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I am really curious when and if the memory leak in KR will be fixed. I think I may have the answer, and perhaps it is never. Why? I think EA Mythic would have fixed it by now. I think the KR game engine memory leaks cannot be fixed without re-writing the whole engine from scratch - at least it appears this maybe the case. If this is true, it is indeed a sad day for some of us.

I have a dual core processor running at 2.40GHz with a Geforce 7900 GT video card, 2 GB of memory and I am running Windows XP. This is a fine-tuned, perfectly solid gaming system with no issues whatsoever. After playing UO for an hour or so my memory usage creeps up towards 1GB. I dont mind games that use a lot of memory. However, when this results in crafting delays when you mine and lumberjack, and running past houses with becomes a slideshow, it is almost unplayable without restarting the game, and clearing the memory cache.

Why does this happen?

I will tell you why...

UO Producers, Developers, Mythic, whoever, received such an outcry from...you guessed it, our very own loyal fans; some on these very message boards, crying that Kingdom Reborn must run on old computers, "we dont want to have to buy new video cards", blah, blah, blah. Well guess what? You got your wish. Studying how KR works, I am not sure if it uses ANY video card memory whatsover. They were so pre-occupied, trying not to piss off all of you with 10 year old computers that they went out of their way designing (or updating) an engine that uses minimal graphics capability and maximizes (and wastes) memory usage. The result is that older computers run the game almost exaclty as good as newer computers. Another possibility is that KR is actually the 2D engine with new art slapped over it. This would make sense, as the original Ultima Online 2D engine did not use 3D video whatsoever. If this is the case, it is a tremendous oversight, as you have high resolution sprites with lighting effects all running in 2D mode. Yikes.

So basically EA Mythic did not want to piss off their classic fan base. After all, we have seen a couple years of expansions that have failed to attract new players. It makes sense that EA Mythic is making an attempt to embrace loyal fans who appreciate real Ultima lore (Stygian Abyss) rather than BS Ninja's and Elves. I still wish KR used more of my graphics card, if any of it at all. I wonder if I upgraded my system to 4 GB of memory if the lag after an hour of play would not be as bad? Wouldn't that be ironic? We may still have to upgrade our hardware to run the game?

So I thought I would play around with the memory settings...but wait. They reset back to 5mb after you hit accept. Why? What does this setting do? Are there any memory performance tips? I have not seen much of anything...

Because there is no answer.

I hope there is, because I see the good in KR, I really do.


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There is one major fix in the build planned for Thursday. We're doing a ton of optimization work at the moment, which you should see over the next couple of patches.



E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

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Thats great news for those of us still not able to play .*gets excited at last that KR will soon be playable by all *

As i posted there...
this makes no sense at all

It's easy to snub the players with low-end machines when you have a high-end one. But to the OP, hey, as long as the game runs well for YOU, that's all that matters, right?