Mawxiwtz on 8/8/2024 at 15:33

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I guess my iso is corrupted in some way, I've tried updating Mednafen but it still crashes there.
As for stacks, when on level 2 I tried splitting gold from the inventory I couldn't do it, the only way to split it was by dropping it and then picking up, but once I pressed select or it's combination with something it got fixed. I've tried now to replicate this, but couldn't do it either, so it might have been another bug.

Gertius on 18/1/2025 at 20:34

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Hi Sir Robin,
thanks for checking out the translation and for your kind words!

I am happy that another UW fan got enjoyment out of the translation. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to create it.
As I wrote above I am also a big fan of Ultima Underworld.
I felt happy and blessed to subsequentially find all the infos and clear all the showstoppers to be able to make the translation happen.

I´ll check out your other thread too.

Cheers,
Gertius

Sir Robin on 23/2/2025 at 01:22

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Reading your "UU_PSX_Information.txt" file, I can answer a few things for you.

Section 1.2
Yes, I doubt block 10 is used at all. The LOOK feature seems to ignore walls, textures, and bridges entirely. As in, if you look at a wall and there is an object on the other side, you'll get a description of that object. See my notes here: (https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Technical_Differences_in_Ultima_Underworld_on_the_PSX#Object_Interactions)

Section 3
Interesting about "\mX" for mantras. In the PC version, "\p" pauses the dialog for a moment and "\m" pauses until the players hit a key. I'm guessing that was changed in the Japanese version?

Section 3.1
Your "number words" like first, second, third, etc are called ordinals.

Section 3.2
I can clear up some of these conversation blocks:
3595 - Thorlson - Has strings and conversation code, other than that he doesn't seem to appear anywhere in the game.
3609 - The talking door - This one is definitely in the game. If you found this because you have some code to find strings that aren't attached to actual NPCs, it's because this conversation has no NPC. Door objects don't have a conversation slot, so to make a talking door they had to trigger the conversation from a do-use trap attached to the door.
3699 - Crazy Bob - another one with strings and code but no instanciation. I get the feeling this character was created to debug the barter system.
3770 - The Failed Levitator - Another with strings and code but no existance.
3879 - The Impatient Mage - Another with strings and code but this one can be called into existance with a summon monster spell.

You didn't mention this next one, does he not exist in the PSX version or did you just miss him?
3610 - Celaven - strings and code, no spawn.

The blocks you noted were duplicates:
3730..3733 - These are the trainer knights. They train 4 different mantras but it looks like the devs made a super knight will all the mantras, copied it to all four blocks, then had the codes written to only use the strings that each knight trained. I suppose you could trim out the unused strings of each knight.
3846 & 3847 - green goblins, I'm assuming one is for club wielding and one is for the sword wielding models. If so, they forgot to assign it, because the sword wielding green goblin doesn't talk
3852 & 3856 - gray goblins, same assumption as greens, and sword guy talks
3860 & 3862 - there are two mountain man definitions in the game, same dialog but different models/portraits. One is all the generic mountain man instances on level 2, the other is only visible with summon monster spell.
3861 & 3864 - I'd assume these are the green and red lizardmen, they have the same dialog
3875 & 3881 - in the PC version they aren't exactly the same but similar, only one line different between them. These are a ghoul and a dark ghoul, similar dialog but different models
and portraits. Neither appears in game but can be found with a summon monster spell.

So in all there are 4 creatures not normally seen in the game unless spawned with a summon monster. I can find these pretty easily in the PC version but have yet to get them in the PSX version, so they may have been coded out.

FYI, details on the summonable monsters is here: (https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/NPCs_cut_from_Ultima_Underworld)

Gertius on 31/5/2025 at 17:48

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Thanks for sharing your feedback!
May I ask which version of the game (Rev1?) and translation patch (1.2?) you were using?
I may be able to look into some of these points but I don´t really have capacity to do more work on the patch in the foreseeable future.
Here are already some comments though:


Edit: saw this now with Shak, an "O" appearing at the end of the reply when asking to teach repair. Because you said the other place are the trainer knights and they also teach you mantras, this is most likely connected to the mantra text codes inserted at the end of the sentences. Possibly when you ask them a second time to train you and you already know the mantra... this is speculation though.


I noticed that in my playthroughs but I never knew it worked in the DOS version. Always thought it may be intentional from the game.
I just compared this to the Japanese original Rev1 and it´s the same behaviour. "demand" line is missing from the trade dialog.
I noticed in the source strings that Shak has the trading dialog twice, once with and once without the "demand" line. Maybe for PSX they decided to only use the one without.
I also noticed that you cannot really anger Shak, not even by taking his items that are lying on the floor or attacking him. Maybe that´s why they left out that dialog option.


I can imagine that I may have added the newline to prevent chaotic linebreaks in the world window. Most likely the inventory does not render a newline escape char.
I just rechecked this behaviour as I couldn´t really remember seeing that before. When rechecking, the item loses the "...belonging to" part in the inventory completely. At least for the two of Shak´s weapons I checked it with


Confirmed, this is a bug in the translation. It only happens when talking to Eyesnack again after learning the flute song. This is most likely why I did not encouter it before. Dropped replies sometimes caused memory errors, similar to the bandits and Shak bugs, that were fixed in 1.1 and 1.2. If I ever find time to do another release this bug would be on the top of my list.


I did not change any conversation code/logic, at least not intentionally.
Only exchanged the text contents. I had looked into conversation code but was unable to figure out the code tree structure.
For some NPCs I had to insert or remove replies from the English original, to match the Japanese dialog structure, so there were definitely some changes between PC and PSX versions. Simple example I remember: the English PC version differentiated in Shak´s dialog between one "piece of gold" and multiple "pieces of gold" when displaying the cost for something, by using a variable that linked to separate dialog lines. As in Japanese singular/plural seems to work differently, they scrapped that variable and also the lines of dialog it referenced. I had to remove the variable and delete the lines from the English translation, so that the rest of the lines would line up again with the adapted Japanese dialog structure (that I was unable to change).


Also for these points, one could compare to the Japanese original to see how it behaves
Edit: I just checked with Eyesnack and the flute. It´s the same behaviour in the Japanese original, you can ask him to teach you the song repeatedly after having learned it.