Patch 46 - 04/01/16 - NPC Speech

[Jack]

NPC Speech

NPC speech is something I've planned to work on for a long time but have only recently gotten around to. The UO Demo includes the full OSI speech system that was used in era, as well as many speech fragment files (a file that consists of keywords and their responses). There are dozens of different speech fragment files, and probably thousands of keywords/responses all together.

These keywords and responses take several things into account.

• The attitude of the NPC (NPCs range from having an attitude of "wicked" to "good hearted".
  
• The sophistication of the NPC (basically, how well spoken they are).
  
• The fame/karma of the player (NPCs hate people with bad karma, love players with good karma).
  
• The profession of the NPC.
  
• The town the NPC resides in.
  

NPCs can have wildly different responses to the same type of conversation based on the above. I found working on this pretty interesting and had some funny moments chatting with NPCs. I hope some players will take the time to enjoy having a chat with NPCs. I personally am a bit nostalgic for it since I used to probe them during era with conversation.

Misc

• The +25 ancient tailoring needle is now available for 25 platinum (600 uses).
  
• The UOR tinkering menu no longer claims to retain the color of ingots.
  
• You can now use items inside a locked container if the container resides in your backpack.
  
• You can now buy interior decoration tools from the architect NPC for 10,000 gold.
  
• Monster armor has had a major update. Without going into exact details, monsters will now have lower armor overall (most were roughly halved), but the armor they do have is more effective. This is an era accurate change, most armor values were taken directly from the demo files. Judging by the demo files, the pattern seemed to be that nearly armor was reduced by roughly half of the values we had. So any T2A creatures (which do not exist in the demo) followed that rule.
  
• Armor and gold values have been updated on the bestiary. All monsters on the bestiary should now show how much gold they drop.
  
• Fixed an issue with loading achievements. This issue never affected anyone.
  
• Fixed a bug with Last Man Standing that also never affected anyone.
  
• Specially named clothing again shows the (blessed) tag.
  
• Broken chairs on the plat vendor will be sold with the itemid advertised. Broken chairs can now also be flipped.
  
• Fixed an issue where the discord bot would sometimes announce the incorrect type of tournament (eg: 2v2 when it was actually a 1v1)
  
• Fixed tracking images for alligator and gazers.
  
• The website now uses an https protocol and most URLs have changed to "pretty URLs". If you notice any broken pages on the website please let me know.
  
• The platinum vendor will now auto update the hue of the month for dye tubs.
  
• Monster statuette casing has been corrected.
  
• NPC vendors now fight back when attacked.