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Welcome to the CM 1.60 Beta pre-release party. Grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let me tell you about the final batch of changes that are coming to Ancaria before I release it into the wild later tonight. ========================================================== Starting Island Portal is enabled in singleplayer. Access it any time. Visit the merchants, start the CM quest "Bugs!", and make use of the the portal dungeon there to jump around the world. Ship Ports and Hot Air Balloons now work like Portals. After activation, they may be accessed from the world map at any time or place. New "Travel Agent" NPC's added in 20 locations. These NPC's use the ship captain icon and will unlock new "portals" through which to travel. You can read more about this new feature and check out their new locations in this thread: ADDING NEW PORTALS TO COMMUNITY PATCH. The player can now teleport to underground soulstones when above ground. This bug kept people from being able to get to places like the Great Machine soulstone. Mounts can now be called into dungeons and underground areas (player must still dismount when entering\leaving dungeons due to code limitatons). Run Speed (non-functioning bonus) on Horses is replaced with a Physical Armor bonus. There was just no way to get this bonus to work. The best alternative was to replace it with a different useful bonus. Don't forget the player can now use buffs on Horses! Player no longer gets stuck running around in circles when trying to mount Horses and Special Mounts. It's happened to all of us. The player only want to mount on one side. If you're on the wrong side, the toon runs around trying to get to the other side, and sometimes gets stuck running back and forth. This is now fixed, or at least mitigated. Player no longer loses control of the camera during boss battles (no more centering on the boss and extreme zoom out). This feature was very disorienting, and on rare occasions it would make the keyboard unresponsive, making boss battles about 20x more stressful than they needed to be. Also you could never get a good look at a lot of smaller bosses because the camera zoomed out so much. Stackable items have max stack size increased from 20 to 99. Runes are now stackable. Items already in inventory before patching must be dropped and picked up again to benefit from this change. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Rune Stacking poll and gave feedback! Autocollect pickup range increased. Basically the graphical circle and the actual pickup radius are separate. To make the graphic match the new coded pickup radius, change the line "autoCollectRadius" to a value of "230" in options.txt (not required, but recommended). The player can now use the "ESC" key as an additional quicksave hotkey (in addition to the player's usual quicksave key). Requires editing options.txt. If you're happy with the quicksave being bound to a single key, then no need to do anything. If you'd like some extra assurance that your progress is always saved, then open options.txt and edit the following two lines so that they read as follows: binding_shortcut0 = 1, cmd_shortcut0 = "sys savehero", Sources of "Experience per Kill" on items, potions, statues, and spells now stack instead of overriding one another. Yes the dreaded bug is finally squashed. How do all these various sources of XP per Kill now work together? Very simple: Hero statue bonus overrides potion bonus whatever the application sequence, potion duration overrides statue duration whatever the application sequence, experience bonuses from items and spells are added afterwards. All binaries patched to address the game's memory leak problem and improve PhysX performance. Crashing and freezing should be dramatically reduced. This is a big change. This includes a newer version of mss32.dll, as well as all the binaries patched to allow memory usage over 2GB. In addition to this, Dmitriy has made the game flush the system memory on changing zones and on game exiting/reloading. If you are using the new CM 1.60, please don't patch any of the files yourself or use any 3rd party utilities. The days of trying to flush the system memory yourself, either manually or with a program, are also over. Elite Mounts Project is now fully integrated. This will no longer be a separate mod going forward. Elite Mounts in its entirety is now included in CM Patch, playable in all 10 languages for the first time. This huge project was the child of many parents over many years, so I'm glad it will finally be a part of the CM Patch as it was always intended. Fixed an Inquisition temple model that had gaps where the mesh pieces didn't fit together right. This was just kind of a random last minute change. Any final thoughts before I roll it on out? My last task is to encode the raw texts of all the different languages, so barring any errors there, ETA in 5-6 hours.

I am absolutely blown away by what has been done to this classic since ive been gone, and that after all this time, so many other people still love this game as much as my lady and I do! after a looong time away we are 100+++ hrs into the newest patch and we have been -blown away- by the fit and finish of it. no issues whatsoever, ad hoc gaming on laptops for the win, no dcs, just good times and tall drinks on our end! it is insane that we havent had a crash, bug, or any issues like the old days xD Cheers and thank you all for the amazing rework we will be donating soon! Doc and Dran

Following the instructions I've put the Beta to work. Started the game with the "-nocpubinding -skipopenal" on the Steam program startup options and immediately enabled both Physx and Elite Textures. Proceeded to load a HE toon I started a couple of weeks ago, based on the Secret Agent build. It's actually the one I used when we were talking about the DLL file and all of that in the Memory Fix thread. In four sessions three came to a random crash, always preceded by a slowdown in the frame rate. I've changed several variables; like disabling the custom Nvidia CP settings, running the game via shortcut without Steam (with the "-nocpubinding -skipopenal" instructions on the shortcut), and even not having any DPS effects active on my sound card's control center (which by all means is always running so it shouldn't really be an issue, and I only use it to emulate 3D sound to the 2.1 speakers). It crashed during combat, teleport or just walking around. Speaking of frame rate slow down, every time I load the session and/or the weather kicks in it kind of stutters. Especially when the weather kicks in. But it goes beyond that, to the point where sudden shifts in camera zooming while moving make the game stutter a lot. As an example I went through Griffinbourgh doing zoom in/zoom out while moving forward with the keyboard and rotating the camera left and right, and boy did that slow the game down! Like the movement almost halting! My HDD was constantly being accessed while this was happening so I'm guessing it was writing texture cache?! Not sure. But in terms of camera movement mixed with toon movement it gets kind of freaky. In terms of gameplay I've already noticed many of the news in the patch. The fur on boars is beyond crazy! But also some shields, enemy and weapon models are already up and running. Faced the Grunwald dragon (and ran :D) and the zoom on boss update seems to be working nicely, as it maintains the zoom as is. A strange thing was casting a Raging Nimbus/Frost Flare/Glacial Thorns combo and having the cursor appear with the ranged attack icon, which also happens whenever you use a spell and point the cursor towards the edges of the screen. Potions (not health potions, the rest) are either not working or their animations aren't, couldn't really understand which. But the animation at the hero statue also seemed to not appear. Beware of champion trolls and their ghostly summons (holy crap they're harder!), but that should be a part of the new rebalance so no harm on my view. Oh, potions stack ok, and like it was said you just need to drop the ones in the inventory and pick them up again. I think that was it, it was just an hour and I've tried different things. Didn't try to run Elite on and Physx off but I don't really have any more spare time today, maybe tomorrow. But I'll gladly run more variables into the equation.

I am nearly rendered speechless. I cannot think of a single thing not to love about this CM patch 160. I will pose only this query: Should I do a fresh install of the game before patching it or just delete the Elite Mounts mod (or any others) now rendered redundant and/or superfluous?

Great work team! Definitely a few quality of life improvements in there

It's done. See CM 1.60 HIGHLIGHTS: GENERAL AND CODE CHANGES

Thanks! Item Mod 1.2a is included in full, as described in this post: CM 1.60 HIGHLIGHTS: PLAYER EQUIPMENT FIXES The Blood Dragon will remain strictly part of D2F.