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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

blog.cotten.io

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#51

Post by chongli »

victorclf wrote: post #3

Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.

Sadly I don’t think it can be done. I mean sure, the game could be written, that’s not a problem. The trick is to get people to show up and in particular get players to play who aren’t “UO fans.”

UO was amazing because a ton of people played it who weren’t UO fans or even MMO fans because such things didn’t exist. The players were simply RPG fans wanting to try something new and what happened was magical and serendipitous.

Now any game that tries to do the same will only attract UO fans or classic MMO fans. That original audience of people who were essentially naïve but open to a new experience are gone.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#52

Post by chii »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #15
no_wizard wrote: post #9

Aside 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.

for example, EVE Online is mostly done via python (server side at least - not the frontend iirc).

In fact, i reckon the reason a lot of games would have crashes is because it's written in an unsafe language like C++.

And the reason there's so many successful plugins for minecraft is _because_ it's in an "easy" language like java.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#53

Post by cottenio »

armchairhacker wrote: post #38
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #5

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Do you need a proof-of-work ledger, or just a central sequentially-consistent transactional ledger shared between all servers (without burning energy for rare SHA checksums)?

Is there any efficiency benefit to blockchain vs just storing a unique ID for every item, so that even a stack of coins has a stack of UIDs?

Consider the sheer scale: people sell 200 million UO gold for $10. Can you imagine every gold piece having a unique UUID? Even if you didn’t use 256 bit hashes, even at 64 bits you’d be talking about 1.6gb per $10 worth of UO gold.

UXTO would’ve been a neat technology to have to experiment with at least.

Memory was at enough of a premium that even in the tagging system we made in the article it was just for the rarest items.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#54

Post by namrog84 »

DixieDev wrote: post #30

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…

One of the challenges is finding the right proportional scale.

If the difficulty or fun of say blacksmithing nice items for the community. And you have it balanced out that you expect 20% of players be blacksmith. But then either 10 or 30% be blacksmiths either items skyrocket in price and make it unobtainable to most or the floor bottoms out making it not viable for most to engage in a market.

I think its solvable but itd require a lot of dynamic based systems to scale properly based upon number of players in each categories of life skill limits.

With that said, check out a game called Eco. They have life skill limits and force cooperation on small scale (30 day per server wipe). I think you can reasonably have 2 or 3 professions of 12 and people buy and sell from each other.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#55

Post by zinckiwi »

Alex3917 wrote: post #18
xwdv wrote: post #10

Ultima 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4j-5YFKK4

I largely agree with the perspective of that video.

Specifically thinking of the difference between EQ and WoW, I do think there's one objective difference though: downtime. It wasn't uncommon to spend minutes recovering from a fight, or wait 20+ minutes between spawns if you were camping a particular spot. At the time we moaned about it, so WoW came along, and "solved" the complaint.

In hindsight, the downtime was the best part of the game. Chatting with strangers in a pickup group. Gambling. Friendly duels. Dumb feats of strength. Mutual grumbling about waiting for the boat. My fondest memories were all the things around the gameplay, but that doesn't make the game irrelevant. It was an excuse and a reason, but also a setting. The combination was intoxicating.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#56

Post by cottenio »

veleek wrote: post #34
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'. Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one. I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness…

All of the server nodes are run by the same entity (the game developer). Blockchain is a good solution when the nodes are not necessarily trusted (thus the need to prove that you did the work). If all the nodes are trusted you can accomplish the whole decentralized thing much more easily. As a super simplified example, if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so eac…

Oh, and a good aside: thanks to player exploits the nodes themselves weren’t necessarily trustworthy (such as duping exploits across shards, not just areaservs).

Like I said, not saying we “needed blockchain”, but when AWS released QLDB I was like “ohhhh, that would’ve been useful” since, you know, forging log files is a thing.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#57

Post by namrog84 »

cottenio wrote: post #53
armchairhacker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any efficiency benefit to blockchain vs just storing a unique ID for every item, so that even a stack of coins has a stack of UIDs?

Consider the sheer scale: people sell 200 million UO gold for $10. Can you imagine every gold piece having a unique UUID? Even if you didn’t use 256 bit hashes, even at 64 bits you’d be talking about 1.6gb per $10 worth of UO gold. UXTO would’ve been a neat technology to have to experiment with at least. Memory was at enough of a premium that even in the tagging system we made in the article it was just for the rares…

Could you mux the data of the coins?

If you have a stack of gold containing 5 uuid and mix it with another stack of 3 uuid but only support 5 uuid per stack. Then calculate proportional weightings which 5 you store.

You could probably find a way to try and wash the money but I think it could be done with right heuristics to catch a good majority of use cases but maybe not all.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#58

Post by not2b »

furyofantares wrote: post #22

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; I would hope not! Lots of MMOs exist, for example. > but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Right, blockchain and more narrowly Proof-of-Work have loads of use cases. They're just the worst solution available for almost all of them.

Couldn't they just use a Merkle tree, like git does, to keep track of the history? I think that's what he's referring to here. They don't need proof of work if the code that can modify the history is trusted.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#59

Post by cottenio »

nordsieck wrote: post #33
DixieDev wrote: post #30

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…

> Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players? I think Eve Online is the classic example. It's not technically true that players are limited in the sense that you mean. Rather, the limits are emergent. The areas with the most valuable resources also have the least game provided security, so players are forced to band together into larg…

EVE is my favorite example.

There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#60

Post by arduinomancer »

furyofantares wrote: post #22

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; I would hope not! Lots of MMOs exist, for example. > but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Right, blockchain and more narrowly Proof-of-Work have loads of use cases. They're just the worst solution available for almost all of them.

Yeah this seems like another "how is that better than a centralized database" situation
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