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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

#181

Post by bevacqua »

stepanhruda wrote: post #154
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…

Hey I learned to code thanks to RunUO!

I learned C# and landed my first coding job thanks to it too

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#182

Post by xani_ »

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.

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

Minecraft got mod support way after there was already a ton of mods for it. The way it got initially was basically hacking into game jars, not because it was supported in any way, it only got support later.

Granted, Java JVM did made that easier, but still the reason it got so much stuff is because it was so fucking popular first. All of the modding tools were pretty much made by community from scratch, way before Mojang moved their ass.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#183

Post by rightbyte »

lethologica wrote: post #161
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

Same thing happened with me and WoW Classic. I was hoping that classic would recapture the magic I felt playing the game a decade ago but after a few days I was just bored and cancelled my subscription. I guess that feeling is just a moment frozen in time now.

Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think. Also if you were a kid at the time way more things are exciting in gemeral.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#184

Post by 5560675260 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #139
fastball wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Take Minecraft for example – before the acquisition by Microsoft, servers were entirely run by individuals/groups who set their own moderation policies. Some servers were entirely PG-rated, some allowed cursing/sex stuff/etc. Mojang technically still had some level of control over things like skins (which were centrally managed), but otherwise it was choose-your-own-moderation for each individual server.…

But the point of an MMO is to share a space with thousands of people so individual servers with differing rules don’t really work in that context. And individual servers doing moderation is the same as individual server based games doing moderation, it’s just a difference in scale. I’m sure there are loads of other games people can play. For example Rust is infamous for a lack of moderation and has all the racist and…

Ultima had plenty independent (pirate) servers with vastly different cultures and even game mechanics. Even WoW, I think, has servers with different moderation - those that require roleplay and those that don't. Unified experience IMO would be a detriment for most games.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#185

Post by Geenirvana »

I miss UO.

I only played on unofficial servers but I had many hours of entertainment.

My greatest achivement is that I wrote a Macro program called UO-Mcro in VB6. It was a stepped based Macro program that didn't require coding to use. It had popular actions such has

LeftClick x Wait x seconds Set Variable If / Loop

Each action was designed using VBScript, so it was possible to extend to more advanced actions.

It has long since gone but the website is available on the wayback machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20040802021732/http://uo-mcro.tk...

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#186

Post by andrepd »

lethologica wrote: post #161
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

Same thing happened with me and WoW Classic. I was hoping that classic would recapture the magic I felt playing the game a decade ago but after a few days I was just bored and cancelled my subscription. I guess that feeling is just a moment frozen in time now.

To be fair WoW is a completely different beast from Ultima. They might as well be different genres.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#187

Post by Nexxius »

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.

I worked for Origin at the time as a UO Admin using the handle GM Snarf, we had a control console on our standard installs which allowed us to toggle "god mode", "smite", cast spell, create item, create gold, summon monster, etc. If you forgot to toggle god mode after logging into your avatar stupid things would happen and the players would screen shot it to spread the fun. I remember forgetting to toggle it before responding to a customer call and getting insta-killed by a dragon.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#188

Post by jansan »

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’…

Rainz was allegedly was banned from Ultima Online and all other OSI games for life.

Rainz had used a Fire Field scroll on Lord British without any real hope that his assassination attempt would be successful. When Lord British died Rainz admitted he was in complete shock and even burst out in laughter. Rainz faced immediate repercussions from Ultima Online programmers and was summarily banished from the game. The official reason for his banning was said to be because of the sheer number of complaints other players had filed against him due to his playstyle. He was also banned from all future OSI games, however Rainz refused to rule out that he might continue to play under another alias.

https://clanet.io/wiki/Ultima_Online/Beta_Pacific/Rainz

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#189

Post by naz »

Misdicorl wrote: post #107
aasasd wrote: post #105

I continue to be burdened and mystified by a memory from an article circa early-mid 2000s, about UO or a similar game, if there was one: that in the game, when one was being robbed or beaten, they could summon some wunderpolice, whose representative immediately teleported to the scene and instantly killed the culprit. However, if the alarm was false, then the supernatural officer killed the player instead. The implic…

Yeah it worked like that. Saying "guards" would instantly summon the guards if any criminal was present and subsequently murder the criminal(s). Nothing about incorrect summoning though. Most people had a macro invoking "guards" "bank" abd "vendor buy" all at the same time. The interface was mud like and the first (?) command in a statement that was valid would execute.

As an avid player I can confirm that all commands would execute. So if you were next to a vendor, you'd see the buy menu, but also if a criminal was nearby they'd have the guards summoned on them at the same time.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#190

Post by Kiro »

xani_ wrote: post #175
Kiro wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no difference between a Minecraft server implementing moderation policies and an MMO implementing them. The self-moderation we're talking about would be on an individual level.

a minecraft server yes, but this is forcing same set of rules to every server

That's not what we're talking about though.
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