Oh Dear....Someone messed up with latest patch.....Bejesus!!!

[Erigo]

I Run XP sp3 and do NOT use UOA
patching worked - BUT that "delay' while doing the checksum-or-whatever-it-does thing to startup takes way too long from 3 to 10 minutes.

 

[Proserpina]

if you're fully patched, what happens starting UO w/ client.exe? it shouldn't launch the patcher

That worked....! Took a few minutes to get all the beta UO garbage out of here, but Thank you!!!

 

[MYUO]

I am using 9th anni edition (classic client) on Window Vista. When I used UOA to start the game, it gave me this error message:
"Failed to open 'map0LegacyMUL.uop' from HD using a maximum install. Either this file is not readable, your system needs to be rebooted, or the file does not exist and you either need to reinstall or switch to a non-maximum install."
After a few tries, now I can't open the client.exe from the 9th anni folder. My laptop (Window 7) has "UO classic" downloaded directly from uo.com a few months ago. It patched without issue.
Therefore, I think the earlier version of classic client somehow had conflicts with the new patch.
Question: if I download and reinstall "UO classic" on my Vista computer, will it erase all my settings and macros?

 

[lineman]

Cant seem to have 2 clients going at same time now, can run the one fine but if I try and run 2nd it goes thru the patch and gets error message and stops there,

 

[Basara]

Prosperpina: There's 4-5 incremental patches - odds are the patches you are seeing are not the SAME patches, but one after the other. (essentially, it's doing something similar to what happened with the patches associated with the ML launch, which came in a series of 3 over the August of that launch).

One thing I did note (for the people using UOA) - if you do launch with UOA and let the new patcher run, it kept wanting to redo the last patch of the set, even though starting it without UOA said no additional patches were needed. You can just cancel out of that before it gets through the check for updated parts, and not worry about it (do NOT cancel after it's done with the check, unless you let it run to where "play" becomes lit).

 

[Meatbread]

I patched with no difficulty, but two minutes of staring at the patcher every time I go to restart the client is...
TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.

 

[SlobberKnocker]

i reinstalled after getting the missing map fatal. i start up uoa and get the old and new login. i log into the old login and close the new login. uoa dont work but im playable for the moment. i suppose ea will fix it around pub 100. what a horror show.

 

[Ashlynn_L]

I patched the classic client on my computer and it works fine. If this is UOA related... well it's a third party program. Not really anything to do with EA.

 

[SuperKen]

I patched just fine, and I am lucky that I'm on a brand new SSD so it doesn't take that long. Even a reinstallation takes about a minute and a half. I now start with UOA and I just hit cancel and ignore its messages about impending doom.

However, this is still very poor implementation for those of us on the Classic Client. It's not that I can't still log in and play, but there's gotta be a better way.

For now, I'm considering the registry hack.

 

[Ezekiel Zane]

The registry hack is harmless. It's not difficult to do and it simply tricks UO Assist into not running the patcher.

 

[Conrad]

I have 3 computers that have UO installed. All three have both the Classic Client and the Enhanced Client. I didn't have a SINGLE problem with the new patch for one reason--it was doing something I had never seen before (new patcher for the CC) so I didn't touch a thing until I was absolutely SURE that everything had finished (it had). This took about about 5 minutes on all but my slowest machine (the P4/XP machine). NO problems at all. I saw the new update screen, the DOS gui, the new update screen again, etc., but I also saw long wait times.

Here is what I think is happening.

The Classic Client loads and patches faster then the Enhanced Client--it always has...until now. Now, you have the same patcher as the Enhanced Client, and yes, the wait for the file check varies between 15 seconds to a minute for me, and again, always has. I suspect all the people that are trying to patch the Classic Client, and having problems, simply didn't wait for ALL the update steps to complete--they interpreted a long series of read/writes as a hangup or crash of the new patcher, when it was working fine all along. They are interrupting it before it is done--that is all. Each time you do this, the patcher determines that a file was corrupted (because it was interrupted!) and thus re-downloads it and goes through the whole mess again. To make matters worse, there has actually been two patches.

In short, Classic Client users are used to a faster patch/login process and simply didn't wait long enough.

