name, the experience value goes from +21 to +24 (decimal) bytes from that address . You can edit as needed and walk in to get all your rings the first time you find the temples/circle.

Money is another one that's stored similarly.

Finally, using Vanshilar's item codes above, and watching the memory addresses change, I was able to see new items added to a character's inventory. After which I was able to edit the values and change the inventory. Infinite glaives of fire! One thing to watch out for, however, is that each item has two bytes assigned to it. The first is the item ID. The second seems to be a "status." That status can include "equipped," "unquipped," "broken," etc. And from what I saw, it seems that the different status codes are explicitly tied to the type of item. So "unquipped weapon" is a different code from "unquipped helmet." So if you're going to item edit, buy the same type of item (helm, shield, whatever) from the shop, so that you get the proper "unequipped" code, etc.

 

[TigerKnee]

If you're playing around with hex editors etc to figure out the deeper workings of the game, can you try to figure out what Intelligence and Piety affects?

From my earlier posts and testing, they don't seem to affect spellcasting at all despite that being the intuitive outcome.

 

[Fiordhraoi]

I'll see what I can do. I've found the memory addresses for all the various character stats as well, but I'll need to figure out a good testing method.

If you like, I can post the Cheat Engine table that I've been using. You have to adjust it every time since DosBOX doesn't present the same starting memory regions, but it's a uniform memory layout so if you figure out the variance of one value, you can adjust the memory addresses of all the values by the same amount and everything works again.

 

[Fiordhraoi]

Okay, some preliminary results:

1) Intelligence does not directly affect spell damage. Tested this by starting a new game, getting into the Dog fight just after Urtas, and repeatedly casting AMRAS with varying Intelligence values. The damage was always the same. Going to test a bit more, I recall VERY rarely having Amras and it's like just stop in midair as if they hit a wall but with no wall anywhere near. I'm curious if that's a "critical failure" mechanism of some sort. It's also possible that certain spells might pit your Intelligence value against the enemy in some way (specifically thinking of Sator/Rotas) to determine success or failure.

2) Strength DOES directly affect weapon damage. Same fight, I put my fighter's strength to 3 and swung at a dog, average of 3-4 damage. Put the fighter's strength to 20, instant kill every time he hit.

3) Intelligence does not affect the rate of ring acquisition, despite what the book implies. Ring awards are based on experience, NOT directly on level. This is why you'll sometimes get new rings in the middle of a level. Got to the Circle, and tested. I get the Copper ring of Fire at 900 experience. This happens regardless of my Intelligence value. So it does not appear that a higher Intelligence grants you rings at an earlier experience total.

4) Piety does not seem to affect the chance of a spell being answered. It DOES seem to have at least some part in the chance of summoning an elemental, and perhaps turning undead. I think raw level calculates into it somehow as well, but I seemed to have better odds of summoning an elemental when my piety was high. I've only got a sample size of about 12 fights at the moment though, so this requires a lot more scrutiny.

5) Psychic point relationship to INT, if any, is bit hard to determine, since it doesn't seem to be a "hard" PP value. Rather, there's a point at which you can rest up to in Sanctuaries, but after that you can still go up very slowly. Here's my observations on that:

• I set INT to 5, and leveled my mage to level 7. When resting in Sanctuary, I could get up to 6 PP. If I left sanctuary into the Teleport hallway and just spun around for a while, then re-entered Sanctuary (I "wandered" the maze for a while), my PP would go as high as 10. This implies to me that with an INT of 5, my "rested" value of PP is 6, and my "max" value of PP is 10.
• Changing my INT to 20, my "Rested" value of PP went up to 10, and my "max" value went up to 18.
• Rings appear to have a LARGE impact on how much PP you have. Without changing any statistics or raising level, I then went to the Circle of Magicians. The values I mentioned before were derived while my mage had Fire/Frost/Healing/Knowledge all at Iron. I then went and obtained the Copper Fire ring. My PP values then increased to 21/25 at INT 5, and 21/31 at INT 20. A bit suspicious that the bottom number didn't change.
• I then noticed that while I'd been doing all this, my starting Priest was up to 75(!) Virtue points. That threw a red flag for me, so I increased my food value to several thousand and just started spinning for a few minutes of real time outside the sanctuary. Sure enough, there didn't seem to be a "cap" on the actual maximum value of either Virtue or Psychic points, which threw my previous theory in the trash.
• Conclusion: INT does not appear to be directly related to PP value maximums, as my results were all over the place. Indeed, it appears there IS no hard PP/VP maximum, given that my starting level 1 Priest with 2 Iron rings is now sitting at 122 Virtue points and this keeps increasing, albeit slowly.
  
