Gothic Patch 1.6 Announced

[Elhoim]

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... reich%3D60

(Note: Translated by google)

Liezen, Austria, 20 December 2007; JoWooD Productions gives further details on the official patch of Gothic 3. The German studio Spellbound working together with the community patch team in the development of the updates on the successful German role-playing game of all time. JoWooD Productions would like to thank all the participants, with the full deployment in the project, again warmly. The patch, which will appear in early 2008, the following improvements in the product include:

Adjustment of values, balancing, script optimizations and gameplay-related changes to the game code itself, implemented by the community patch team.

General stabilization, crash prevention, revising and optimizing the memory management, implemented by Spellbound.

"We are pleased the fans this long-awaited patch will soon be available. The changes, and renewals will be very positive for the game fun. To all the major inconsistencies from Gothic 3 to remove the team, we have enough time to publish the patch and the beginning of next year, "said Stefan Berger, Head of Product Management JowooD Productions.

JoWooD Productions also warmly thanked for all fans, by the reporting of errors in the work of the forums programmer is many times easier!

http://72.14.203.104/translate_c?hl=en& ... 071220.txt

Gothic 3 v1.6 patch status 20.12.2007

Community patch fixes team
---------------------------------

-- The Hero's death will not cause a failed quest-message anymore.
-- Frozen NPCs and creatures will unfreeze after a while in any case.
-- Rune Zapotek and do not attack anymore when the player picks up ham or wood for a quest.
-- Quest items like barrels of fish, firewood, etc. disappear from the game when you delivered them to decrease the amount of unusable quest items in the inventory.
-- NPCs in charge of relevant quest items do not retreat anymore after a city's liberation but keep fighting.
-- The hero does not stab NPCs anymore when they already lost their last health points.
-- NPCs who the player is asked to follow will walk to their designated destination instead of standing around after they get knocked down.
-- Chests are now being closed after NPCs used them.
-- When a ranger is being attacked by the player will approach other rangers to help him out.
-- Krush Tarachs, spears and halberds dropped by NPCs are now worn.
-- After the message Not enough reputation the amount of missing reputation will be shown as well.
-- Tutorials may now be permanently deactivated
-- NPC retreating after a revolution which will now directly when you remove their last health points.
-- Whetstones may now only be used after the player learned Hone blade.
-- Dialogue choices concerning part deliveries of goods referred to quests have been corrected.
-- Dialogue concerning success or failure of a quest are now put into the questlog as well.
-- Menus may now be closed pressing the button menus even if the player had magic equipped when opening them.
-- You can not challenge more than one NPC at the same time in the arena anymore.
-- Whenever a guru appears a log will be saved automatically.
-- The name's chest colour now shows if already looted.
-- Taking a follow-Quest will automatically cancel any other active follow-Quest.
-- The Hero may sell out to Sanford Marik even if this results in a duel between the Hero and Sanford.
-- Unnecessary Marlo continue dialog option has been removed.
-- Dialogue concerning success or failure of a quest are now put into the questlog as well.
-- Entries quest for some quests added.
-- Logic of dialogs with Folleck corrected.
-- Cor-Shach does not appear as a teacher too early now.
-- One sentence by Emet is now played.
-- Porgan's dialog order has been corrected.
-- Wrong armor values for the paladin's shield have been corrected.
-- Snapper fire lizard leather and leather are now sorted in the inventory tab hunter hides and merchants will pay twice the price for them.
-- Gold values of some ancestor stones have been corrected to 50 gold.
-- Torches and burnt torches now have a value of 3 buying gold, selling value is 1 gold.
-- Golden necklaces and rings are now sorted in the inventory tab thief valuables and merchants will pay twice the price for them. The value of necklaces has been adjusted to 250 gold.
-- Wrong armor values for the rebel light armor have been corrected.
-- Icons have been improved visually again
-- Strafing speed of ogres and goblins has been adjusted.
-- Female slaves do not wear weapons or shields anymore.
-- The orcs in Al Shedim now react to the death of one of them with aggressive behaviour even if the player already handed all five artifacts to one of the gods.
-- Some orcs now sell orcish weapons as well as their standard equipment.
-- Integrated sand-rain-snow storm sound effects
-- Improvements fmodex
-- Updating fmodex to newer version
-- Some Internal Improvements



Spellbound fixes
---------------------------------

-- New memory manager implemented to improve performance and stability
-- Error handling in memory improved pool
-- Fixed memory allocation error when saving
-- Memory is now freed correctly
-- Improved memory allocation for memory streams in filesystemstreams
-- Fixed a potential memory leak which would result when an insert operation fails
-- Fixed memory leak which produces 84 +20 bytes for each savegame leaks when entering the load screen
-- Remaining memory impact during saveload reduced from 100MB in some cases to typically less than 1.5 MB - thus significantly increasing stability game
-- Fixed memory leak in game_script
-- Fixed some potential memory leaks in scripts
-- Several shader enhancements to improve memory usage
-- Fixed several uninitialized memory reads (potentially resulting in unstable or unpredictable runtime behavior)
-- Improvements to the memory logging system - giving more detailed protocols of memory allocation activities
-- Improved Caching
-- Unload caches game before restart (further reduction on memory leaks while savingloading)
-- Purged all regular caches before loading a savegame - further reducing the memory leak during saveload
-- Fixed access violation exception on program termination - crash during exit
-- Fixed a crash bug where entities were cached out even though they were still in use
-- Fixed crash bug in physics and character controller - potentially occurs during main gameplay
-- Fixed crash bug within entity manager - potentially occurs during main gameplay
-- Fixed one crash bug when using teleport stone
-- Changed control order for PrefetcherJob destruction to avoid deadlocks (and possible crashes)
-- Fmodex.dll updated to version 4.10.01 (fixing potential freezes or crash)
-- Changes to the filesystem for Fmodex to avoid file format errors
-- Memory performance improvements in the mesh renderer
-- Fixed some memory fragmentation for performance improvements
-- Performance and memory improvements to the container templates
-- Slight improvements in performance Thread Pool
-- Reused vertexbuffer declarations in several locations
-- Error handling in improved vertex processors
-- Created vertex buffers in default pool instead of managed pool if managed pool fails
-- Fixed memory overwrites in the shader module
-- Fixed rendering of zero or less vertices
-- Fixed issue DX9 complaining about different vertex stream strides for lightmap
-- Fixed DX9 issue about impossible MIP filtering
-- Various small cosmetic fixes for the world
-- Some fixes to avoid playing sounds with empty filenames
-- Fixed bug where objects could be off color

