Glamdring - Greetings and thank you for attending tonight's Open House.
Glamdring - Tonight's chat is considered General Discussion and as such we will accept questions of any topic relating to UO.
Glamdring - I will be our moderator for this evening. In order to submit questions please /msg or /query Jerrith, Ssendam, XenaDragon or |Ffil|.
Glamdring - Please /msg different question-takers at different times, in order to balance the load and speed this process up. Do not msg anyone from OSI, or myself--these questions will be ignored.
Glamdring - Remember that OSI may not have the opportunity to answer all of your questions. In addition, some questions may not be answered if the Dev Team feel that it is not appropriate or that it has been better answered through some other question.
Glamdring - In addition, please do not submit any questions that have already been answered during past conferences. We encourage you to read the logs of the previous Open Houses, which are available at http://uohoc.stratics.com.
Glamdring - Thanks for coming, everyone. We will now begin accepting questions.
Glamdring - If you wish to discuss the chat while it is going on, please join #ultima-online.

Glamdring - *Sl0th* Besides the house auction system, what else is being done/will be done about the current housing problems?
Runesabre - House maintenance has been the other mechanism being discussed for helping to "recycle" houses that are not used much.

Glamdring - *DamienVryce* Q: Have you considered an option for homeowners to voluntarily make their house doors pickable for role-play purposes.
Runesabre - Never actually thought about it... not sure how many players would purposely put themselves at such risk even for roleplay reasons but its interesting nonetheless.

Glamdring - *Drizzt* if u don't want us to macro then how can we make our murderers blue?
DD - Don't murder. :)

Glamdring - *Refan|SSP* Does OSI intend to strengthen the 'forensic evaluation' skill, and thus permit players to enforce law in UO? ... Perhaps skilled detectives could determine how many murder counts a character has, learn the true identity of a disguised thief, etc..?
DD - We've talked about doing that many times, but don't currently have any concrete plans about it.

Glamdring - *Metallikat* Can you give us any more info on this Companion program?
DD - Basically, the Companion program is for all those players who help out newbies and want to contribute to UO culture and society, but aren't really up for the whole Counselor thing, which entails a lot more work
DD - The idea is that you can sign up to be a Companion (and don't ask me what the details or process involved in signing up is, whether there are interviews or what, I'm not up on the details)
DD - and Companions get a special message when new accounts log in, and can choose to teleport there and help them get their feet on the ground.
DD - (Lest you think that this is liable for abuse, the newbie gets to decide whether they felt that the Companion was helpful :)
DD - Basically, though, it's for regular characters--the character you usually play--so you can turn on listening for newbies, help a few, then turn it off if you decide to just play the game for a while.

Glamdring - *Grellinstone* We want to be able to craft carpet and make it dyeable so that we can get rid of the cloth littering our decorated floors, thus cutting down on the lag. Can this be done soon?
DD - Well, actually, pieces of carpet are items just like pices of cloth. So it won't really cut down on lag unless we build specific carpets, of predetermined sizes, that are considered to be one item...
DD - We'd like to do this, but right now, we're not as worried about lag from items in houses as we are about backup times from too many items in general.

Glamdring - *DamienVryce* Q: Why is there a limitation on bank box size, only to have people go around it by cluttering up the landscape with houses they use as extra bank boxes?
Runesabre - Bank box items are part of the character, and thus, get transferred across server boundaries.
Runesabre - What this can result in is higher server lag due to sending large amounts of data as well as making our backup sizes larger by giving everyone large bank boxes.
Runesabre - So there are several reasons to limit bank box size.

Glamdring - *Life_KoC* Beyond 91 Eval Int it currently takes 5 hours to gain .3 any plans on making it easier since macroing is prohibited ?
DD - As macroing is reduced, the skill will naturally get easier. If macroing isn't reduced as a result of these measures, then we can't afford to make it easier or people will build supercharacters way too quickly. It's a tricky line to walk.
DD - We are very worried about those who can't advance because macroing is dostorting the playing field, but we need to resolve more of the macroing problem to really be able to increase learn rates.

Glamdring - *Ziggy* Will we see Firework wands on the 4th of july? :)
Runesabre - Unfortunately no

Glamdring - *Zerum* Are you planning on making the 1 tile tables that are in npc shops craftable? They would really make player run shops and taverns more authentic looking.
DD - We'd like to add a few craftable items in every update, and that sounds like a great candidate. :)

Glamdring - *Joshua_Rowan* Earlier versions of Pande's Client had the nighttime be TRUE Night, as in dark as a dungeon during the evening. Many of us thought this was incredible and that it added a lot to the atmosphere. What happened? Why did you revert back to the Dusk look? And by the way, colored lighting looks great!
Runesabre - Many players liked the darker nights ( as do I ) but others did not like it very much.
Runesabre - Since we were limited on time and trying to do other things with getting the client stable, we decided...
Runesabre - ... it was best to leave it "as is" till we can get further input.

Glamdring - *Kon* In the new targeting system, will there be a 'target aggressor' option? If not, any plans for one in the future?
DD - No, no plans for target aggressor. It's too easy to have multiple aggressors. With being able to 'tab' to the next target, it didn't really seem necessary.

Glamdring - *Myrddraal* When are the proposed parry changes going to come into effect (blocking missile spells, ect) ? Also, will the few mundane weapons (executioner's axe, 2 handed axe, and blackstaff) ever get a magic variety?
SunSword - Parry changes are not scheduled for immediate introduction because we are going to spend some time evaluating our last changes on combat (including archery) first. Remember, we also have new systems to introduce, and the accessibility update. As far as magic items, one of my pet projects after necromancy and alchemy is "enchantment" which will allow the creation of magic items (including weapons). No timeline on this yet.