  Next PP experiment:
  
  
• I cast Lum until I was below the "rested" PP value, and then rested until I reached it, so I had a solid starting value. I also turned on a speedhack to accelerate the game to 500%, so the effects would be more dramatic.
• I set the Mage's INT to 20. I left the sanctuary and held down the "turn" key for 30 seconds. I then re-entered the sanctuary and found my PP had gone from 21 to 25.
• I set the Mage's INT to 5 and repeated the experiment. Again, my PP went from 21 to 25.
• Conclusion: INT does not appear to affect the rate of PP generation.

I'll keep fooling around and see what else I can dig up. If people have suggestions for experiments, feel free to post and I'll try them.

 

[TigerKnee]

Level and amount of Rings (which are kind of connected but you could in theory hack in rings without the corresponding exp) seems to be the biggest factor in Elemental Summoning from my testing - in fact I would say if Piety had any effect in that department, it's unnoticeable compared to those listed factors.

Only thing left to test for Intelligence is maybe the effectiveness of healing spells, utility spells (like the rune translator) status spells (like Straal)?

Bizarrely enough, I actually figured that Intelligence actually does affect weapon damage (potentially less than Strength... I think), and it would be rather strange if they forgot to actually implement a spellcaster benefit for the stat.

 

[Fiordhraoi]

Random addendum: Testing Strength values further, values above 20 do not seem to have any effect. I'm not sure if there's a pre-written table or something, but putting my Paladin's strength from 20 to 50 and hitting one of the frost spirits in the Cube with a glaive of fire does around 115 damage each time (seemed to range anywhere between 108 - 120).

 

[Fiordhraoi]

Level and amount of Rings (which are kind of connected but you could in theory hack in rings without the corresponding exp) seems to be the biggest factor in Elemental Summoning from my testing - in fact I would say if Piety had any effect in that department, it's unnoticeable compared to those listed factors.

Only thing left to test for Intelligence is maybe the effectiveness of healing spells, utility spells (like the rune translator) status spells (like Straal)?

Bizarrely enough, I actually figured that Intelligence actually does affect weapon damage (potentially less than Strength... I think), and it would be rather strange if they forgot to actually implement a spellcaster benefit for the stat.

It's entirely possible that the piety doesn't actually effect the summoning - I saw zero failures out of 6 attempts at 20 piety, and 2 failures out of 6 attempts at 5 piety. That might just be the RNG deciding it doesn't like me.

Tested intelligence with healing, and no effect. Shum healed 19-23 HP regardless of INT value. I'll give it a go and see if it affects utility spells, but that runs into the same problem as the elemental summoning where it's laborious to test.

The only other thing I can think of is that INT perhaps influences miscellanous things such as searching for secret door opening devices, calculating surprise and/or initiative, etc?

 

[vanshilar]

So I've been away for a while. I tend to shift between games, sometimes strategy, sometimes RPG. After Uukrul I did Rise of Nations for a while (and am still doing some of it now). Currently I'm looking at Castles II: Siege and Conquest. I haven't really looked at Uukrul in a long time. But some comments about past posts:

It's stored in this strange manner where everything is in these particular two values and based off adding all the values together. Well, I feel like I read about it somewhere before but I can't remember where it's called

Ufthu = 1
Drutho = 8
Golthur = 64
Fshofth = ??? (haven't figured it out yet)

So if you wanted Ufthu level 3, Drutho level 2 and Golthur level 1, you would do

1 x 3 + 8 x 2 + 64 = 83

which in Hexadecimal would be 53

What throws me off is when the value gets bigger than FF and I have to use the 2nd field, which always seems to screw things up for me. Must be an Endian storing thing.

