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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

#81

Post by __d »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #19
shiftpgdn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they were invented by Apollo Computer as part of their NCS (Network Computing System). From there, they were adopted by the OSF (later Open Group) DCE RPC system, and from there, by Microsoft (who renamed them GUIDs).

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#82

Post by fatneckbeardz »

kmeisthax wrote: post #32
palata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...

Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.

ok so to restate.

proof of work blockchain use case:

you want to invent a money transfer system that will attract criminals to use it, and they will think it is anonymous, but its not really anonymous.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#83

Post by edmcnulty101 »

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?

Lots of samples if you google.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#84

Post by cottenio »

DelightOne wrote: post #71
cottenio wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my point was that an internal PoW ledger (not decentralized but still technically a blockchain) would’ve been useful because: A) stack tracking per stackable type is trivial with UXTO, and B) adding a few seconds of PoW makes the resulting chain so hard to forge for crime-of-opportunity style attacks (preventing internal employees from making untraceable gold) that it could’ve prevented a few firings/calls to t…

Are there ready-to-use blockchain libraries to simply create such a blockchain or does everything have to be custom-written and tested manually -> requiring the developer be an expert?

Apparently it was a valuable enough idea to Amazon that they spun it up as a service in AWS: QLDB.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#85

Post by Operyl »

chii wrote: post #52
Dylan16807 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Client uses a ton of Python too, mind you they have a very special interpreter. https://github.com/stackless-dev/stackless/wiki/

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#86

Post by debesyla »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #80
namrog84 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I don't understand why MMOs could never figure out how to make resource gathering as fun (or more fun) than hack & slashing. Stardew Valley and other games - Death's Door, A Short Hike, Toem, etc - figured this out. Why haven't any MMOs done it?

Dunno, RuneScape seems fun? There's lots of types of materials, lots of ways to gather? True, most of the mechanics are just click-and-wait, but it's not like most MMOs where wood isn't any different from ore...

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#87

Post by erichurkman »

bevacqua wrote: post #20

As 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 bu…

> As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read

Ultima Online emulators were what took small interest for me and blew it up into a career. But for me, it was pre-RunUO: SphereServer (aka GrayServer, I think) and UOX3. C++, with its own scripting engine built in. It wasn't exactly closed or open source. It also got me into Linux: while some emulation servers were run on home PCs, others were run on hosted machines. Debugging often meant the server administrators would give you root access to debug their running server. New Ultima Online releases meant being late for school to try and debug the client code changes to be able to quickly update the server, otherwise no one could log in.

It was incredibly buggy and never, to my knowledge, reached feature parity with the full game. The workarounds individual servers made through the rudimentary scripting language was impressive (many of these hacks were then copied into the core emulation scripts).

For trips down memory lane, these sites are still live -- and being updated? Wow.

https://www.sphereserver.com/

https://www.uox3.org/

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#88

Post by pmoriarty »

This reminds me of the assassination of Lord British: [1]

"Lord British was a player character created by Richard Garriott, the producer of Ultima Online. Using this character, Richard acted as Ultima’s King and would sometimes interact with other players. Lord British had considerable protection from an entourage of bodyguards and was even explicitly coded to be invulnerable to virtually any attack. During the game’s online beta test, Lord British gave an address to fellow players at his Castle Britannia. But while British was giving his address, a player character known as Rainz cast a spell scroll that set the Lord on fire, killing him instantly.

"It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag, leaving him open to being killed. If that wasn’t shocking enough for the attendees, a fellow developer of the game known as Starr Long, with his in-game character Lord Blackthorn, summoned a horde of demons to kill the assassin. Not only did the assassin manage to escape, but the demons had killed nearly every player attending the address..."

[1] - https://www.cbr.com/ultima-online-lord-british-assassination...

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#89

Post by welshwelsh »

arduinomancer wrote: post #60
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

Pretty much every MMO has implemented some type of censorship/shitty rules, so no company can be trusted to run a game

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#90

Post by JoeOfTexas »

pmoriarty wrote: post #88

This reminds me of the assassination of Lord British: [1] "Lord British was a player character created by Richard Garriott, the producer of Ultima Online. Using this character, Richard acted as Ultima’s King and would sometimes interact with other players. Lord British had considerable protection from an entourage of bodyguards and was even explicitly coded to be invulnerable to virtually any attack. During the game’…

Wow, talk about a train wreck lol.
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