the original moongate (moongate.net 4000) was a MUD written by Vassago and still exists today as Materia Magica
Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
71–80 of 168 posts
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#72UO 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.
My preferred methods at the time, sneaking/breaking into houses, stealing, and ganking/PKing unsuspecting souls (emphasis on graveyards, dungeons, and miners). Stealing items, often the offensive spell reagents, out of someone's bag before a fight made for no shortage of quality interactions.
It was a sad day when UO introduced Trammel.
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#73Wow! This is no small feat... am I reading the contribution graph[0] correctly, you've done all this yourself? This endeavour sounds a whole lot like a server emulator for Infantry Online that was started by an incredibly talented developed 16 years ago ("aaerox"). I found the original svn commit on Sourceforge [1]. It's since moved to GitHub but has been active for 16 years and it has much of the same functionality…
I forgot to mention, the entire web part in React was done by Codex. I hate developing frontends!
Did you have to massage/guide the UI quite a bit? I've had terrible luck with codex, claude, and gemini at doing frontend. It's always so close but so far at the same time
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I forgot to mention, the entire web part in React was done by Codex. I hate developing frontends!
Did you have to massage/guide the UI quite a bit? I've had terrible luck with codex, claude, and gemini at doing frontend. It's always so close but so far at the same time
I build first Web API then create a plan with codex. But I choose Web Api endopoins!
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! There are still a few active shards out there, mostly us "old guys" in our 40s chasing the nostalgia of our teenage years. UO has a way of never really dying. Combat and skills are still a ways off, but the foundation is solid enough that I'm adding features every week (in spare times,) I'll keep pushing updates!
UO was such a big part of my life back then, it’s great to hear that it’s still going. Maybe I’ll set up a server to play with my kids - although they’ll never be able to get the full experience with player killers, trolls, scammers, people hawking their stuff at the bank, dragon trainers, etc.
I've been tinkering with the same thing -- wanting to set up a little server so that we can all play together as a family. We've enjoyed Diablo 2, Minecraft, and Terraria as a family, but I feel like it would be fun to set up a little UO server. I'd really like to find a good tutorial for how to set up a chill / casual-friendly server (I like there to be some grind, but I don't want it to feel like "stock" UO) -- so something with accelerated skill gains and whatnot.
I don't know if there are "family-friendly" presets for such things, but so far Copilot has been reasonably helpful at helping me along -- I just don't have it all working yet. If you have any resources you come across, I would be interested in comparing notes. :)
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#76The sad thing is i see this and think:
"Who owns the UO IP now and how litigious are they?"
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it par…
UO came out when I was in high school. I would time my morning routines around the server reboot to grab those special items, some of which didn't respawn during routine reboots.
The bugs were part of the game culture. The first time that you learned that items in the bottom right corner of your first house -- because they could be stolen through a bug even if your house was locked -- was something everyone jointly went through.
UO also had maybe the closest thing to a true player economy than any game. There was a legitimate path to making money (and having fun) to just mining ore and selling ingots. You would sell your iron bars in an unattended vendor to other players at your own price. Those bars would get bought by a blacksmith player to produce armor that they sold to other players... who would buy it to go adventuring in the dungeons.
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most active is UO Outlands. Several thousands players? They've reworked a lot of systems and it's basically 100x better than original UO. There are several systems in place, which original devs wouldn't even dream of and saying that, official Ultima Online is still running. :D It's PvP server, but with balanced PvP which really works for everyone. Not like original devs, they just dropped PvP because cookie-cutter pl…
Outlands is impressive from a technical standpoint, they've put an insane amount of work into it and the player count speaks for itself. I played there for a while. Personally though, I feel they've overengineered it a bit. So many custom systems layered on top that it starts to feel more like WoW with UO graphics than actual UO. The original charm was in the simplicity you, a sword, and a world that didn't care abou…
This was the bummer to me when I tried it. I liked the bug-ridden classic experience before the notoriety patch.
I recently tried https://www.classicuo.eu/ ClassicUO, and the nostalgia was incredible. Granted it is not playable, but there is something about that experience that all of the assistants, hotkeys, etc. fail to capture.
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#79This must be an omen given how I just this week watched a bunch of the Majuular videos on youtube (Highly recommend them) about the Ultima series of games, particularly Ultima Underworld The Stygian Abyss, and Ultima VII and VIII. That lead to me buying Underworld and VII last night on GOG as feel like I missed out on something wonderful in the 90's (Also need to grab System Shock and Crusader no remorse.)
My brother and I bought IX when it was released but it was a buggy nightmare so we gave up and never experienced Ultima proper. However, my brother and his friend got into UO and played a ton. His friend was a greifer at the time going by the name SirDarkSpell and supposedly made a bit of a name for himself. This was around 2000 or so? I bet the two of them would love to hear about this project as both of them have fond memories of UO.
Anyway. Might just throw my weekend into the Stygian Abyss...
Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
#80Great news. Haven't played UO in forever. What kind of client are people using on modern systems, these days? Is there a client working well on linux?