Gothic 3 - New Official Patch Coming Soon!

Gorath

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JoWooD announced that a new official (!) patch for Gothic 3 is on the way. The CPT and Spellbound are working on it cooperatively. While the former concentrates on scripting, balancing and gameplay, the latter is working on general stability, crash prevention and overhauled and optimized memory management. Expect it early next year.
A long temporary fix list labeled "Gothic 3 v1.6 Patch status 20.12.2007" can be found in our comment thread.
More information.
 
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Gothic 3 v1.6 Patch status 20.12.2007

Community Patch Team Fixes

- The Hero's death will not cause a Quest failed-message anymore.
- Frozen NPCs and creatures will unfreeze after a while in any case.
- Rune and Zapotek do not attack anymore when the player picks up ham or wood for a quest.
- Quest items like barrels of fish, firewood, etc. disappear from the game when you delivered them to decrease the amount of unusable quest items in the inventory.
- NPCs in charge of relevant quest items do not retreat anymore after a city's liberation but keep fighting.
- The hero does not stab NPCs anymore when they already lost their last health points.
- NPCs who the player is asked to follow will walk to their designated destination instead of standing around after they get knocked down.
- Chests are now being closed after NPCs used them.
- When a ranger is being attacked by the player other rangers will approach to help him out.
- Krush Tarachs, spears and halberds dropped by NPCs are now worn.
- After the message Not enough reputation the amount of missing reputation will be shown as well.
- Tutorials may now be deactivated permanently
- NPCs retreating after a revolution will now die directly when you remove their last health points.
- Whetstones may now only be used after the player learned Hone blade.
- Dialog choices concerning part deliveries of goods referred to quests have been corrected.
- Dialogs concerning success or failure of a quest are now put into the questlog as well.
- Menus may now be closed pressing the menus button even if the player had magic equipped when opening them.
- You cannot challenge more than one NPC at the same time in the arena anymore.
- Whenever a Guru appears a log will be saved automatically.
- The chest name's colour now shows if already looted.
- Taking a Follow-Quest will automatically cancel any other active Follow-Quest.
- The Hero may sell Sanford out to Marik even if this results in a duel between the Hero and Sanford.
- Unnecessary Marlo dialog option continue has been removed.
- Dialogs concerning success or failure of a quest are now put into the questlog as well.
- Questlog entries for some quests added.
- Logic of dialogs with Folleck corrected.
- Kor-Shach does not appear as a teacher too early now.
- One sentence by Emet is now played.
- Porgan's dialog order has been corrected.
- Wrong armor values for the paladin's shield have been corrected.
- Snapper leather and fire lizard leather are now sorted in the inventory tab hides and hunter merchants will pay twice the price for them.
- Gold values of some ancestor stones have been corrected to 50 gold.
- Torches and burnt torches now have a buying value of 3 gold, selling value is 1 gold.
- Golden necklaces and rings are now sorted in the inventory tab valuables and thief merchants will pay twice the price for them. The value of necklaces has been adjusted to 250 gold.
- Wrong armor values for the light rebel armor have been corrected.
- Icons have been visually improved again
- Strafing speed of ogres and goblins has been adjusted.
- Female slaves do not wear weapons or shields anymore.
- The Orcs in Al Shedim now react to the death of one of them with aggressive behaviour even if the player already handed all five artifacts to one of the gods.
- Some orcs now sell orcish weapons as well as their standard equipment.
- Integrated rain-sand-snow storm sound effects
- fmodex improvements
- Updating fmodex to newer version
- Some internal improvements



Spellbound Fixes

- New memory manager implemented to improve performance and stability
- Error handling in memory pool improved
- Fixed memory allocation error when saving
- Memory is now freed correctly
- Improved memory allocation for memory streams in filesystemstreams
- Fixed a potential memory leak which would result when an insert operation fails
- Fixed memory leak which produces 84+20 bytes leaks for each savegame when entering the load screen
- Remaining memory impact during saveload reduced from 100MB in some cases to typically less than 1,5MB - thus increasing game stability significantly
- Fixed memory leak in game_script
- Fixed some potential memory leaks in scripts
- Several shader enhancements to improve memory usage
- Fixed several uninitialized memory reads (potentially resulting in unstable or unpredictable runtime behavior)
- Improvements to the memory logging system - giving more detailed protocols of memory allocation activities
- Improved caching
- Unload caches before game restart (further reduction on memory leaks while savingloading)
- Purged all regular caches before loading a savegame - further reducing the memory leak during saveload
- Fixed access violation exception on program termination - crash during exit
- Fixed a crash bug where entities were cached out even though they were still in use
- Fixed crash bug in physics and character controller - occurs potentially during main gameplay
- Fixed crash bug within entity manager - occurs potentially during main gameplay
- Fixed one crash bug when using teleport stone
- Changed control order for PrefetcherJob destruction to avoid deadlocks (and possible crashes)
- Fmodex.dll updated to version 4.10.01 (fixing potential freezes or crash)
- Changes to the filesystem for Fmodex to avoid file format errors
- Memory performance improvements in the mesh renderer
- Fixed some memory fragmentation for performance improvements
- Performance and memory improvements to the container templates
- Slight performance improvements in ThreadPool
- Reused vertexbuffer declarations in several locations
- Error handling in vertex processors improved
- Created vertex buffers in default pool instead of managed pool if managed pool fails
- Fixed memory overwrites in the shader module
- Fixed rendering of zero or less vertices
- Fixed DX9 issue complaining about different vertex stream strides for lightmap
- Fixed DX9 issue about impossible MIP filtering
- Various small cosmetic fixes for the world
- Some fixes to avoid playing sounds with empty filenames
- Fixed bug where objects could be off color
 
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Excellent news. I'll get to play a fixed version where the twelvth chalice doesnt go to a Nordmar warrior:)

On the minus side there's no mention of the copy protection or my pet bug (Angar and the other Arena fighters in Mora Sul siding with the Hashishin), but those are manageable.
 
