Ultima The Ultima Underworld I & II Thread

[Butter]

I think there's only the GoG-version, if other versions exist they're identical.

IIRC the GoG-version had a problem in that it didn't set up its Roland MT-32 settings right, meaning that the music came out all wrong.

But that was years ago, surely it must have been fixed by now.

I played it through a few years ago and it wasn't right. You get used to it.

 

[behold_a_man]

IIRC the GoG-version had a problem in that it didn't set up its Roland MT-32 settings right, meaning that the music came out all wrong.

The music is right; the sound effects probably not - there is a clacking when walking, as if I were wearing plate boots. Thankfully, sound effects can be disabled without any hassle.

 

[Kweepa]

I think the easiest way to set up the sound correctly is to use Ultima Underworld Portable. https://github.com/vini1264/Ultima-Underworld-Portable
It also includes the mouse look patch, but it's optional.

 

[Kweepa]

Would anyone care if a port of Ultima Underworld removed the "om cah" skills (traps to swimming)?
They range from slightly useful to completely useless.
Or perhaps just removing Traps, Search, Track, Sneak, Charm, and Appraise would be safer...?

 

[behold_a_man]

Would anyone care if a port of Ultima Underworld removed the "om cah" skills (traps to swimming)?
They range from slightly useful to completely useless.
Or perhaps just removing Traps, Search, Track, Sneak, Charm, and Appraise would be safer...?

1) Picklock and Repair had dedicated items. What happens to them? Do you remove them, making the loot scarcer? Replace them with something? Leave them as they are, making them useless (except for bartering), lowering the interactivity of the world?
2) I think one of the Abyss' allures is the density of loot. I think the developers expected mantras to be not much less important than runes as rewards for exploration (but the game wasn't really finished). If you'll remove a mantra along with associated notes, I think you'll make exploring the world a bit less interesting. Also, if you didn't get a mantra, you knew there was some place/dialogue you should see, but you didn't.
3) Implementing some of them, like Swimming or Acrobat, should be trivial (just like those skills that don't even work).
4) What do you want to achieve? Faithful reimplementation? If not, you can simply change the benefit you get from uttering the mantra of those skills from, say, +3 to +15 to make them borderline useful for a given price.

Also, do you already have a minimum viable "product"? If not, why care yet?

 

[octavius]

IIRC the GoG-version had a problem in that it didn't set up its Roland MT-32 settings right, meaning that the music came out all wrong.

The music is right; the sound effects probably not - there is a clacking when walking, as if I were wearing plate boots.

Yes. Personally I play without music, but the faulty sound effects are annoying.

Thankfully, sound effects can be disabled without any hassle.

To get proper sound effects you need a Munt emulator and somehow aquire the needed ROM files, as detailed on this page of this thread.

 

[SharkClub]

Would anyone care if a port of Ultima Underworld removed the "om cah" skills (traps to swimming)?
They range from slightly useful to completely useless.
Or perhaps just removing Traps, Search, Track, Sneak, Charm, and Appraise would be safer...?

Any updated version/reverse-engineered source port/etc. needs to have 1:1 feature parity with the original version if it is to be worth anything to the wider community, even if that means the junk skills with little use that people only use for roleplaying flavor playthroughs. For example, I would not have been happy if Daggerfall Unity randomly ended up removing all of the language skills because "they range from slightly useful to completely useless", even though they provide minimal use in vanilla they are worthwhile for roleplaying/larping flavor. From the foundation of vanilla feature parity you can then build upon those lacking features with optional settings and mods in an attempt to improve them and increase their lacking usefulness (another Daggerfall example), but you can't do that from a base that doesn't bother to include them to begin with.