I assume the Magician Rings work the same way.

Yeah basically it's just storing multiple fields within one byte. Back then space was a premium so games tended to store multiple things together, especially if they didn't need the entire set of 256 possible values for a byte. So in trying to figure things out, sometimes it's more useful to think in terms of bits rather than in terms of a byte, which consists of 8 bits. In this case, possible values only range from 0 to 6, which only needs 3 bits to store. So the first 3 bits are for Ufthu, the next 3 bits are for Drutho, the last 2 bits plus the first bit of the second byte is for Golthur, then the next 3 bits for Fshofth. Or you can think of it as a two-byte field (in little endian, i.e. small byte first), in which case the value is:

1 * Ufthu +
8 * Drutho +
64 * Golthur +
512 * Fshofth

so level 6 in all spells would be a total of 3510, which would be stored in hex (little endian) as 0xB6 0x0D.

The magician disciplines are the same, i.e. terms of a two-byte field, the values are stored as:

1 * fire +
8 * frost +
64 * protection +
512 * healing +
4096 * knowledge

so level 6 in all disciplines would be a total of 28086, or 0xB6 0x6D in hex.

BTW I'd be wary of bumping up the stats past their allowable values -- not that you can't, but it's unclear how this game (or any game) might handle them. I think in Curse of the Azure Bonds there were definitely some weird effects if the stats were past 25 (I think), and you also have to consider that the field may be signed, which means that too high of a number might make it negative as far as the game was concerned. So it's possible for example that setting Intelligence to too high of an allowed value may have had some unintended side effects.

So I know this is a somewhat late addition to Vanshilar's good work, but I've been playing with Uukrul in a memory editor on and off for a while now. Some things (Psychic/Virtue points, health, etc) are pretty easy to find. Some, however, always eluded me.

What memory editor do you use? I use HxD editor to open up the memory of a game opened in DosBox, but it's a pain looking for (for example) the values that changed when I did something. I'm not sure if there's an easier way. It's good though if I already know what the values are for the field I'm looking for, such as character names.

What I've found is that for many of the game's values, the game stores them in memory in the REVERSE byte order that you'd expect. It also seems like it's not quite a standard hex.

For example, looking at my Priest's experience right now, it's hex value is

29 10 53 00

But the decimal value as displayed by the game is 531029.

Yeah it's called endianness -- basically, due to how a computer read/writes to/from memory, many programs (especially from the DOS era) have the "little" values stored first, even though we (humans) read the "big" values first. In Uukrul, in a lot of cases they seem to have converted the numeric values into ASCII values and then stored those values instead, rather than storing them in hexadecimal form, but maintaining the endianness. No idea why. So it's basically in ASCII decimal, little endian form. But yes, some things like money, experience, etc. are stored in this way, while other things like HP and stats are stored in the traditional hexadecimal way (though still in little endian).

Fortunately, it's rather easy to find once you find it on one character - from the byte that holds the first letter of the characters name, the experience value goes from +21 to +24 (decimal) bytes from that address . You can edit as needed and walk in to get all your rings the first time you find the temples/circle.

