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Im looking for ideas for skills that are not a part of Ultima, but should be, or would be cool to have. What skills would you add into the game, if you could?

There are ton's of skills already but there are a few that I would like to "Split" to make the game a little more mature for its age verse the newer online games.

Sailing... Not everyone and their brother should be able to jump in a boat and navigate the globe.

Alchemist who blow glass??? Come on! How about a "Glass Blower"? Or that carve stone??? How about a "Mason"?

Boat building?

Scrying? Where depending on the skill a player can view any area on the map through a fog with no names perhaps even at random to keep it from being misused but interesting.

Runemastery? Make some cool magical symbols with all sorts of effects. Perhaps with the ability to draw magic circles during combat to protect against undead or wild animals?

Scribe??? The guy making copies of novels is the same one who cranks out magical scrolls or spell books to support his crack habit at night?

A real carpenter who builds "Containers or cabinets" and not everything...

There is a huge difference between a blacksmith and an armorer or weapon smith.

Metalurgist? Perhaps allowing them to generate ingots of alloys which would give bonuses to weapons or armor, perhaps creating a true nonstick pan!

Farmer...not everyone should have a green thumb even with GM crafted potions...

Rancher...they could actually breed animals and make them multiply in numbers or sell them for slaughter to make a nice steak for someone.

Butcher...processing animals into raw cuts of meat, supplying bones and tissue to the Alchemist to make glue perhaps or skins for crafting into sheets velum?

Binder...the guy who binds all those cool books the scribes crank out to support their crank habit.

The list just goes on and on. This would bring back the demand for crafters in UO I think due to a little more specialized requirements to make "cool" items. Do you think the next door blacksmith crafted Excaliber?

Sorry but after playing over 30 roleplaying pen and paper games growing up a question like that makes my brain explode with a rush of skills.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

why'd you stop then?! lol.

I am adding in Archeology to replace that waist of a skill, Camping.. I mean, how mich skill does it really take to scrape some kindeling off a tree and light it.. as well as rolling out a blanket to sleep on.. bah.

Anyways, I have a few other skills to replace too, ?Necromancy, Bushido, Focus, Ninjitsu, Chivalry and spellweaving. (Spellweaving could actually come to some use, but different from the way EA threw it together)

Witch Craft came to mind from the wife, gathering specific resources around the world to 'craft' some enchanting type potion, or curse etc.. I like the idea of splitting out Masonry and Glass Blowing.. wich I had also thought of earlier as well.

Boat craft, or Boating.. yeah, that is a good idea too, but really, unless a guy removes Recalling and GateTravel (wich we may) boating has almost no demand anymore.

We are creating my Ancient Legends map on Trammel, and the Ultima 5 map on Felucca (both using Felucca rule sets) using the Diff files.. wich I have tested out, and seem to work perfectly together with no preformance loss from the huge file difference to the Dif files. So boating I am changing, rather than wrapping around from the west side of Trammel to the East, You would flow into the East side of the Felucca map from the West edge of Trammel..

Anyways, I dont want new skills to be a 5 month project, so hopfully I can figure out a few decent ones, with good purpose, that are also fairly simplistic too.

Thanks, Dev

btw, This is the Ultima 5 map that Imprint is making for us. Its nearly ready.

You could also have it only true Mage's could cast Gate Travel and Recall, maybe even up the requirements to cast it.

I feel that Gate Travel is great, but should be very very costly to use. Maybe have it use some very rare reagents as well as burn 100% of the mage's mana. Same thing with Recall, it should be very costly to use, and you should be able to have it where once you use the recall rune, it is gone. Make it sorta like a component to recall.

Or... there would be no boat salesmen in UO, strickly crafter made and fishermen require them to make GM anyways so there will be a demand.

Yes only true mages should be able to cast Recall or Gate and to make it a little more punishing you could drop the players stamina/Dex/hp's by half for a recall and drop all stat's for 15 minutes for a Gate. To rip a hole in time and space should demand a heavy price, it would also tone down PK activities and make mages in demand.

Perhaps a perfect diamond would be required as a spell component for magical transportation. You could also do the AD&D thing and have a 1% chance the characters teleportation/gate is slightly off and it runs the risk of teleporting them into solid rock and sends their ghost back to their starting point thus forever losing all their items.

To do what I would like to see in UO would require a totally new UO Client and server since it would mean a complete redo of all skills which the game does not currently support since they can only be exchanged 1:1.

Horse riding should also be split out since it does take "skill" to ride a horse. Perhaps the characters skill determins if they remain mounted during random acts of stupidity like fighting while mounted. i.e. if they have 50% skill that means they have a 50% chance of falling off during special moves. This would be hugely more realistic and fun since there is something about a horse (non-war horse) wanting to get near a deamon I find questionable especially if it is a mile underground in a damp dark dungeon...

Painting should be a skill. This would be required for painting shields and paintings (for players homes).