The UOAssist issues are nothing new--it always takes Tugsoft a while to update it. No point in complaining to the Devs in that regard--it isn't their job to make sure 3rd party apps are compatible. This is one of the biggest reasons I moved to the Enhanced Client--I am no longer bound to Tugsoft and an application that probably will not be updated for much longer. The only people still using it have all already purchased it--new UO players are more then likely opting for the Enhanced Client (especially once they realize they have to pay for UOA) and thus Tugsoft probably isn't making much money off of UOA anymore. No money, no reason to continue supporting/updating it.

There is also the possibility that this is just one step, in many to come, to gradually force the population that still uses the Classic Client over to the Enhanced Client so the Devs can stop wasting time beating a dead horse (...can you tell I prefer the Enhanced Client?).

 

[Vampyre Kitty]

Have they made it so you cant run 2 clients anymore.? I have more then one house that I cant access crap on and its a real pain to have to log out log in that char.. get the stuff I need.. then log back onto my other acct... let alone the damn patch screen takes 20 years to load now :/

 

[S.P.A]

The registry hack is harmless. It's not difficult to do and it simply tells UO Assist the new filename to use to open the client.

Ezekiel,

The only "registry hack" that solves this problem is tricking UOAssist into running something else as the UOPatcher; hacking the registry or using the normal UOAssist menus to change the target client.exe doesn't avoid the (problematic) running of the UOPatch.exe.

I've documented the "registry hack" fix in my second post on my other thread here.

 

[S.P.A]

Have they made it so you cant run 2 clients anymore.? I have more then one house that I cant access crap on and its a real pain to have to log out log in that char.. get the stuff I need.. then log back onto my other acct... let alone the damn patch screen takes 20 years to load now :/

No but you are going to have to make a shortcut to client.exe to start your second / Nth client bypassing the patcher.

 

[Vampyre Kitty]

Ok thanks S.P.A

 

[Ezekiel Zane]

Ezekiel,

The only "registry hack" that solves this problem is tricking UOAssist into running something else as the UOPatcher; hacking the registry or using the normal UOAssist menus to change the target client.exe doesn't avoid the (problematic) running of the UOPatch.exe.

I've documented the "registry hack" fix in my second post on my other thread here.

Yeah I know. I worded my post poorly. I should have said it basically tells UOA not to run the patcher.

 

[Juztme]

This is not an issue, upon launching the patcher it determines if any of your client files need to be patched which is the 390/390 you are seeing.
Each time the patcher is run it will check for available updates and verify your client files. So to answer your question yes you download a checksum from the patcher server to verify that you are up to date. Once that is complete you can hit play.

Thanks for the reply... as long as its not repetitive patching alls good in the world

 

[Redxpanda]

I have a habit of always starting the classic client 1st (without UOA) and i am happy that i did that...

However:
UOA = Broken
UOAM = Broken
Pincos = Never really worked so i can't say if the patch broke that too

It really took me back to the old days having to look at the paper map to find my treasure chests. If only the loot was worth all the damn trouble this patch put me through tonight.

 

[THP]

and a word from the Devs???????

 

[Conrad]

Pincos = Never really worked so i can't say if the patch broke that too

You mean you never got it to work. It works fine for everyone that I play UO with, and works just fine after the patch. In fact, Pinco had a patch for his UI up (in response to the official UO patch) and his mod patched before the game even had a chance to patch. For those running EC/Pinco's, other then the time it took to download the patch, nothing was even noticeably different.

I do think it kind of sad that every patch to Pinco's UI has patch notes right in the patcher when the game doesn't.

Seriously, don't knock the guy's hard work simply because you were unable to get it to work. If it didn't work for you, trust me, the problem was not the mod.

 

[The Scandinavian]

Great,
patch is not working.They could not kill me of by the account migration so now they try the patch trick.

I'm playing on a comp with xp will that still work?
Are you all saying that I should not start UOA as usual?
Not even start that game but start the patcher?

It seems that I have to reinstall UO,what a joy.
Install from what version?
Anyone have a good link to start from,it has been some time since I got the last CD?

UO for me have always been relaxing but now I'm not sure anuymore.
To often it is stressful.

Regards
The Scandinavian

 

[Redxpanda]

You mean you never got it to work. It works fine for everyone that I play UO with, and works just fine after the patch. In fact, Pinco had a patch for his UI up (in response to the official UO patch) and his mod patched before the game even had a chance to patch. For those running EC/Pinco's, other then the time it took to download the patch, nothing was even noticeably different.