Glamdring - *Joshua_Rowan* Cards... Why don't we have them in the game? We have many other kinds of games, including Darts, Chess, Checkers, Dice and Backgammon. But the one game that would really be a major draw to Player-Run Taverns and Casinos, and even NPC Taverns, is missing except for the basic graphics. Would you consider putting in a simple interface for such a thing? Perhaps have Lord British and Lord Blackthorn as the Kings, etc.
DD - The reason playing cards didn't make it into the game was the art load when we were originally shipping UO. I agree, that it would be neat to have them--but it's not actually trivial to do, there's the issues of allowing shuffling, treating it as 56 items sometimes and 1 item sometimes.... and the art download, of course.
DD - It might be possible to do it textually at first, maybe?
DD - We'd have to see. :)

Glamdring - *deVoca* As an overall sort of question, would y'all say that UO is close or far from its scaling limit?
DD - UO is very scaleable, and we can scale it in many different ways. The question is kinda vague, so I can't tell which limit you mean specifically. :)
DD - But we can certainly scale up to handle more players, even within a given shard if necessary (though we prefer to open new shards when shards grow crowded, because we like the population sizes we get on a shard right now)
DD - We can grow in any number of ways, basically, it's a very scaleable architecture.

Glamdring - *DarkHand* When you recall off a rune that is blocked, you don't go anywhere, but your reagents, and mana are still used... Any plans on changing this?
SunSword - Not at the moment. Most blocked locations are invalid or exploit locations, or areas that are temporary. As this is a one time occurance, and because the order in which the code checks for validity in spell casting...
SunSword - This isn't something that is likely to change.

Glamdring - *Brother* we havent heard anything about diffrent races in a while any plans on that?
SunSword - I think we can all agree that playing different races would be a lot of fun. Currently Toad and I have been researching ways that we might introduce races within the next 6-9 months that avoid the many issues of downloads and art
SunSword - Hopefully we'll come to a solution that is both achievable and introduces new and fun gameplay
SunSword - we'll keep you updated on our progress. We'd love to pull it off, but it is likely to be months.

Glamdring - *HappyCanadaDay* When will line of sight for NPC's be addressed? ie. calling guards through walls
Runesabre - LOS checks can be expensive on the server so adding general LOS checks to NPCs has to be evaluated carefully to make sure it doesn't generate undue lag.
Runesabre - Its certianly something I want to check into as well as possibly adding LOS checks for monsters trying to attack thru walls
Runesabre - I am sure many Tamers are tired of Drago attacking that rat behind the wall. :)

Glamdring - *Rainman* With the next patch geared mostly towards newbies, is it too much trouble to ask for one small thing for the veterans. Can you please put in better pathfinding AI for the game's monsters (at least the dungeon monsters)?
SunSword - Changes to monster AI like pathfinding are currently under development for an update after the accessibility update. Pande has been learning about monster behaviours and coming up with some pretty neat solutions.
SunSword - Can't wait to see monsters healing other monsters, walking around objects, flying in combat, etc :)

Glamdring - *DarkHand* The UO CD has graphics for a pedal-powered helicoptor-type machine... Will we ever see this in-game? :)
DD - That is actually prototype art for the blade spirits, that didn't work, and never got removed from the artwork becuase we thought we might find a use for it later. It's not pedal-powered, though :)

Glamdring - *Life_KoC* Hi ! Question : How comes we can't find UO for sale in France when it was supposed to be released in europe on the 25th of June ?
DD - Well, we're all dev folks here, so the intricacies of sales and the like are beyond us. :) But what I heard was that it was going on sale in Germany and the UK this week. I don't know details on France or other European countries.

Glamdring - *Airc* When the attack damage was put in at the beginning of the swing in combat it looked odd. Still does. Could the swing animations be sped up quite a bit? Also, for the times when you aren't swinging, how about "fakes" and "twists", as well as thrusts and different swings for weapons. I'd think thrusting with a longsword or halberd would be part of the combat...
SunSword - Yes, it does look odd. I'd like to take a look at the animation sequence and see if we can't make it sync up better (same with the logs and the chopping sound effect).
SunSword - As for new moves for combat
SunSword - we'd like to flesh out the skill trees to allow players to specialize more, this would be a definite place to add new and more complex moves. Combat could certainly use some more variety on that end.

Glamdring - *Morag* DD, With every patch you take away rare items. Tinkering was a big one...are you going to make more rare items?
DD - We'd rather rare items were rare because of the actions of the player economy, than rare because the game didn't spawn them very often.

Glamdring - *Darketower* Any word on the party system that was discussed a while back?
SunSword - The party system is one of the things that we'd definitely like to add in the second half of this year
SunSword - we've actually dusted off the design document and begun taking a look at what we need to do to implement it, no definite schedual yet.

Glamdring - *Arislan* Is there a possibility that the wrestling issue will be addressed once and for all? It seems wrestling is always simply dealt with rather than worked on. Is there anything being considered?
Runesabre - One of my personal goals is to add some special moves wrestling and make it a truly different style of combat.
Runesabre - Things such as being able to knock the wind out of players, tackle players, blind them, etc.
Runesabre - Again though, its a little ways from realization as other things take priority.
SunSword - Plus we believe the skill management system we're working on will address the issues of unwanted skill gain in wrestling (or any other skill)

XenaDragon - That concludes tonight's chat. I'd like to thank everyone for coming tonight, especially DD, Runesabre and SunSword.
SunSword - Thanks :)
XenaDragon - Feel free to continue talking about UO in our channel #ultima-online.
XenaDragon - Goodnight all, see you again in two weeks at the next House of Commons chat.