 

[Kweepa]

LOL, message received.
I have already implemented all skills except Trap and Search (as I'm not sure what they do).
Otherwise as far as I know the game is at 100% feature parity (all weapons, conversations, items, spells, traps, puzzles, and enemies work) and I'm just working on polish items - more sound effects, particle effects, voiceover for signs/books/scrolls, and 3d models for the enemies.
I definitely didn't want to reduce the interactivity of the world. Lockpicks work. I would just have made them not skill dependent. Repairing items works. Again, I would just have made that not skill dependent. Then any writings that mentioned mantras, I would have replaced with a more useful mantra, or a hint for one of the more obscure puzzles. But as I say, message received. It's easier not to have to!
behold_a_man - by "repair had dedicated items" do you just mean the anvils?

 

[Spukrian]

IIRC the GoG-version had a problem in that it didn't set up its Roland MT-32 settings right, meaning that the music came out all wrong.

The music is right; the sound effects probably not - there is a clacking when walking, as if I were wearing plate boots.

Yes. Personally I play without music, but the faulty sound effects are annoying.

Thankfully, sound effects can be disabled without any hassle.

To get proper sound effects you need a Munt emulator and somehow aquire the needed ROM files, as detailed on this page of this thread.

There's another, easier solution (if you don't want to download and install stuff):
1. Go to your UU directory, look for a folder named UNDEROM1, then DATA and then open UW.CFG.
2. No matter what is there, replace it with this:

2 -1 -1 -1 sounds

2 -1 -1 -1 speech

0 cuts

Of course the music won't be as good in this case.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Of course the music won't be as good in this case.

I actually prefer the OPL-music to the Roland-music in Stygian Abyss.

 

[octavius]

IIRC the GoG-version had a problem in that it didn't set up its Roland MT-32 settings right, meaning that the music came out all wrong.

The music is right; the sound effects probably not - there is a clacking when walking, as if I were wearing plate boots.

Yes. Personally I play without music, but the faulty sound effects are annoying.

Thankfully, sound effects can be disabled without any hassle.

To get proper sound effects you need a Munt emulator and somehow aquire the needed ROM files, as detailed on this page of this thread.

There's another, easier solution (if you don't want to download and install stuff):
1. Go to your UU directory, look for a folder named UNDEROM1, then DATA and then open UW.CFG.
2. No matter what is there, replace it with this:

2 -1 -1 -1 sounds

2 -1 -1 -1 speech

0 cuts

Of course the music won't be as good in this case.

I'm pretty sure I tried this easy solution and that it was not the same. And I'm only concerned about the sound effects; I turn off the music anyway in first person games.

 

[Spukrian]

I'm pretty sure I tried this easy solution and that it was not the same. And I'm only concerned about the sound effects; I turn off the music anyway in first person games.

Well, yes, the game is using a different soundcard.

For me though the footsteps no longer sounds like I'm playing on a piano so I'm satisfied.

 

[The people of Duckburg]

Would someone mind giving an example of what the correct sound is supposed to be? I don't find the footstep sound to be anything like a piano, but it does sound heavy for a footstep.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Would someone mind giving an example of what the correct sound is supposed to be? I don't find the footstep sound to be anything like a piano, but it does sound heavy for a footstep.

Spoiler

That video has Adlib-playback.

Does this sound correct to people?

 

[Spukrian]

The first video sounds like what I hear when I play the game.

The second video has better music and the soundeffects do sound different, like there's an echo added maybe?

 

[octavius]

If you don't use Munt, you can get basically correct sound effects (no piano when walking), but they are so weak and wishy washy compared to what they are supposed to be.

 

[The people of Duckburg]

Would someone mind giving an example of what the correct sound is supposed to be? I don't find the footstep sound to be anything like a piano, but it does sound heavy for a footstep.

Spoiler

That video has Adlib-playback.

Does this sound correct to people?

I get the latter. Thanks for the confirmation. Another sound question: directional sound, like footsteps and wing flapping, seems to come from random directions, almost opposite of where they should at times. Is this just a sign of the game's age, or is some setting somewhere wrong?

I got to the third floor with my first character after taking a swim on the second floor. Explored most of it, went back up to finish the second floor, headed up to store stuff on the first floor, and went down to the second to continue. Got hit by the item error as I entered that floor. Awfully early in the game for that to happen. Reloaded a save from the second floor and threw basically everything that I didn't want to keep in the water, but I would still get the error every time I entered that floor. I decided to restart since I ended up with fairly low strength character anyway.

