source UO Kingdom

Well, it looks bad for seafarers in Ultima Online : Kingdom Reborn as the crappy boat movement code and design from 1997 - full of lag, rubberbanding, and general glitchiness - has simply been imported over. Alas, there's not much we can do but hold out the slightest hope that this is just temporary and that the fact KR is being built from scratch will allow future programmers to replace it with something better.

Having said that, I still wish to do my part to test KR, and have been doing so, sending in many bugs. It's been hard for me to test, though, without some simple boat movement macros to make sailing manageable. At first I was stumped - the macros I was creating and assigning to hotkeys would disappear each time I logged off and back in. Talk about frustrating.

Then I saw a UHall post by Ifful with tons of hotbars on the screen and knew that there must be a way. So I jumped back in last night and figured it out (Ifful was kind enough to respond to my queries on the matter in that thread later, though, with the exact things I needed to discover on my own).

To save my boat command macro hotkey assignments, I needed to simply put them in actual hotbars. Once I tested this I was off and running. But another great discovery awaited me - it turns out we can make the hotbars we create any length we wanted. My mind reeled at the possibilities.

So I created the 16 boat command macros I wanted and arranged them in 4 hotbars with 4 slots each - a 4x4 grid. There was some glitchiness there, too, as the hotbars began to bleed across the screen at one point. A quick log off and back in cleared that up.

Thus I created my hotbars, which gave me an on-screen boat command interface. Since I was used to using actual keyboard keys to command my boat, however, I also tied those hotkeys to the numeric pad on the right of my keyboard. The onscreen grid did not exactly match my keys, though, so I am still fiddling with the layout of both.

Here's what I have right now on my screen, seen under the radar map:




The Num Num Num in the grid comes from my keypad assignments, where the text to say what key is assigned to the macro misses just a bit. The grid is loosely inspired by Douglas Portz' old UO Rudder program.

By the way, I was hunting Tokuno krakens in that screenshot, so for the curious here's a close up of one:



They look very strange now. No longer a member of the crab family, it seems. They look like an aquatic version of that dog-thing that Kirk encountered outside the Klingon prison camp in Star Trek 6. Six flippers and a huge overbite, with a great dorsal fin across its back.

The cool thing, which I've also noticed with sea serpents, is the fading translucency of the monster under the water. This is an effect that a designer named Jalek once told me that they intended to have in the initial release of UO, but it was too lag-intensive at the time. I'm glad to see that design revisited with KR.

But I digress.

Anyway, I've gotten a few nautical miles of sailing out of this interface, and I like it a lot. It goes a long way to show the versatility of the new UI in KR. In case you're wondering the key assignments I used for my 4x4 grid up there, here's what it would look like if they allowed small text in the macro box:




And here's roughly what I would ideally like it to look like if the art team had a few minutes to add the art for it:



Anyway, that's what I've got so far. Not that the sailing is smooth in KR, but at least I can get out there and do some more serious testing now.

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I like your ideas of the grids


Hehe love the Krakens too


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I love the new boat art. They did a great job on the sails and rigging.

It's entirely possible that the devs plan to eventually make sailing more intuitive. I don't think it's going to happen before KR's launch, but I don't expect them to stop updating the KR client with the KR launch. I think they're going to get it to a pont where it's fairly functional and then call it "launched". Then maybe they'll address things that players request.

In the mean time, think about what an ideal sailing interface would operate. Don't just stop with what you can already do with boats... Try to revolutionize the interface.

For Example, what if the sailing interface could integrate with the mapping system?

What if you could set waypoints on your map and have the boat sail there?

What if there was a sailing gump you could access from the tillerman that let you specify hotkeys for nonverbal boat commands?

These are just 5 min ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure if you really think about it, you could come up with really cool ideas. I'm just trying to plant a seed, cause I don't really care about sailing. I know you do, so I figured I'd try to inspire you


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I sometimes convey my crafter around Siege by boat, but I plot a course on a map and have the tillerman sail it. Is that possible in KR?

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I'm not sure. I haven't done much sailing in KR. I don't generally do much sailing. I thought you could do that, but wasn't sure. Right now sea charts and world maps are blank. I reported it a couple days ago, but it was probably a known issue.

I think admiral's gump is half decent, but I think an actual boat control gump should be able to go forward and backward. This could be done either with a set of boxes similar to admiral's boxes and a toggle that determines if they give "forward" commands or "backward" commands.

I guess we could have speed settings (1 tile, slow, normal)
Forward/reverse toggle
Directional arrows that issue a boat command at the current speed and direction
Anchor toggle (drops and raises the anchor)
oops... turning.
Needs to be a key for turn right, turn left and turn around

So, with proper design, the gump would require 15 hotkeys to handle all this functionality.


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Anyone else had there entire background go compleatly black while sailing, Mine has and it was like being in a black void till i crossed a server line.

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Nicely done.

Now, the dev team should use your macro format for boat commands and hotbars to create a "boat tool" similar to the "pet tool".

...and they could name it after ya too!

oR... give us the ability to make our own "pet tools" by being able to "link" hotbars togather and give the linked hotbars the function to hide like the pet tool can. Use it, when ya need it.


*unrelated thoughts about boats*
On a side note, It would be nice, or more realistic for the boatmen to do things on the boat when its not being commanded to do something in the new client. Like cleaning the deck, rolling up rope, or whatever. When a command was given, it could get back to rear of the ship.
*/unrelated thoughts about boats*


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Apologies about boat movement not being smoother - fixing that is all server-side, and would be a very big task. It's something we'd certainly like to do, but wasn't within the scope of KR.

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

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Thanks for taking the time to reply. That actually clears things up a bit for me.

Is there nothing that can be done client side to help things out - such as making the whole boat one single piece of art? Right now it seems that the boat and the mast are seperate as they rubberband when the ship is in motion.

And what about some sailing macros / macro key art, as I've suggested above?

Again, thanks. I look forward to meeting you at the next town hall here in Columbus. Bring Leurocian.


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I've sent your macro setup to the Master of Macros, and we're looking into getting you some decent icons at least. He was very pleased that you were able to use his system to set that up - that kind of flexibility was very much the point.

I don't think there are anythings that can be done just client-side to make boats work better, sadly. As I said, it'd be a big job.

I'm not sure who's going to be in Columbus, but it should be fun either way

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic