Room of Dead in BG

[FlyNN@]

Hi ! First up i am not sure if this forum is still active but i will have a try nevertheless. fitst of all, many thx to the exult team for making such a great program for free, and give it all fans to download. you did a great job )
now to my question / problem: in bg there is this room, where all killed characters are transported (Location 15S/51E), but when i teleport there its always empty, no matter how man npcs i killed.....
is this a "bug" due converting u7 to exult ? i mean its not a tragic thing, just interesting..... ;o) thx in advance, Farewell

[wjp]

It's not a bug in Exult; we just decided to do things differently.

When somebody is killed he's just removed from the map in Exult, instead of being transported to the room of the dead.

[FlyNN@]

hmm ok, just to know, and thx alot for the fast reply m8 )

[evasi0n]

why?

[wjp]

Because the room of the dead doesn't make much sense. If NPCs are dead, they're dead. Not just 'somewhere else'.

[evasi0n]

why do you think they had it in the origional?

[Covenant]

That's how the engine worked...

But, what about an option which enables the dead npcs in the room? That way, cheaters can speak with dead characters.

I know, I know it's a silly question...

[Andrea B Previtera]

I could be on that terrible "Voodoo memory manager". They probably had problems deallocating memory for the NPCs, or maybe they were forced to a certain rigid structure for the NPC themselves, so that removing one from the chain was impossible, or problematic. So, they just decided to hide the dead NPCs somewhere.

After all, what do you do when the floor gets SO dirty (or you are SO lazy) that you don't even know where to throw all the garbage? You just hide it under the carpet...

[Kennedy]

The one that was in the NW corner of the map? Is that empty to?

[Dirty Hairy]

I don't think this was due to problems with the voodoo memory manager. The only thing that made him so nasty was the fact he exploited a, uhhhm, 'bug' in the i386 architecture which allows to access the whole memory in a flat model without going through the trouble of writing protected mode code - you switch the processor in protected mode, set the amount of memory accessible in one segment to the max and switch back into real mode and - voila, you can access the whole memory. Unfortunately, this is VERY incompatible with anything that runs in protected mode, even good, old emm386 used protected mode to access extended memory.
So, you couldn"t use emm386 to load TSRs into HMA, and since ultima 7 required a huge amount of base memory to run, you had a very annoying time tuning your system to load ALL neccasary drivers and still have anough meory to run U7.
But I don"t think the voodoo engine limited the possibilities of allocating and delocating memory... I suppose, the room of dead was used for debugging things...

[evasi0n]

I dunno, I just think the origional makers of the game liked that sort of @!#$... just like the cheaters never win plaque...