Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.
It appears to be still around?
EDIT: looks like it changed hands a number of times, very unlikely its as good as it once was, I imagine
We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
11–20 of 265 posts
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#12Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if…
I don't know about that I'd say we're doing pretty good on the MMO scene. FF XIV really revitalized the space, but WoW is still chugging along, ESO, Star Wars, New World, Guild Wars, EVE, MMO Lite Destiny 2, etc. Basically there are a lot of MMOs with really stable populations where doing activities isn't cumbersome and you can play whatever aesthetic (fantasy, space, etc) you'd like.
It's certainly different from the age of MMO's like Ultima though and the sense of community is vastly different than it was back then by virtue of how mainstream they are now and because of all the different tools and such people use to build those communities now.
So if not golden, I'd say still pretty strong silver.
To your other points though I completely agree.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#13Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if…
[deleted]
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#14Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.
there with you - UO was the greatest game I ever played
A game development pair working on a kind of similar MMO for the last 10 years. "Haven and Hearth" has all the house building, player killing, crafting, and trading. No pre-made safe zones, though, and it resets every year or two.
I think all of these small, independent efforts fall under the radar without the advertising of more expensive games. I don't know if UO was well-advertised at the time, but it was certainly the only option at launch!
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#15Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if…
> Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022?
Yes.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#16yay, you invented UUIDs (?)
Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. The technical term "sharding" literally comes from the intro video in the game where they explain why there are multiple copies of the same world.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#17Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.
I've been working on this sort of game for awhile now. Never too seriously, though that will change in 2023. Hardly worth sharing at this point, but I will anyway.
I need to seriously think about what I want out of this game (more of a mmo game engine), but "UO-like" is definitely top of mind.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#18Ultima Online is the only MMO that felt like a true virtual world and not just a grindy RPG game played with a lot of people. It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. A shame.
> It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO.
I don't necessarily personally disagree with this, but this counter argument is worth watching:
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#19yay, you invented UUIDs (?)
Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. The technical term "sharding" literally comes from the intro video in the game where they explain why there are multiple copies of the same world.
> Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today.
Yeah, but not UUIDs. Those go back to the 80s.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#20As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read
Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across
We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bug leading to people being trivially able to print money — this led to runway inflation in some servers.
UO economies themselves being matter of study, for a Really interesting article, see [2]
[1]: https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs
[2]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7...