Now I'm cleaning up anything I find by polluting the water, but I'd like some advice.
I saw a list of items that you can safely trash, which included "green plants". Does this include the plants with red berries? Are there any plants I should actually keep? What about mushrooms? Candles, oil? I know that I'm supposed to keep one incense. Any items that I should trash, like duplicate keys?
Trying to be thorough with my cleaning since I somehow managed to get the error so early last time.

 

[behold_a_man]

I know that I'm supposed to keep one incense.

One might not be enough.

The error might occur at random, even on a cleansed level. Coincidentally, it didn't happen to me on a level I kept all my stuff on. After it occurred to me once, it occurred to me when I entered the level with an error (sixth) with ~50% probability, even after massive cleansing (I still finished the game with the error). What follows, I'm not sure whether cleaning subsequent levels makes any sense - especially since it's hard to break the hard limit on items unintentionally.

 

[octavius]

I get the latter. Thanks for the confirmation. Another sound question: directional sound, like footsteps and wing flapping, seems to come from random directions, almost opposite of where they should at times. Is this just a sign of the game's age, or is some setting somewhere wrong?

Are you sure it's actually coming from a direction? Old DOS games like Dungeon Master and Arena usually just had ambient sound that didn't come from any direction. The Amiga version of DM has directional sound, though. But Evil's Doom, an Amiga exlusive, doesn't.
It's kind of a pet peeve of mine when First Person games don't have DS. It's much more important than music to me.

 

[Kweepa]

Minorly spoilery: All plants and debris can be trashed, as can anything "broken", aside from the obvious. If you're not using ranged weapons (and why would you) you can trash all the ranged weapons and their ammo and the quiver. You can trash any containers you aren't using. I would be wary about trashing duplicate keys unless you are sure they are actually duplicates. I think a couple of graphics are reused with different descriptions and usage. You can also trash any small weapons once you move up to larger ones, and a lot of the loot drop armour. I haven't found much use for most gems since I don't bother with trading. A couple of rubies should be enough to keep.
I'm not 100% sure of the reason for the item error though, so this might all be pointless. My suspicion is that carrying a lot of items from one floor to another is more likely to trigger the error, and that removing items from the world won't help. I've never encountered it, so these are poorly-informed guesses.

 

[Sceptic]

I remember some game/sound card combinations switched L and R channels on stereo, I know for sure this was a bug in one of the versions of Doom. There were ways to fix it in these cases but I can't remember if it was with the game setup or something in the DOS sound driver config. With UW1 I don't remember if that's the problem or if it's just lack of DS like you said.

Was the exact cause of the item error ever narrowed down accurately. There was some debate about too many items in one level, but there were also indications that simply carrying too many (the likely suspect at the time was containers-wtihin-containers) was more likely to trigger it. I know I got it on one of my early playthroughs (I think I never managed to finish that one) and I was definitely putting bags inside bags to save on space, which in hindsight doesn't sound as clever as it did.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I can faintly recall that UUW had directional sound. The best place I found to test it is being near the 'beast' in the Dwarven mines. It constantly bounces around and hits walls, you can try changing your position relative to that, see if the sound changes position. If you've already killed the beast, try finding a similar one later one, there's at least one on the third floor.

Regarding the item error: Every time I can recall getting the item error (in UUW1) was on the second floor, and after I had 'visited' King Goldthirst's vault IIRC. (In UUW2 it was on the second floor of the Pits of Carnage, but only if descending to the third floor.) I could mitigate the error by simply not visiting Goldthirst's vault, and by not keeping anything important on the second floor.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

You know, I'm not an audiophile but I recall reading about when sound boards and headsets changed so you could feel the sound coming from different directions based on the channels and shit. I have some music that still makes me duck because I think something is coming at me from behind and above. I forget what the hell they call this. It was a nice article.

Also, I noticed there is another long Ultima Underworld video put up about a week ago. Prepare for 2+ hours!