Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

There are games that managed to allow PvP while also having places players can be safe, whether axiomatically, or by having enough players interested in providing protection that there are safe locations you can count on not being attacked because anyone trying will be quickly caught.

> reimplementing a network protocol

My reply is that, strictly speaking, it is not a reimplementation of a network protocol if you need to recreate parts of the game based on best guesses that _impact_ the gameplay if your guess is wrong/different. A game is more than a network protocol. It is the data within that makes it to you that is being emulated.

SMB3 is SMB3. I would probably classify SMB1 (proprietary, closed) implementations as emulators if the guesses resulted in differing functionality from clientserver to another clientserver.

Aha, yes! And it looks like meteor swarm was Kal Des Flam Ylem).

Its time to shine was short lived, I want to say it didn't even last the entirety of October '94. At the time it was out of reach of most toons anyways, but each individual meteor was close to instakill, plus it was AoE. The downside of course was it was AoE and friendly fire would make you red.

I remember one time in that time range getting called in because an argument was brewing between some guild mates and another guild in some dungeon. I arrived, decided to end the argument with a meteor swarm, promptly killed literally everyone from both guilds due to the AoE, and was a dread lord for a while. Needless to say, not how I drew it up on the board!

The concepts come with the idea of a persistent game map, which is online 23/7 and never wipes.

When UO came out, it had to deal with a large game world that nevertheless would be too small to reasonably hold a number of players that represented financial success. So the game world was duplicated on multiple servers running the same map. A player on Atlantic server could have no interaction with a player on Chesapeake server. If you wanted to play together you needed to make characters on the same server. In-game this was reflected in cosmological lore about the world being some kind of crystal that was shattered into shards. This jargon spread, to some extent, to be a generic terminology in MMORPGs.

I believe UO launched with only three shards, and added a couple dozen at the height of its popularity.

Eve is notoriously a single-shard game, with the player count being accommodated in other ways as the map grows larger and more organized play is added patch to patch, and the actual play changing notably from the era of 5,000 simultaneous online to the era of 50,000 simultaneous online.

Even without deep skill-stat specialization, when your alliance has 500 people it lends itself strongly to role specialization, because an alliance of 500 people is an organization of 500 people, who find different things fun in different contexts, and whose operations have every category of need you would find in a small nation state, from diplomacy to collective resource allocation to logistics to surveying to espionage to military service, recruiting, communications, practice and command.