User talk:Memnock of the Sillyhood
Old Client Patches
Where are you getting these? I ask because the places that I found them at were rather sparse when it came to patch numbers. I spent several days researching and was only able to verify correct patch numbers for some of them, and sometimes only circumstantially at best. Patch numbers such as 1.25.10 were more or less made up; extrapolated backwards from verifiable patch numbers. I'm just curious if you found them someplace with corresponding patch numbers or you're just assuming that what I had put up there is correct.
--Cogniac 06:03, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
Kind of a mix of both, really. :) I made the assumption that the patch numbers were up from a source I was unaware of and just took the patch notes I had archived and matched them up by dates. The more I've gone through my own records and those still archived in the Wayback Machine, though, I'm remembering that actual patch version numbers were VERY few and far between. I have archived all the patch notes from release in 1997 to the end of 2002, and in all those notes, there are MAYBE a double handful of actual Client Versions or Publish numbers listed for the patches. If that. Since the 2D Patch Listing pages is arranged primarily by Client Version number, I didn't want to mess that up (assuming it was correct), so I've just been going by date and matching actual Client Version numbers for those early patches up to the correct date as I run across them. The Devs were obviously very lax about communicating those numbers to the players for those first few years. The information I've got archived was copied directly from the Ultima Online Update Center at the time of their publish (I'm a 136 month Charter Edition player). I've been able to corroborate my information up to 1998 with some slight date corrections through a newly found oldpatch.html page I found hidden in the current UO website. Some of the information is missing, though, so it looks as though someone at EA has re-constructed their own patch notes from an external source. That site is located here: http://update.uo.com/oldpatch.shtml with just over a year gap to the current UO patch update page at http://update.uo.com/latest.html I didn't mean to step on any toes... I just noticed that information was missing and that I had access to it, so I wanted to get it up for posterity. I'll continue to add in what I've got archived through the end of 1998 and see if I can research up any more cross-checking on these early version numbers. Unless you'd like me to hold off on any more updates for now.
--Memnock of the Sillyhood 11:09, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
No need to hold off, and you're not stepping on anyone's toes. It's the very nature of a wiki that anything can be edited by any editor at any time, and I'm not like those crazy bigwigs over at Wikipedia that get into edit wars over nothing.
I've been getting my info from http://wiki.uosecondage.com/index.php?title=Main_Page, which in turn copied most of their info from the long since defunct mengaxe.com, which had a robots.txt that blocked the Wayback Machine from indexing it, so I can't verify its content. But that doesn't really matter, since in turn they supposedly got their info from that oldpatch.html page you found, as well as the other various EA pages over the years.
I've talked to many others who played during that era, and they corroborate what I had been seeing, as well as what you're saying now; namely, that EA was fairly lazy about broadcasting patch numbers to the citizens of Britannia, that they didn't like distinguishing between client patches and server publishes very often, and that they often published many fixes that weren't even documented in any of the patch notes.
I've been able to verify some of the patch numbers directly, such as 1.25.19, because it just flat out says the number. Others I've been able to extrapolate from other sources, such as 1.25.23 and 1.25.25, which I found mentioned in the version info at the bottom of this page over on Stratics: http://uo.stratics.com/xena/uomagic.shtml. Others, as I mentioned, I tried to extrapolate from their calendar relation to verifiable patch numbers. It starts to get rather confusing when the gaps are larger and I can't figure out if there was actually a client patch of some sort associated with a particular update.
I figure the number one priority is to get the data up there, and then things can always be moved around if new information comes to light. So, carry on, good sir. I went ahead and added in a long string of beta patches that I had actually found with accompanying patch numbers here: http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/8878/ (http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/8878/patch.html). And if you know any Japanese, this might be of some help: http://www.ichioka.jp/modules/xpress/?p=798. Russian will also come in handy here: http://zuluhotel.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=444&mode=linearplus, here: http://dl.ultimasoft.ru/cat12.html, and here: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:yW7bFSu_VssJ:www.ultima.odessa.net/board/lofiversion/index.php/t18316.html+%221.25.37a%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us. The various freesharder sites out there have also been helpful in corroborating that certain client versions did, in fact, exist, as they like to keep downloadable backups of the various clients for accessing particular servers.
--Cogniac 08:04, 17 January 2009 (UTC)