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

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

#41

Post by orphea »

squidleon wrote: post #32
orphea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other example Mangos is "Wow emualtor" Do they call themselves an emulator? I'm seeing "a server" or "a reference implementation".

Just update repo and README from server emulator -> server !

While I have your attention - let me wish you good luck with your project! While I'm not an UO gamer (my MMORPG has been WoW - that's where I know Mangos from :P), I'm happy to see a .NET project - I think it's an underappreciated platform; for once, Microsoft made something very cool

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

#43

Post by vunderba »

haolez wrote: post #34
squidleon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor and still have a meaningful experience. The gap between a grandmaster swordsman in full plate and a guy selling fish at the Britain bank was enormous, and both of them were having fun. Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per…

If starting from scratch, what would an MMO need to replicate that? I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.

You’d need to start with the premise that combat shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of the game. Work on making other aspects (farming, hunting, taming animals, etc) to be equally compelling mechanics.

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

#44

Post by _doctor_love »

haolez wrote: post #18

UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment. But the game was fun even for underpowered players, so they kept playing. The really powerful players were famous, like celebrities. It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero.

UO was the best online game for me. All others stand in its shadow. It was the most "free" in terms of what you could do and the appeal was the non-gamification.

I loved Everquest and World of Warcraft but those didn't feel "raw" enough for me.

The Realm is my dark horse submission for best MMO. (Yea, yea, yeah Meridian 59 and Underlight too)

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

#46

Post by deadbabe »

haolez wrote: post #34
squidleon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor and still have a meaningful experience. The gap between a grandmaster swordsman in full plate and a guy selling fish at the Britain bank was enormous, and both of them were having fun. Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per…

If starting from scratch, what would an MMO need to replicate that? I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.

It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural.

UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).

The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.

In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.

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

#47

Post by kethinov »

nebezb wrote: post #40
kethinov wrote: post #10

I'm a fan of UO and I love seeing more projects like this. Nice work! Obligatory nitpicky aside, a time-honored tradition of HN: I've long been irritated by the use of the term "server emulator" in gaming contexts. Technically these projects are just reimplementations of a proprietary networking protocol. Nobody calls Samba a "server emulator" because it reimplements the Windows file sharing protocol, because Samba i…

> I've long been irritated by the use of the term "server emulator" in gaming contexts. Technically these projects are just reimplementations of a proprietary networking protocol. Nobody calls Samba a "server emulator" because it reimplements the Windows file sharing protocol, because Samba isn't "emulating" anything from the perspective of the traditional definition of "emulator" in computer science. I think the dis…

Your reply did exactly what I complained about: expanding the definition of emulator to cover reimplementing a network protocol.

You're not wrong that "server emulator" is a generically correct use of the term emulation, in the same sense that it is a correct use of the word for someone to say they emulate a fashion sense of a celebrity they like in their own wardrobe.

But in computer science, strictly speaking, the original definition of emulator was more strict. It was about things like emulating processor architecture A so as to execute programs written for it on processor architecture B.

And part of why expanding the definition to include "server emulators" annoys me is why has this definition expansion occurred only in gaming contexts? If a free UO server is a "server emulator" then why is Samba not also a server emulator? The lack of consistency is irritating to me, and it only happened because gamers like the term emulator, not due to any kind of rigorous computer sciencey reason.

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

#48

Post by kethinov »

daeken wrote: post #13
kethinov wrote: post #10

I'm a fan of UO and I love seeing more projects like this. Nice work! Obligatory nitpicky aside, a time-honored tradition of HN: I've long been irritated by the use of the term "server emulator" in gaming contexts. Technically these projects are just reimplementations of a proprietary networking protocol. Nobody calls Samba a "server emulator" because it reimplements the Windows file sharing protocol, because Samba i…

> I certainly do find new slang introduced by gen Z like "he got the riz!" to be quite cringey This is interesting to me, if only because it's such a natural bit of slang. Given that it's a shortened form of "charisma", this one just Makes Sense to me! I figure it'd be incredibly cringe for me to use at my age, but it's a good term IMO.

You're right, it absolutely does make sense. And yet it annoys me anyway.

There's been research by linguists (John McWhorter comes to mind) analyzing this phenomenon and it basically just comes down to the fact that as we age, we get more set in our ways, so the linguistic innovations that younger people do just have a tendency to annoy us, even when they logically follow or are objectively useful.

I try not to let it bother me, because it's irrational to feel that way, but it just does lol

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

#49

Post by swaminarayan »

Very cool project. MMO server codebases tend to accumulate a lot of architectural complexity over time, so starting fresh with a cleaner separation between networking and game logic makes a lot of sense.

Curious about the sector-based delta sync — how do you avoid packet bursts when a player enters a busy area with lots of items and mobiles?

Also interesting to see NativeAOT used here. Was that mainly for deployment simplicity or performance?

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

#50

Post by nonethewiser »

haolez wrote: post #18

UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment. But the game was fun even for underpowered players, so they kept playing. The really powerful players were famous, like celebrities. It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero.

I can relate to this part in terms of visuals:

>It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero

But isn't this true for most games?

>UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment.

I guess the main example I'm thinking of is Path of Exile. There is such a massive difference between your average player and the top tier. Or even not the top tier but enthusiasts.

I mean almost by definition most people wont have top notch equipment?

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