the game had some rough animation despite being hyper HQ back in it's day.

also: the game world is constantly being streamed in as you move around, the game my be pausing because you moved far enough to trigger another block of the game to load in.

Hi.
Support doesnt work on weekends.
There is separate Ultima forum. :)

Well i played the game on exult a year ago and changed resolution or did something with the graphics which made it run flawlessly, i even had higher resolution than i have now so that's not the problem. Obviously a computer as fast as mine shouldn't have any problems running a game from 1992. This bug makes the game more or less unplayable and like i mentioned earlier, i've seen other people have it as well in other forums, not regarding this gog version of the game though.

I'm with Sogi-Ya, what you described sounds pretty much how U7 originally ran. The gameplay on it was always anything but glass smooth. Especially without a disk cache program (smartdrive) the game play was very jerky with pauses etc. here and there as it was constantly streaming the game world from the hard disk to your computer. Without playing the GOG version I can't tell if it is "just as it used to be", or some other problem with the GOG version.

I presume it runs in an emulated DOSBox environment, in which case it can't be necessarily said that "a 2011 computer should be able to play a 1992 game without hiccups", after all DOSBox is trying to mimic the original hardware.

You could try tweaking DOSBOX - there are some recommended settings for cycles, fullresolution and scaler on this page

Ultima VII's engine was not designed to ever be smooth - Ultima VIII has it even worse. In Ultima VII, it wasn't a problem though, because you could just activate combat and watch. In Ultima VIII, they tied real time combat to the jerky movement which was less fun. It was very easy to step too far for example.

No you're all talking about a much smaller type of lag. With that said i got this working by downloading exult and playing the game via that. There is a bug in exult that makes items dissapear but i haven't encountered it this far, so the way to go for now if you have this bug is to download exult.

Yeah i always remember it being jerky but thats normal, also expect you're followers to run off in combat i've lost npc's sometimes, next thing you notice someones corpse under a tree, its you're ol mate Iolo having a nanny nap.