If it's in the same format as the save game file, that region of memory probably looks something like this:

(format is the number of bytes, then what that field does)
1 Number of letters in the character's name
11 Character's name
2 Unknown
2 Gender (0 = female, 1 = male)
2 Title (0 = Berserk, 1 = Warrior, 2 = Guard, etc.)
2 Current HP (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Max HP (in hexadecimal, little endian)
4 Experience (in ASCII decimal, little endian)
2 Skill level (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Virtue/Psychic points (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Dexterity (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Piety (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Intelligence (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Vitality (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Strength (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Number of items carried (in hexadecimal, little endian)
36 Item information for up to 18 items (2 bytes of data per item)
2 Current encumbrance (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Max encumbrance (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Current armor (in hexadecimal, little endian)
2 Shield armor bonus (in hexadecimal, little endian) (guessing on this one, it may store something else for the second byte)
2 Spells available (using format above)
2 Prayers available (using format above)
2 Unknown
3-4 How many times character has received level-ups; note this is what determines the XP needed for the next level

This is how the information is stored in the save files (from byte 0x0080 to byte 0x01FF), and since save files are typically (or at least sometimes) just directly a memory dump, it's probably the same way in memory.

3) Intelligence does not affect the rate of ring acquisition, despite what the book implies. Ring awards are based on experience, NOT directly on level. This is why you'll sometimes get new rings in the middle of a level. Got to the Circle, and tested. I get the Copper ring of Fire at 900 experience. This happens regardless of my Intelligence value. So it does not appear that a higher Intelligence grants you rings at an earlier experience total.

Yeah, that was what I found too. Sometimes what the manual says doesn't line up with how the game works, unfortunately.

I'll keep fooling around and see what else I can dig up. If people have suggestions for experiments, feel free to post and I'll try them.

I kind of forget...is food consumption something that is constant? I.e. every 4 steps or something. If so, you can essentially count up how many turns you did by how much food decreased. Not particularly important, though, but might be nice to have some rates.


Anyway, lately I've been focusing on figuring out the save game format for Castles II: Siege and Conquest. I've put some of what I've figured out here:

http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Castles_II:_Siege_and_Conquest_Save_Game_Format

I've also been looking into its game mechanics, but I'm not sure where is an appropriate venue for that info. Despite this site's name, are there people here who play strategy games like Castles II: Siege and Conquest and would be interested in exploring its mechanics? I'm not sure if it's worth starting a thread to talk about the game.

Additionally, I did start working on figuring out Uukrul's save game format a while back, so I have some of it figured out. The save game is 2560 bytes long, fixed size, so it's just a matter of figuring out what field each byte corresponds to and it's not all *that* long (for Castles 2 the save file is 11682 bytes long). Should I post what I got on that site and/or elsewhere for Uukrul as well? It's a wiki so anybody else can also add to it as they figure out how the save game works. The save game does have a checksum of sorts (bytes 0x024E and 0x024F) to prevent people randomly changing its contents, but (for example) figuring out how that is calculated would make editing the save game file a lot easier.

For me, the difference between Castles 2 and Uukrul is that I played Castles 2 growing up, so I've beaten it multiple times using multiple strategies so I can give input on not just how the game works but also how to beat it, and I"m familiar with most aspects of the game already. For Uukrul, being a game that I found only relatively recently, I haven't really played it through so there's bound to be large gaps in my knowledge about how the game works. So I'd be a lot more help for a game like Castles 2 compared with something like Uukrul.

 

[TigerKnee]

There's actually a sub-section of the board for Tactical/Strategy games that might be the place to put a Castles 2 post.

 

[Leitz]

Probably no one cares but I just finished the game after an intense month in what I played the second half of the game (the first half took me 6 months lol). Great game. The endgame was not my taste because the dark one was dissapointing (why was he defiantly laughing when I got his heart but shrieking in terror when I used it? Doesn't make sense in my book) and the chaos was...chaos. The nice and sad end cutscene made me cry a little though.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Probably no one cares but I just finished the game after an intense month...

I care, man. I care. Welcome to the very small, but prestigious club.

 

[TigerKnee]

Spread the word of Uukrul.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I care, too.

Chaos is really not that chaotic, though.

 

[Justin Carroll]

Wake up sleeping thread!

So, I'm an old skool gamer - I actually was one of the few who bought this game back in the day. Wish I still had it but I'm horrible at saving things

Anywho, I've loaded it up again and am glad I found this thread and Crooked Bees LP. Thanks to all the hex hackers who've done some digging and found some gems of useful info like you get Rings at set XP versus how often you use it, etc. as some have proposed.

