Ultima Underworld walk/run speed

[rewinder47]

Hello and thank you so much for your work on Ultima Underworld 1 & 2, it makes them much more enjoyable to play. Would it be possible to either alter the walk speed in UW1 to speed it up a little, or add another key that moves you at some medium pace between walking and running? The walk speed seems to me to be okay in UW2 (though I haven't played it as much), but it's pretty slow in UW1, and running all the time is a bit faster than I'd usually like to go. I find myself alternating between walking and running a lot, or just running in short bursts frequently, and neither is quite ideal.

[JohnGlassmyer]

that's an interesting idea.

how would you imagine choosing or configuring the particular speed? assuming it were possible to do, how many speeds would you want to be able to choose among? one from a few set options, or a continuous range to select from?

is this something you would want to configure once per playthrough, or would you want to be able to change the walking speed dynamically, moment to moment within the game? if speed were controlled dynamically, how would you imagine doing so with the keyboard and mouse?

what about walking backwards? it would probably be cheating to speed up the backward movement rate, but would you ever want to walk backwards more slowly?

how about moving side-to-side (left/right)? would changing the speed there be similar to or different from moving forward?

would the option to adjust (slow down) the running speed be useful?

i should mention in passing that uw2 (but not uw1) allows continuous analog speed control with use of a joystick. though that's usually more of an annoyance because it's usually not calibrated accurately and so causes the player to walk ever so slowly backwards.

[rewinder47]

Well, if it is possible, I would say the ideal solution would be to implement a couple of keys that would incrementally increase or decrease the speed of the walk button. This would allow players to choose their ideal general walk speed, as well as adjust it if they find a specific situation that demands a faster or slower speed. The lowest speed could perhaps mimic the lowest speed possible using the mouse movement, and the highest could be just below running speed. Of course, I have no idea how difficult/possible this would be to implement, and I think there are several different implementations that would be a pretty great addition to the mod.

As far as adjusting backwards and strafing movement speeds, I think that increasing them would be "cheating" to some extent, since the original mouse control doesn't allow for that (that I'm aware of), and I don't really see a reason to slow them down since they're not very fast anyway.

[rewinder47]

Oh, and regarding the idea of adjusting running speed-- I suppose it could make sense to adjust that as well at times, though I feel if you were going to make only one adjustable, walk speed makes more sense. The number of situations where you would want to walk slowly seems like it would be less than when you would want to run at max speed. Following the idea for the walk button adjustment, adding a couple keys for increasing and decreasing run speed too could be nice, and personally I don't think 4 extra buttons complicates the controls too much. I just don't think I would adjust it personally.

In terms of a range of adjustment, probably something that mimics the number of different speeds available in the gradient offered by mouse control seems like the most natural solution (though I'm not sure how many different speeds that is).

Alternatively, just changing the UW1 walk speed to match UW2 would do as well :)

[JohnGlassmyer]

i guess walk speed could be an entry in a config file, which doesn't exist yet but probably will some day.

and/or maybe some day each Underworld game could have separate Walk and Sneak keys.

i don't want to change the default walk speed, because i think that would deviate from the original gameplay more than i'd be comfortable with.