Overview
It's common for free UO shards to have heavily modified assets, which is why we've created a custom patching system for shard owners.
What you will need
- Have been granted access to the Shard Management
- Your UO installation directory
- An up-to-date version of Chrome
Steps
- Using Chrome, browse to the
Patching
section inside your Shard Management - Click
Open UO Directory
and choose your UO installation directory, accepting the permissions prompt - Verify the list of
Files to be patched
, move any files to theIgnore List
to not patch them- If you see UOP files automatically added to the
Ignore List
, this is likely due to a MUL <-> UOP conflict - To change the preferred file type, click the settings cog icon, and change your preference
- Otherwise, remove the conflicting files from your UO directory and try again
- If you see UOP files automatically added to the
- Verify the
Client Version
is showing the correct version (it is automatically read from yourclient.exe
or CUOsettings.json
) - Once ready, click the green
Patch
button - When patching is complete you can review the final manifest of files, if there are any missing check your
Ignore List
or UO directory - Click
Publish
selectingCloud
, this will begin uploading your content and making it available to players - Done
Video Example
Troubleshooting
How do the patches work?
The system essentially creates efficient binary-delta patches using VCDIFF against a known set of input source files. We also convert any UOP based assets into their MUL equivalent which results in far smaller delta patches.
When a player clicks Play the web client will verify the users browser filesystem, and download any missing content. During gameplay the patches are used in a random-access mode we call livepatching, the fully patched UO asset is never written to disk to save players disk-space. Similarly to save space all content is deduplicated across shards; for example if two shards have the patches for the same file, the user only downloads it once.
The web client gets stuck during loading e.g. at Animations
This is likely because you're missing files, and/or gave the wrong files to the patcher. Try manually copying only the files you put into the files
array into from your target folder into a new folder and launch Desktop CUO pointed to that folder.
If Desktop CUO loads fine with just those files ask for help in #for-shard-owners channel.
I see MUL patches but I put in UOP?
The patcher will automatically convert your UOP asset files (exception being the Animation*.uop
files) to MUL. We do this because of the compression in UOP files causes extremely large patch deltas, with MUL they are much smaller ( e.g. 90MB to 2MB).
File is being used by another process
Double-check your file list, it's likely your file list contains both the UOP and MUL version of the same asset(s), e.g. art.mul
and artLegacyMUL.uop
. Use only one.