My question is this (and I apologize if it's been addressed elsewhere - feel free to point me toward it):

Mage spells are obviously associated with a Ring level - but how are Priests Prayers handled? All invocations are listed equally with no apparent differentiation between Ring levels. Can you invoke any of them and they're just weaker at lower Ring levels? Or do you just have to try and hope for the best? Virtue points are hard to come by so that method would kinda suck? Any info/experience would be helpful.

This also goes for Calling Elementals. Are they all equally easy/hard to call? Or is the Air easier than the others (from left to right.)

I think that's the most frustrating part of this game. So little is documented and there is such a small fanbase that there's little to go on. So again I thank those here who have done some digging. Hope someone here can help me with these questions.

Thanks in advance!

AriseThePhoenix

 

[TigerKnee]

In the Priest Prayers document, top to bottom according to the Gods are weaker to stronger - Stronger spells are harder to succeed at until you get the higher rings - spells don't scale up so Ralkor (the earliest Priest attack spell) drops in relative damage as the game progresses.

Seems to work the same with Summoning Elementals from Left to Right

And yes, Priest is pretty frustrating at early levels before they start getting more consistent - since Piety has no known effect on the game, I like giving my Priest physical stats instead like Dexterity to improve his melee a little (eventually he starts getting too squishy for that task).

(It might potentially be level based, but in practice that means the same thing unless you have a habit of not returning to the temples to collect your rings immediately)

 

[Justin Carroll]

Cool! Appreciate the info TigerKnee!

Happy 4th everyone!

 

[Invictus]

Cool! Appreciate the info TigerKnee!

Happy 4th everyone!

Are you running this on DosBox?
I always wanted to try this along with Magic Candle

 

[Justin Carroll]

Yes, DosBox .74

Magic Candle is cool too - a bit different, especially in it's ability to split up the party and have people "work" to contribute to your cause. For a more tactical combat flavor of Magic Candle, try Bloodstone. Many of the same mechanics but more combat oriented with "newer", "updated" graphics

Happy Gaming!

 

[TigerKnee]

 

[Strange Fellow]

Still plodding through, more slowly now that the game has dialled up the devilishness of the puzzles. I just made my way through one if the three tests by the Twisted Paths sanctuary, where I've been stuck for a little while. I looked back through my screenshots and made the connection, much thanks to the crossword cuing me in on this game's love of puns (and also LOTR - speak friend and enter ). The combat gauntlet seems quite impossible at level 9/10, and I still don't have a clue what the business with the grates, indentations and drawings on the walls is about. Is it just a red herring? I'd love an explanation (or if this is in fact mandatory to finish the game, at least a hint).

 

[octavius]

Wish I could remember.

Do you have both the spells that let you read runes?

I think I only skipped the crossword puzzle (no patience for it) and parts of the Pyramid level (too many nasty Sorcerors).

 

[Strange Fellow]

Well if you don't know then I suppose I'm out of luck. I assume it's just another way through the test, and as such it's not important, but it's going to keep bugging me now.
I have all three decoding spells, but there have been no helpful inscriptions in this area.

...and I'm stuck again. This card in the pyramid does nothing, and there's no way forward. Not asking for help yet, but Christ, this game doesn't let up at all, does it?

 

[Scribblemacher]

I really liked DHoU, but I had a lot of trouble slogging through battles. The puzzles, favour text, and atmosphere were just so wonderful, but I let out a sigh of pain when combat started. I liked combat at the beginning, but the low rewards really annoyed me. I think I stopped somewhere around the Rhombus (I think that's what it was called--it was after a really long hallway).

 

[Deuce Traveler]

The combat gets better as your characters level up and get more tricks, but then the combat almost ceases altogether at the end and the final leg is almost all puzzles. Stick with it.

 

[octavius]

Consult Crooked Bee's excellent LP or CRPG Addict's blog if you're stuck.