You could have a skill such as "Elementary Skill Set" which would allow players to learn the basic skill sets for cooking, painting, camping or any other "Group" of common skills up to a small percentage point (30%) but anything greater would require specific training in a field.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

K.I.S.S.

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This space for rent.

yeah.. well that method just makes another run of the mill UO shard

and I dont like those.

Who says skills can only be exchanged 1:1? Using a custom skillgump overriding the default one, you could add as many skills as you wanted.

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

That is what I am doing, yes. Archeology for example replaced Camping. I edited the Skills.mul/idx files.

Ah, I must be out of date then because the last time I used "Skilleditor" it would only exchange skills not add new ones. Thats a good thing then!

Hmm maybe someone (One of you C++ monkeys) should make a tool that allows people to make skills then it automatically generates the basic script additions using a template. This way people would only have to edit the scripts as to what sort of effect (damage) the spell had. This would allow us "nOoBs" to just drag and drop into the folder and become ShardLords like the rest of you.

Sounds like a job for SuPer SyD! Shouldn't take more that an hour tops to code. *clicks his stop watch as he staggers off*

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

I'm not talking about editing skills.mul/idx, but about overriding the client's request to open the skill-gump and instead supply it with a custom one from the server, with a list of as many (or as few) skills as you want your players to have access to. You could even give different skill-gumps depending on which class a character has (if you use a class-based system).

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

hmm. interesting, yea.. now you mention it the standard UO Skill gump is getting old to look at, and never has been too user friendly..

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Forget what you know, know what you forget.

Light years ahead of you guys. I've already created my own gump system, and it works very nicely.

Then I just rename/change the skills I need in the scripts and voila, a custom system.

I've even gone to the degree of changing the way you increase/decrease skills in UO. I like the work it till it increases, so what I've done is made it where every time you use a skill, you get experience. Then you can use that experience to increase either an "Adventure" skill, or a "Crafting" skill.

Anyways, just a small tidbit out there. I also use Gump Studio to make the gumps.

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Demuria Studios

Thought Dian already had a custom gump system? Been so long since I played on your shard I can't remember other than it was different than normal.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

I had done one for....now I don't even remember the name of the shard I was working for....was for Sphere 55i heh. Skills were all scripted. It was a total revamp of UO into Harnmaster. Of course it never got finished anyway, was an overly ambitious project.

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This space for rent.

So what ever happened with it Stormcrow? The scripts are lost?

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Demuria Studios

Probably. They were for sphere anyway, and sphere is a piece of shit. I'd have to go through my pile of old hardrives and see if I have it anywhere still.

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Such Language !

ah Harn...I used to play that. Still have all my books around somewhere.

That would make a nice RPG world.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

Sorry, I meant to say Sphere is a fucking piece of shit, and Damian and Westy suck donkeydick (I still give props to Menace for Greyworld). Was an oversite on my part.



Yeah, me too. Auran (which is another crappy company) bought the rights to make Harn computer games, but of course they have done crap with it (and their crappy 3d engine). As far as the pen and paper, N. Robin Crosby and Columbia Games had a huge falling out and were probably going to take each other to court last I kept up. The problem is the map is too large for UO to do it justice. Llwelyn Mahr had done a nice rendition of it the Xuri way (WF and other primitive tools) but of course the scale is off so bad what I suggested is that we make just a small castle and entrance point on the main map and do the towns off in the dungeon area (this was before map2 and 3 and tokuno and all that). They were huge and cluttered towns, true to the maps. Would have made for hella cool urban adventures but of course Sphere would have puked under the load.

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This space for rent.

Hey.. how much are you renting that space for, btw... *thumbs through wallet*

Lol, Sphere isn't so bad now. With the .56b series. I speak to the new dev team regularly.

As far as Damian and the rest, have you seen Irth? *coughs*

Anyways, I've got a Sphere server and it runs great. It could even handle the load now for that.

So where is Llwelyn Mahr lately? Gone from the UO scene?

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Demuria Studios

Irth? Ever read the reviews on all the big gaming sites? Last threat I heard was they were about to get sued out of business.

Seems the magic fizzled and the hat turned out to be a shoe with a rather foul smell eminating from it.

That will teach them to charge players monthy fee's to debug an alpha game. Just the petty infighting the dev's of this game left in the EMU world is enough to keep me from ever supporting "ANYTHING" they produce.

If somehow they do rip it violently out of their ass and make billions (which no game ever has) then good for them! Hopefully they invest the money well and move out of the U.S. and are never heard from again.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

Hmm, I'm going to have to check up on that. It will be interesting to see about how that is going.

As far as that, what is Llwelyn Mahr up to lately?

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Demuria Studios

and, WHAT might I ask.. the hell does all of this shit have to do with Ultima skills?!?!??!?! jeez.. try to ask a simple question, and you get chatty cathy's swamping the thread with a bunch of nonsence!

anyone seen my dog?

oh, nvm.. I dont have one..