I do think it kind of sad that every patch to Pinco's UI has patch notes right in the patcher when the game doesn't.

Seriously, don't knock the guy's hard work simply because you were unable to get it to work. If it didn't work for you, trust me, the problem was not the mod.

I said that wrong. I downloaded Pincos a long time ago and it never worked for me. I never bothered to check what the problem is but UOA and UOAM worked just fine without me jumping through hoops (prepatch) so i assumed Pincos would work as well. At any rate, still can't say if it is working now since it never worked for me

 

[THP]

Seriously have we gotta wait for the patch every single time we log in now...this is outrageous!!!!!

 

[Lymbyc]

I'm still not on lol.

When I download the file from www.uoherald.com/downloads it doesn't even give me all the right files!! I've checked my firewall, my anti-virus, I've checked that I'm saving it to all the right places, I've rebooted numerous times... I just can't figure out what it is. And when I go to try and talk to someone from EA they just say they don't know. Fat lot of use that is hehe. But when I try to download a different file for UO, it's obviously not the right file because it's not the one specified on the patch.

I just paid my UO sub for 6 months literally 3 days ago. Really wish I hadn't now.

 

[Petra Fyde]

It's not a patch, it's a 'checksum', the EC does the same, but it usually takes just a few seconds. For some reason, on some computers, the check sum for CC is taking something like 5 minutes. - I've emailed the patchlog and metric.txt from Terry's pc in hopes of helping to find a solution for this.

Patch without assist, once that's gone through and you're just getting the checksum, start with assist, but cancel/click the x on the patcher. The game screen, started by assist is behind it.

If things have screwed up and you actually have to uninstall then reinstall you do so by downloading the installer - link in the patch notes. Run the installer, then start the game. It will download the most recent files, when you finish it's all ready to go, no waiting for months and months worth of patches to download individually.

 

[Vyal]

Why not just run client.exe and not the patcher or uo.exe ? I have always done this so I don't get unwanted patches.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

Perhaps someone who can multitask could sum up in a single post we can point to, from the several threads now, about what's going on, what to expect, what to do, with/without UOA. Something like this should have been released by a Dev Beforehand, but's that's a thread in itself.

 

[SlobberKnocker]

what a bloody horror show.

 

[Jade of Sonoma]

what a bloody horror show.

From the moment this thread was posted, I put a complete STOP to logging in to UO and I haven't dared log-in to the UO game since, because, between all the problems I am reading about in the posts, plus the weather we are experiencing in Canada, I may not get the required time to download EVEN IF the new patch WORKS FOR ME. High Wind Storms, snow, hail and power outages crashing my computer have taken their toll. So .. I don't need a patch that either doesn't work or requires more downloads and patches to fix.

Sometimes, when I think back to the account Migration nightmare and other issues since, I wonder about the cost of playing UO. It seems more like work and worry rather than fun. Just thinking ....

 

[Bleak]

It's not a patch, it's a 'checksum', the EC does the same, but it usually takes just a few seconds. For some reason, on some computers, the check sum for CC is taking something like 5 minutes. - I've emailed the patchlog and metric.txt from Terry's pc in hopes of helping to find a solution for this.

Patch without assist, once that's gone through and you're just getting the checksum, start with assist, but cancel/click the x on the patcher. The game screen, started by assist is behind it.

If things have screwed up and you actually have to uninstall then reinstall you do so by downloading the installer - link in the patch notes. Run the installer, then start the game. It will download the most recent files, when you finish it's all ready to go, no waiting for months and months worth of patches to download individually.

We are actively investigating this checksum processing time issue.

 

[S.P.A]

We are actively investigating this checksum processing time issue.

How about, whilst you are in the codebase, why not change the program sequence to make this backwards compatible?

Right now what you have done is:

1. Made a new UOPatch.exe program that simply starts UO.exe and closes itself
2. Made UO.exe copy itself to UO.bin, start a patcher called UO.bin and when it finishes start Client.exe
   • I can't yet tell if UO.bin starts Client.exe or UO.exe starts Client.exe without attaching my VS2010 debugger to it; I'll do that if I need to

Change this to something that works in a backwards compatible way:

1. Make the patcher program called UOPatch.exe again
2. Have UO.exe call UOPatch.exe and wait for it to finish, then have UO.exe start the Client.exe
3. Have UOPatch.exe able to be run standalone; when it finishes it does not start the Client.exe

If you did that, then amazingly, UOAssist would work again without Tug even having to change a line of code.

