

Ultima Underworld bugs - rsaarelm
http://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/21/ultima-underworld-bugs/

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jasonkester
Ultima 3 was the ultimate hacker's game. You could crack it open with a Hex
Editor and mess with anything you wanted. Your characters were all stored in
one place, with every attribute easy to find (and change to FF). Towns and the
world map were all sitting there in memory waiting for you to change whatever
you want.

I made my own town at one point.

Better still, you'd inevitably screw something up and suddenly find yourself
being chased across the map by a giant letter M, which you couldn't defeat
because your armed weapon was "Paladin". Too much fun.

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bryanh
You could tell that these guys were having a blast making the games, and the
games showed it. That, in my opinion, tends to highlight the big problem with
a lot of sterile games nowadays: designed by committee and handed off to
underpaid developers in a cubicle.

Thank goodness for indie games, they seem to retain that spark.

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jasonkostempski
No other game makes me so nostalgic. Though I've been bitten by the Judy bug,
not knowing what it was at the time, I was more than happy to start over. I
figured I just missed something critical and would have to immerse myself even
deeper into the game.

~~~
Maciek416
I got the surge of nostalgia too.

Another heartbreaking (but no less attempt-discouraging) bug that would
occasionally happen would be that after loading a saved game you'd discover
that the contents of your bags had all turned into UW's ubiquitous piles
debris (or pools of blood, I can't remember anymore), and that your saved game
had been saved in a corrupted state.

Underworld wasn't the only Ultima that had a hit-it-with-a-stick-till-it-does-
something-funny-or-undefined quality to it. You could do some fairly
unsanctioned things (climing on top of stuff, going where you weren't supposed
to go) in 7, and in Ultima 9 (Ascension) you could visit places long before
you were "meant" by mountain climbing with stairways constructed from objects
out of your inventory (my favourite was using books and loaves of bread).

Origin games always had such a rough-but-polished quality to them. Whenever I
broke an Ultima in this manner it never quite shattered my suspension of
disbelief (like, for example falling out of a Quake level into empty space)
but instead gave me the impression that wow, they had a fairly open
environment here where you could expect the unexpected.

With a lot of modern games that seems to have been lost, where typical map
design is simply a straight march through a series of set pieces, with
invisible walls blocking off any chance of looking behind or underneath
something or coaxing some kind of unsanctioned behaviour out of the game. Not
to mention the flood of quality control these games enjoy..

Too bad! On the other hand, one of the most popular games out right now,
Minecraft, seems to have brought back a little bit of this spirit.

[EDIT: did any other UW players here hoard objects in that room near the
dwarves on level 2? Good times.. ]

~~~
dfan
Oh, the goddamn container bug. OK, that one was probably even worse than Judy.

We finally found the problem while developing Ultima Underworld II. You will
think we were complete idiots for not using this process (described below) to
find it earlier, but it was 1992, we were straight out of school, and we
basically discovered all our debugging techniques ourselves.

We knew (even during UW development, I think) that it was possible for your
inventory to get corrupted. We even wrote debugging code that would trawl the
entire object system ensuring its validity; the problem was that, especially
on PCs at the time, running it all the time slowed down the system too much,
even just for local testing. Our eventual bright idea (duh) was to run it just
once every few seconds, assuming that whatever corrupted the object system was
likely to be due, however indirectly, to player input. The hope was that when
the assert fired the player would have just done something noticeable, and we
could then look into the code that followed from that behavior.

Sure enough, a few days later, the assert fired right after a tester threw a
bag into the water. And it turned out that's where the bug was.

~~~
JanezStupar
Dude... seems like literally Everybody is on HN :)

You guys (Looking Glass) were THE heroes. You got me into computing for real.
Massive kudos to you sir.

My first PC gaming experience (aged round 7-8) was UW2 - and I remember how I
managed to get into sewers, wandering in the dark (who would know to use a
torch) and then ran into a headless. God did that first sewers level freak me
out. I couldn't bring myself to return to playing for a month I guess.

I'm still waiting for that UW series remake. Gothic came pretty close, so did
Oblivion in a way, KOTOR and Mass Effect got a lot of magic - but I'm still
holding out for the real thing (shame on EA!).

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brisance
Even though back in the day Origin Systems were known to have stiff hardware
requirements, these games programmers were real hackers in bringing entire
worlds to life. Kudos!

~~~
dfan
The "nice" thing about writing for PCs was that even if our game was slow, if
we took long enough to release it, the hardware out there in the real world
would catch up a bit. (Of course, taking a long time to release the game
creates other problems...) It still amazes me in retrospect that people were
willing to play Ultima Underworld at single-digit frame rates, though. It
wasn't really an action game, but still. I think our target "that looks pretty
smooth" frame rate was 12 Hz, and if a super-powerful PC could get up to 20,
that was insane. It was a different age...

~~~
hcles
Do you know which developer in UW2 was responsible for the Servant Strike bug?
That glitch wasted 6 weeks of my life! I recently started playing UW2 again
through Dosbox, using a character editor written in 1994 to change save files
is humbling.

I would read a book or 10 full of these old-school game developing anecdotes.

~~~
dfan
I do, but he's paid me to keep quiet... Truthfully, he was pretty upset about
having caused it at the time.

The worst thing was that you triggered the bug at the beginning of the game,
but didn't discover that it had made the game unwinnable until the end.

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zandorg
I swear Ultima 6 kept me playing - not even to completion - for 3 months of my
entire life. But it was worth every moment.

When I'd explored everywhere, I just stopped playing. A strange game.

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k4st
Thank you, that brightened my morning up :D

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agavin
Ultima was so easy to patch that I wrote my own character editor in basic that
worked on II, III, and IV (Apple II versions). You'd insert a disk at the
programs's request, load a character and could edit virtually any property or
inventory item. The Binhex style single byte encoding really did make it a
"pleasure" to hack.

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phlux
Anyone remember the boat duplication bug in Ultima II? I had hundred of ships
that I made to make bridges all across the world and would retreat to the
ships when fighting as well.

I cant recall though, how I made the dupe ships....

