NPCs using their run animations?

[nightshark]

I find it very odd that NPCs/animals/monsters use their run animations. There are only specific situations I recall seeing monsters use their run animations (eg; when trying to escape), and don't ever recall seeing an animal or NPC using it.

On this shard NPCs will use their run animations when attacking/being attacked or during an escort. Escorts always walked, with a kind of bounce/jump to keep up with you. Here, monsters and animals will use their run animations when being attacked. I'm assuming the reasoning this is in place, is that it happens in the demo.

There's a famous screenshot of a player raising resist by using NPCs mages attacking him in town (while they are outside town). I couldn't find it, but if you look at that screenshot, I'm pretty certain they would not be using their run animations.

My memory could be fuzzy, but it did strike me as extremely weird seeing this :S

Note: I played UO from April '99, so my memories of UO are based on that period. I quit official servers in April 2003, so a lot of my memory could have been corrupted from UO:R

[Faust]

The demo actually doesn't use the run animation. RunUO uses the run animation for some reason. You are most certainly correct that the run animation was never used by NPC's besides flying creatures since running produces the flying animation on these type of creatures. However, even with this there were only certain conditions that made a creature fly. There was a write up somewhere(I'm thinking the taming archives) to get a dragon to fly by getting it stuck behind an impossible object. This is something that has bothered me for a very long time with the RunUO software. I have mentioned this several times when it pops up from time to time like with this post.

No RunUO shard has ever fixed or corrected this problem, unfortunately.