UPDATE: The latest patches from Greyface have resolved this issue. Thanks so much, Greyface!!!

You can get the patches here: http://sites.google.com/site/sergroj/mm

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Hi!

A bug regarding player and NPC movement has been reported now in all three of the MM6-8 games.
MM6: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/might_and_magic_series/question_about_walking_running_and_jumping_in_might_and_magic_vi_would_like_some
MM7: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/might_and_magic_series/mm7_weird_issues_with_movement
MM8: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/might_and_magic_series/mm8_bugged_movement_and_constant_screen_tearing

I, too, am a victim of this bug.

Here is a rundown of the problem:
Movement for both the player's party and the world's NPC's ranges from slow to impossible in certain directions. Sometimes the restriction is only on strafing. Furthermore, attempts to move forward in a straight line sometimes result in moving forward at an angle rather than straight.

Complicating the matter, the problem seems to happen to varying degrees depending on the system. For instance, playing in Wine on my OS X partition, movement is absolutely impossible in certain directions for both my party and the NPC's. However, playing the game on my Windows 7 x64 partition, the problem is barely noticeable -- only strafing in any direction with a northerly angle will cause the strafing to be somewhat slower. However, strafing toward the south also causes my party to move slightly backward.

I can also confirm that this is not an issue with the GoG executables. The exact same problem happens with my original, retail M&M6: Limited Edition discs with game version 1.0.

As a community, I propose that we figure out this bug and slay it once and for all. It is quite bothersome and for some it makes the game difficult to impossible to play.

Here is my first suggestion for trying to track this down.

Another classic game I played earlier this year has given me the suspicion that maybe the arrow keys on certain modern keyboards provide slightly different input than MM6 was programmed for back in its day. In particular, I wonder if laptops and/or possibly only MacBooks are the culprit behind this bug.

Could someone please report whether or not they experience this bug on a Windows desktop using a normal full-size keyboard? If you do experience it on the desktop, does the bug persist if you use the num-pad keys for movement, rather than the arrow keys?

I'm away from my home country at the moment and don't have access to a full-sized desktop keyboard at the moment, otherwise I'd check myself.

There may be some promising news on the horizon for this issue, as a user over at Celestial Heavens has embarked on the same quest as I have to slay this horrible bug.

http://www.celestialheavens.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12106

The good news is that Grayface responded to his issue and it sounds like he at least knows the underlying cause and may even have a fix in place for the party movement portion of the problem.

I have also privately emailed Grayface to get further clarification on whether he has been able to figure out the root cause of this issue.

It's good to see another thread about this as the topic has blown away in the wind as of late.

My issue has been mostly resolved, minus the fact there's constant screen tearing with nothing on in the background and having vsync forced in my CCC doesn't help. It's like whenever I move, everything around me has a seizure but my actual movement is fluid. You fix one bug just to run into another.

I made one of the threads in the OP, and I'll reiterate, the best way to "patch" it up is to have absolutely nothing else open before you boot the game, and make sure hardware accelerated is turned on in your game configuration tool.

It's still unplayable to me but the weird wind-barrier movement bug went away. It's really nice to know Grayface is still around and is looking into the issue. I'm on a desktop on a normal full size keyboard. The bug persists either way, but that's really thinking outside the box. It'd be nice if other people could attempt this as well to get more input.

Oh, and maybe this information will be of use, I have not tried installing MM7 from GOG, as my retail copy installed on Vista and I managed to get it working with magic virtual-duct tape and I don't have this issue. I also have neither of these issues on my GOG installed MM6. It's just MM8 that does it for me.

Sometimes CCC fails to actually force vsync. Fortunately, you can download a third-party program called RivaTuner and then use the D3DOverrider program that comes with it to force Vsync. You don't need to run RivaTuner at all, just D3DOverrider, which is a tiny program that will sit in your system tray and force vsync for you. Might be worth a try.

I've posted the download link to the program in my thread about fixing problems in the Witcher, listed under "tweaks":

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher/fixes_to_common_problems/post1

Oh cool, thanks a lot for your suggestion. I'll give it a shot tonight.

Edit: No luck, but thanks anyway! It was well worth the try.

Greyface has fixed this problem with his latest patches. From the notes, it appears that the original game code had a rounding error that manifested itself on some machines.

Thank you, Greyface, for your awesome work!

The patches can be obtained here: http://sites.google.com/site/sergroj/mm