There is nothing functionally different in my proposed code structure, other than it is backwards compatible. You are still using your new patcher technology, but in a program called UOPatch.exe.

In a codebase built in .NET as this clearly is, repackaging the program files with the functional modules shuffled around a bit isn't a major development task; you'd have it done in a few hours and ready for QA.

If you want any alpha or beta testers please let us know, I am sure that many other Classic Client users are willing to help you with the QA work.

And as a word of advice, if you ever again plan to change anything this fundamental, do come to us, the user community who pay your wages and share your ideas with us in advance and let us help you test their proof of concept and then alpha and beta test them.

Remember your boss Jeff in his recent interview confirmed that most users are still on the Classic Client, and everyone in the UO community knows that most Classic Client users also use UOAssist.

So all the benefits of your new patcher have been completely overlooked by the more fundamental problem that you've broken the game for the majority of the majority of the user community! Even more successfully than the billing change did last year.

You owe it to us to deliver something that lets us all play as we have paid to play for the last 15 years without this grief.

 

[Conrad]

Perhaps someone who can multitask could sum up in a single post we can point to, from the several threads now, about what's going on, what to expect, what to do, with/without UOA. Something like this should have been released by a Dev Beforehand, but's that's a thread in itself.

Three things to do if you're still having problems with either the checksum taking forever or UOAssist not working right.

One. See above post...."We are actively investigating this checksum processing time issue." This means wait.

Two. Wait for Tugsoft to fix the login/patch ordering/pathing, OR Follow these instructions: http://community.stratics.com/index.php?threads/workaround-using-uoassist-with-new-patcher-mechanism.263045/

Three. Wait.

...OR, switch over to the Enhanced Client. I hear they have cookies.

(note: The Enhanced client checksum seems to be taking a little longer then usual, as well. I am guessing that is because there is a more then usual amount of players logging in and out trying to fix "issues", and the server is simply congested.)

 

[Aislinn]

I am using 9th anni edition (classic client) on Window Vista. When I used UOA to start the game, it gave me this error message:
"Failed to open 'map0LegacyMUL.uop' from HD using a maximum install. Either this file is not readable, your system needs to be rebooted, or the file does not exist and you either need to reinstall or switch to a non-maximum install."
?

I'm on Windows 7 and getting the exact same message. EC works fine but I really want my CC back!

 

[Storm]

Three things to do if you're still having problems with either the checksum taking forever or UOAssist not working right.

One. See above post...."We are actively investigating this checksum processing time issue." This means wait.

Two. Wait for Tugsoft to fix the login/patch ordering/pathing, OR Follow these instructions: http://community.stratics.com/index.php?threads/workaround-using-uoassist-with-new-patcher-mechanism.263045/

Three. Wait.

...OR, switch over to the Enhanced Client. I hear they have cookies.

(note: The Enhanced client checksum seems to be taking a little longer then usual, as well. I am guessing that is because there is a more then usual amount of players logging in and out trying to fix "issues", and the server is simply congested.)

HEHE we do have cookies

Ok all kidding aside This sucks for UO CC users especially. (EC users it is taking a bit to log in) I use UOassist also when I use the CC But to say the UO team needs to take into consideration how the program changes they make even effect UOassist is crazy talk! We as players payed tugsoft THEY need to make it work with UO not the other way around!
its bad enough they have two clients to worry about now lets make them have to worry about all the third part programs like automap,cartographer etc

 

[S.P.A]

But to say the UO team needs to take into consideration how the program changes they make even effect UOassist is crazy talk! We as players payed tugsoft THEY need to make it work with UO not the other way around!
its bad enough they have two clients to worry about now lets make them have to worry about all the third part programs like automap,cartographer etc

Storm,

They do need to consider what environment the users are using their application in. Everyone at Mythic should be aware that most Classic Client users use UOAssist; everyone at Mythic must know that most users use the Classic Client, as their boss Jeff admitted this in his last interview.

And what they did was completely unnecessary, at two levels.

Firstly...

What are the benefits of the new patching mechanism to Classic Client users? Well... if you havee a lot of patches to install, it is faster than the old process. But you only have a lot of patches to install if you are reinstalling UO from scratch or haven't played for a long time; and until yesterday, the vast majority of us were not reinstalling UO from scratch very often - things have changed, and in the last 24 hours lots of people have had to do that lots of times.

