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Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

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Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#81

Post by nrb »

marak830 wrote: post #62
nrb wrote: post #39

I owe my career to this game. I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith. That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-…

Surprisingly similar for me, I even released my first piece of software on the runuo forms (maraks script creator haha). Never translated to working in software (couldn't afford college lol), but it did leave me with a hobbie I still do today, and love.

I didn’t go to college either, never too late to make the transition if you want it.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#82

Post by _qbjt »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #17
jghn wrote: post #8

The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre. There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed. Similarly there was a…

The earlier economy you describe sounds a bit like Dartmud. I think they gave in eventually too and started supplying the shopkeepers with new money every so often, however some of them still retain in-game "opening hours".

Raph Koster cites MUDs (including Dartmud) as inspiration for Ultima Online [1]. UO as it existed around the T2A / Renaissance era was, in many ways, a lot closer in design to MUDs than it was to modern MMORPGs.

[1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-...

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#83

Post by FroshKiller »

Rotten194 wrote: post #64
golergka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention RDR as if it was an MMO (which it obviously is not), and omit Eve?

How is RDR:Online not an mmo?

A Red Dead Online instance is limited to 30 players and 2 spectators. It's far from massive.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#84

Post by nrb »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #57
Animats wrote: post #42

MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven b…

Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems. There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs. What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of m…

The resource quality and crafting system in SWG was an absolute masterpiece; I’ve yearned for a game with that amount of depth ever since the combat upgrade patch made it irrelevant.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#85

Post by etxm »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #78
etxm wrote: post #48

The two things I loved most about UO: * no opt-in required PVP with full looting * the bugs / exploits I had a very high bounty. :D The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life. Favorite bugs: * mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses * stealing we…

Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.

Says the person using a throwaway account to offer a medical diagnosis from their armchair office to someone they’ve never met, solely based on a comment about a video game they played 20 years ago.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#86

Post by shagie »

Related: A collection of slides on in game economics by the former (in 2000) director of technology at Origin (not a UO team member): https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine-...

The model economy (related to Muds) in Imaginary Realties by Dan Hastings, preserved by Richard Bartle : http://mud.co.uk/dvw/themodeleconomy.html

The basics of these economies is that there is a faucet of some resource and a drain drain on that resource (it goes somewhere and is ultimately destroyed... some how). The economics aspect has a very hard problem with balancing those faucets and drains.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#87

Post by nrb »

na85 wrote: post #43
tobz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, this is funny... I worked on an emulator for Dark Age of Camelot _and_ an emulator for World of Warcraft (WCell) and attribute experience from both projects to getting my first software gig. I also remember (fondly) going through RunUO with .NET Reflector to pick up tips and tricks. :)

I worked with runuo quite a lot and while I too have lots of fond memories, it's actually a huge mess of a codebase. It's object-oriented except when it's not. It's modular except where it isn't. It "optimizes" for $number_of_cores_on_your_box but doesn't actually use them for anything but world saves. Almost none of it is commented or documented (doxygen doesn't count as documentation). I think runuo excelled not be…

I generally agree (object serialization was rough, and stop-the-word saves have been a constant issue for the entire life of the project) but the things it did well were done outstandingly better than POL, Sphere, UOX, Wolfpack, etc.

I think the killer feature of RunUO was that it compiled the C# “script” files and linked them at runtime, eliminating the need to attach a scripting language that provides some limited API. It led to some extremely messy code, but it allowed you to achieve anything you wanted with minimum fuss, using the base .NET APIs that were well-documented. And the community was huge and active by UO emu standards.

It doesn’t fall over with 5000+ clients connected to a single server, which is pretty astounding considering it’s TCP based and players tended to clump up pretty majorly during in-game events and such.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#88

Post by space_fountain »

avar wrote: post #65
Animats wrote: post #42

MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven b…

> This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. This isn't a problem with these games. It's intentional. Everyone knows how to mitigate it, you introduce a factor of significant loss aversion into attacking or being attacked, e.g. what EVE Online has where you might lose significant resources as a result. Players by an large don't like that, and just want t…

Something that a was part of for a long time which I thought had a good mix of this was Civcraft a Minecraft sever/collection of mods.

It made pretty much all resources scarcer and plants and animals harder to grow (biomdepenedent). Then mods allowed users to reinforce blocks meaning it would take repeated breaks for them to actually disappear. (cooked stone meant 25, iron 255 I think and diamond 1255 or similar). Reinforced doors and similar also had permissions associated with them.

Kill other users with a pearl in your hand would trap the player in the end till the pearl de-spawned, you released them, or logged out with it in your inventory. On top of that there were a few other mods, but in my mind it did a remarkably good job of keeping a server with anarchist rules from imploding. I think a lot of it was that Minecraft is a game you can do something other than kill people in.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#89

Post by uo_throwaway »

nrb wrote: post #87
na85 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with runuo quite a lot and while I too have lots of fond memories, it's actually a huge mess of a codebase. It's object-oriented except when it's not. It's modular except where it isn't. It "optimizes" for $number_of_cores_on_your_box but doesn't actually use them for anything but world saves. Almost none of it is commented or documented (doxygen doesn't count as documentation). I think runuo excelled not be…

I generally agree (object serialization was rough, and stop-the-word saves have been a constant issue for the entire life of the project) but the things it did well were done outstandingly better than POL, Sphere, UOX, Wolfpack, etc. I think the killer feature of RunUO was that it compiled the C# “script” files and linked them at runtime, eliminating the need to attach a scripting language that provides some limited…

It actually falls over around 1000 clients if they're actually playing and encountering one another at any regularity. I have been contributing to a new RunUO based shard (http://www.uooutlands.com) that has become extremely popular and hit 2k clients online. The lag was pretty extreme at first, but after a few weeks of studying CPU profiles I rewrote a lot of the map search algorithms, plus a few other things, and it's scaling easily now. I plan to push the rewrites upstream soon. The emulator still has legs!

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#90

Post by cosarara »

egypturnash wrote: post #80
cosarara wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?

By using the simple in-game 3D modeller, or by using an external 3D modeller and importing meshes. Plus time writing or adapting scripts in SL's scripting language, if there's any interactivity needed. It is a similar amount of effort to what goes into making the equivalent object in a 3D game, and if you have the skills and the time, sure, clone other people's stuff, or make your own riffs on them!

Wouldn't it be possible to rip the mesh of the existing object directly out of the game client's memory? And then import it again as a new (copyable) object.
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