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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#121

Post by MereInterest »

Animats wrote: post #118
tiagobraw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also known as database

No, a ledger and a database are different. The ledger is a transaction log. The database holds the current state. Basic bookkeeping concept: every once in a while (usually daily) you take a snapshot of the current state and mark that point in the ledger. Then you take the previous snapshot, re-run the day's transactions, and you should get the current snapshot. If you don't, something has gone wrong. This is called "…

So, an append-only database.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#122

Post by Animats »

noman-land wrote: post #97
EamonnMR wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few people actually enjoy being in a community without moderation though.

Not to speak for a whole community but I think the decentralization idealist would say that people can do their own moderation, instead of relying on a central entity which makes the same broad rules for everyone

That's how Second Life works. Landowners can eject or ban people from their land. This is entirely at the discretion of the landowner. People are always complaining about having been banned from clubs, but there are hundreds of clubs, run by hundreds of people.

This is far, far better than having "moderators". In practice, social media moderators come from the same pool of people that staff low-end call centers. Arming them with ban hammers while giving them anonymity and lack of accountability creates major headaches of its own.

Second Life does have a few paid moderators. A user has to file an abuse report to make anything happen, and in a few days, someone will process the trouble ticket. Policy is not to attempt to intervene in resident to resident disputes at all.

What makes this work is that it's a big, sparsely populated world. A user's radius of annoyance is about 100 meters, and the whole world is about the size of Los Angeles. So, jerks are local, even with over 50,000 people logged in.

The metaverse crowd, if and when they actually create big virtual worlds with large numbers of users, needs to understand this.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#123

Post by seanhunter »

Animats wrote: post #118
tiagobraw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also known as database

No, a ledger and a database are different. The ledger is a transaction log. The database holds the current state. Basic bookkeeping concept: every once in a while (usually daily) you take a snapshot of the current state and mark that point in the ledger. Then you take the previous snapshot, re-run the day's transactions, and you should get the current snapshot. If you don't, something has gone wrong. This is called "…

A database can hold state but it can also easily hold a ledger/transaction log. Or both. Most of the databases I have built or worked on end up organically evolving to have both "state tables" and "event tables" where event tables record state transitions broadly speaking. That's just a very natural way to model systems where you need to capture information about the state changes (eg when they happen etc).

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#124

Post by dbrueck »

Operyl wrote: post #85
chii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Great point!

Side note: you can get a lot of the power of Stackless Python without a special interpreter if you use greenlets (https://greenlet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#125

Post by samstave »

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’…

I was there that day.

>>"It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag"

I never believed this...

it was a fn PK game.

I doubt he had such a flag.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#126

Post by gfosco »

samstave wrote: post #125
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’…

I was there that day. >>" It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag " I never believed this... it was a fn PK game. I doubt he had such a flag.

Of course GMs and staff had invuln flags... the Lord British character didn't play the game normally, he appeared for events.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#127

Post by tommica »

samstave wrote: post #125
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’…

I was there that day. >>" It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag " I never believed this... it was a fn PK game. I doubt he had such a flag.

Easy to imagine that it existed, probably very useful during development

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#128

Post by retrac »

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…

That's an amazing paper. Non-PDF version is available too [1]. It's quite a laugh and really makes you think. A lot seems obvious to me as a sometime-MMO player, but this was written almost 10 years before I started playing MMOs! I think my favourite bit is this:

> Indulgences. Services such as ‘red hair dye’ which players are willing to pay for but which don’t cost server resources. Extreme examples might be titles; for example, 10,000 gold buys a character the title "lord".

I think I'm going to call such features "indulgences" in the future.

> At first, the designers attempted to solve the deflation problem by pumping more resources into the world – they simply increased the total quantity of resources in the bank. But, no matter how much they added, the resources always flowed into inventory and just sat there. The problem, they concluded, was the lack of drains – not enough stuff was flowing out. However, players are (understandably) extremely resistant to rule changes which take things away from them. Thus, significantly increasing the decay or degradation rates is politically unfeasible. New drains were proposed: taxes, maintenance fees on housing, etc. Unfortunately, many of these drains feel too much like real world "work" and are therefore politically unacceptable. [...]

> Many may argue that this economy is not real; that it is merely a simulation. However, this misses the point. UO players are engaging in this commerce voluntarily; in fact, they are paying real money for the privilege! Proof of the reality of the economy can be obtained by observing the real-world prices fetched by players who auction off existing UO characters and property on the electronic auction house ebay.com. As of this writing, one character sold for $2000! It is this economic reality which makes UO a potentially very interesting research platform.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150709101636/http://www.mine-c...

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#129

Post by kethinov »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #77
benlwalker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also now an open source recreation of the original client, all written in C# that actually uses a GPU so it renders 4k at 250fps instead of 800x600 at 12.5fps. It's a very mature and stable reproduction at this point. https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO

Now if they could just eliminate the grind, and get a thriving player base again!

UOForever is quite active.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#130

Post by samstave »

gfosco wrote: post #126
samstave wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there that day. >>" It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag " I never believed this... it was a fn PK game. I doubt he had such a flag.

Of course GMs and staff had invuln flags... the Lord British character didn't play the game normally, he appeared for events.

Thats fine, im just saying as one of the most prolifics (we were the 24/7 testers at intel) etc... and being there that day - no way this wasnt lit on by default, if exist...
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