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Afraid you still are too subtle for me to follow... I can live with the DVD check, but community patch 1.52 made such a big difference that I'd rather not go back to the previous state of affairs, and I'd assume the fix list is in relationship to the last official patch rather than the CPs. OTOH this doesnt look like a final changelog.
 
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CP 1.5.2 disabed the copy protection.

The fix ist is certainly relative to CP 1.5.2.
 
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Very impressive list, thanks Gorath. :)

Zaleukos are you saying the 12th Chalice should Not go to the Fire Clan warrior of Innos? Where else does Innos get his Paladins from if not his best Pious Warriors, which come from the Fire Clan?

As Gorath mentioned, if I understand correctly, this has been fixed as according to PB's intentions, there were/are even original dialogs for that Warrior to get the Chalice but it was just bugged and then fixed by CP months ago. :)
 
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Nice list, but am I missing something, or did they ignore the biggest problem with G3 - namely the horribly poor combat balance?
 
That'd be great, but I have a sad feeling it's so broken it's unfixable without some major changes, e.g. to AI.
 
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That is indeed a very nice list of fixes for the official patch... but for me... it's just way too late. I've already finished it months ago, and it bored me then. If I get the itch to replay a Gothic game (which I probably will), it will be either Gothic 1 or 2 (or both).

I would never replay G3... it just didn't do it for me. But I am glad to see that they are finally getting around to fixing it for those who are still interested. That actually even gives some hope that they may properly support G4 when it comes out.
 
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That's pretty damn impressive. I haven't played Gothic 3 since a few CP's back and I haven't finished it yet, so this is very good news. However, it seems to me from an arm-chair observer, that among the potential of the engine and the amount of scripting power the CPT seems to have, they should be able to fix the AI up some. Maybe even overhaul the combat system.
 
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Fixing the combat would probably require a lot of rebalancing and tweaking. The system from the older Gothics wouldnt have worked since you so often fight large groups of enemies, especially not if they did something about the ridiculous "enemies queueing up to strike" issue.

Very impressive list, thanks Gorath. :)

Zaleukos are you saying the 12th Chalice should Not go to the Fire Clan warrior of Innos? Where else does Innos get his Paladins from if not his best Pious Warriors, which come from the Fire Clan?

As Gorath mentioned, if I understand correctly, this has been fixed as according to PB's intentions, there were/are even original dialogs for that Warrior to get the Chalice but it was just bugged and then fixed by CP months ago. :)

I got the impression that the paladins werent just the holy warriors of Innos, but also a knightly royal order who nowadays are recruited among the "civilized" nobles of Myrtana. The barbarians of the Fire clan by contrast dont submit to the royal authority in recent memory (nor do they wield magic). As for the 12th chalice I always assumed that the 12th paladin was Kurt or whatshisname, who went bananas upon losing his magic.

EDIT: I also got the feel that the 12th chalice "fix" is an artefact from the early days of the CPs, before Jowood got involved. Obviously that's an incorrect assumption if the CP crew managed to unlock existing dialogue for the handover, but I assumed the transfer was silent as the new skill training (and I never got to see it for myself as I gave the chalices to the other side during my only CP playthrough).
 
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I know fixing the system would be hard, but there are many ways of improving it at least. For me, the biggest problem was that I could defeat armies of orcs with ease, but had trouble with hogs and wolves. Even after they reduced the knockback effect.

If nothing else, then at least make orcs less vulnerable or something, so they feel like a challenge. Naturally, this wouldn't represent a fix as the problems go much deeper than numerical values, but I think it would significantly improve the experience.

Anyway, without combat tweaks, the game will remain largely unsatisfying on the whole, and I will not be playing it again. It's truly sad, as I had amazing fun until I realised the utter lack of balance.
 
True Zaleukos, however when Kurt goes bananas this leaves an opening and None of the original Pallys could cast magic without the Chalices, irrc as it was the discovery/creation of Rune Magic that allowed the Pallys to do without the Chalices.
I certainly could be wrong, but I had thought Innos picked due to Faith and Skill, so maybe it is more based of being Civilized.
 
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Well, they could use magic prior to Xardas intervention, and while many (not all) of them moan and grumble about losing their magic you dont see any whining of that sort over at the Fire clan. So I just assumed that the fix was due to the CP crowd being bugged by a "loose end" (which is understandable as there are a few of those that definitely are bugs)...
 
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There are original dialog files, before any patches (Official or CP) for the Fire Clan guy to become the next Pally, I forgot his name, doh. :)
It was some German fans, whom found this first iirc, as they used G3Explorer or another file unpacker to discover the dialog files which were buged.
 
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I for one am thrilled. It is a great move by both Spellbound and Jowood that they would take the effort to do this. Great PR. I still havent played the game so I'm doubly thrilled. :)
 
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has the problem where you become able to one hit kill any monster in the game after you swing for long enough (and normally run out of endurance)?

I might replay the game as a mage when 1.6 comes out.
 
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While this is great news, the timing couldn't be worse for me. I'm about halfway through the game right now (I thought 1.5 would be the last patch for a while), and don't feel like starting over yet again. Nice to know that it will be even better when I replay it though. :)

Also, for those of you who claim you would never play G3 again, I feel sorry for you. The 1.5 CP really made great strides and has brought the game a very long way from the state that it was in when it was first released. I can honestly say that I'm enjoying it more than any other game I've played in the last few years, the only drawback being the high system requirements if you want to see the game in it's full beauty.
 
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Are old save games not compatible with this patch?
 
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