 

[A user named cat]

That's a shitload of fixes, sounds promising. Never did play beyond an hour of G3, even with 2gb of ram and some .ini tweaks I still suffered 8-10 freezes when areas were loading on the fly. Initial load time was just dreadful too, 2-3 minutes was just too long to put up with along with the bugs.

Does anyone who has played through it, think it'll be worth going through the entire game once this patch comes out? Seeing as how the storylines were continuous in the first two and into three (from what I saw), I'd hate to miss anything if Spellbound happens to keep continuing the plot with G4.

 

[Madman]

Is G3 playable with 1.5 patch? Maybe i'll give it a try if yes.

 

[Slaytanic]

Even though I loved the Gothic series I never could play more then 1 third of G3, way too much of a system hog, even though I met recommended specs. Also all the bugs didn't help. Maybe I can finally finish it now.

 

[thesheeep]

Has anyone counted how often the word "memory" is used in the Spellbound fixes? ^^

But this really sounds promising. Maybe... with all those things fixed and that improved memory usage, I will be able to ignore the pain of the combat system. Maybe.

 

[bezimek]

Is G3 playable with 1.5 patch? Maybe i'll give it a try if yes.

Yes. G3 with 1.5 patch = TW with 1.2 patch but in both games some bug remains, so IMHO you should wait for official Gothic 3 patch.

btw. If you played G3 with 1.1 patch , G3 with 1.5 is much , much better game ( stable, load/save time is reduced etc)

 

[Deacdo]

Well, besides the crappy combat system...if they can iron out some of the balance issues within combat, maybe I will give it a go.

Maybe.

 

[Madman]

Is G3 playable with 1.5 patch? Maybe i'll give it a try if yes.

btw. If you played G3 with 1.1 patch , G3 with 1.5 is much , much better game ( stable, load/save time is reduced etc)

No, i haven't tried it yet. but there is no need to hurry, so i'll wait for 1.6

 

[Saxon1974]

Well, besides the crappy combat system...if they can iron out some of the balance issues within combat, maybe I will give it a go.

Maybe.

I assume this doesn't fix the combat system then? If they would just remove the hit\stun feature so you can't "click click click, then dead" to every creature then I would go back to playing it again.

 

[Claw]

It's funny how some people complain that they can click every creature to death while others whine about the unblockable assault rape. Seriously, decide! Can you just click everything to death or do creatures unpredictably launch a series of attacks that is deadly no matter what?

For me, taking 1-2 swings and then retreating does wonders to avoid the latter, and somehow I never got into the "click-click-click" rhythm. Maybe it's "larping" but for me duels against humanoid enemies are varied and interesting. I circle my opponent, looking for an opening while trying to keep myself room to withdraw, I use a flurry of fast attacks to drive my opponent back when I am cornered and I use all attacks available. I rarely use the power attack without having stunned my opponent first, admittedly. It's just too slow.
Combat against animals is more hectic and less sophisticated. Dodge, dodge, hit, dodge, run away for a few seconds, attack again etc.
That's mainly because I prefer to use my sword over my staff whenever I'm not simply blasting any threat with fire magic.

 

[Section8]

It's funny how some people complain that they can click every creature to death while others whine about the unblockable assault rape. Seriously, decide! Can you just click everything to death or do creatures unpredictably launch a series of attacks that is deadly no matter what?

It's both. If you time it right, you're the one delivering the unblockable assault rape. If you mistime it, you're being dealt the unblockable assault rape. Especially with animals like wolves, which can seemingly attack you about 3 times every second giving you no hope of retaliating.

 

[thesheeep]

Exactly. And its not just mistiming. It seems to be somehow random. At least I played so many games that I really doubt that I'm not skilled enough to master this weird combat system.

For me, taking 1-2 swings and then retreating does wonders to avoid the latter, and somehow I never got into the "click-click-click" rhythm. Maybe it's "larping" but for me duels against humanoid enemies are varied and interesting. I circle my opponent, looking for an opening while trying to keep myself room to withdraw, I use a flurry of fast attacks to drive my opponent back when I am cornered and I use all attacks available. I rarely use the power attack without having stunned my opponent first, admittedly. It's just too slow.
Combat against animals is more hectic and less sophisticated. Dodge, dodge, hit, dodge, run away for a few seconds, attack again etc.

The real problem is that doing this feels totally unintuitive with G3 combat system and therefore, its a pain.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

One cannot polish a turd.