So why was this an urgent priority for the developers? Surely not for the majority of our benefit. It was an administrative benefit for the development team, reducing the diversity of the codebase, just like the Account Management migration was an administrative benefit for EA. And just like Account Migration, it was poorly scoped, poorly designed, poorly implemented and caused a lot of unnecessary problems to a significant proportion of the paying user community.

Secondly...

If you were going to implement this, then it is childsplay to implement it in a way that would have been backwards compatible.

If the developers had bothered to flowchart what the existing processes did, and simply recreated those steps using their new technology, i.e. used the program names UO.exe and UOPatch.exe and Client.exe to do exactly what they did before "functionally" but using the new patcher architecture, they would have broken nothing.

Why change the process flowchart as well as the codebase itself? That's inconsiderate development, and an unnecessary risk.

In the old way; UO.exe called UOPatch.exe and waited for it to complete, then called Client.exe and closed itself.

In the new way, UOPatch.exe has been changed to call UO.exe; UO.exe copies itself to UO.bin and starts UO.bin as a process, which performs the patching process, then when it finishes it starts Client.exe.

There was no need to do that. The functions are clearly isolated; UO.bin is doing the patching and should just have been called UOPatch.exe.

One thing you learn about programmers is they fall into two categories.

One group likes "greenfield" development and does things new ways all the time. These types of programmers are excellent for brand new developments, but are lousy when you put them on maintenance of existing projects; it isn't what they want to do and it isn't what they do well.

The other group likes "brownfield" development and enjoys digging around in ex-employees' old code to find out how it works so their code dovetails into the existing application. They are less leading edge (or bleeding edge judging by how the other group are performing at Mythic) and their results can be less visibly spectacular but generally in the long run they improve more and cause less distress.

In my day job I am yet again picking up the pieces of a group of "greenfield" developers writing a replacement for an existing application and being too arrogant to read the old source code "because it is old technology" to discover all the nuances of what the old application did.

I remember some of the older UO developers discussing digging around in old source code and sounding like they enjoyed it. I hear a lot less of that from this Mythic group. They remind me of a team of "greenfield" developers and I've nothing but bad experiences of that attitude applied to old legacy applications, just as UO is.

We'll see how Bleak chooses to fix the mess that he has caused here. I hope he takes the criticism on board, learns from it and implements something that is at a process-level backwards compatible and at a functional level includes his clever new patcher mechanism. Because what he's done so far is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[chester rockwell]

this sucks. im on an overseas connection in a crap country. still cant get in. these patches are taking forever at 3-7kb/sec.

 

[Wenchkin]

I expected problems getting updated with linux and kinda had some, but we got there in the end.

I'd get a small CC patch then it said it was done, loading the client would then get a map error. Trying to patch just wouldn't go beyond that little patch. So I rebooted into another linux distro and tried it there. This time the patcher threw an error saying it couldn't run some unpacking program I'd never heard of before.. but I looked in the UO folder and there was the exe. So I ran it, and it was clearly playing round with my UO files for a bit. When it looked to have stopped I re-ran UOPatch.exe and that opened up the new patcher and patched up properly.

So if anyone can't get past that old patcher and you're getting map errors, look for a file I think it was packerlite.exe or something like that... see what happens if you run that then the patcher

The only thing I notice now is the CC patcher flickers like crazy. The client looks fine when it loads, the EC client and patcher also look fine. But the CC patcher is having a disco to itself lol.

I can login if I just run client.exe when I'm patched, so I think that's the fast way to get logged in quickly. It won't enable UOA that way, but if you're just needing to login quick and get yourself to safety, that would be enough.

The sad thing is, I used to be able to run both the UO installer and patcher without any sort of hitch on linux, and it bugs me a bit when something doesn't seem much better yet needs extra tinkering and cursing to get it going... Though by the sounds of things I've had an easier time of it than the windows users...

One point to note if you have several systems running UO - you should be able to do what I did and copy a fully patched up copy from one to another. So if one system isn't patching, I'd try a straight copy of files from a patched system. I'd also recommend making a backup copy of the UO folder if you did have trouble patching - then you have it stored should you need to re-install later.

Wenchy