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Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

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Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#151
post #18

UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment. But the game was fun even for underpowered players, so they kept playing. The really powerful players were famous, like celebrities. It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero.

This is one of the reasons i loved UO. The only big MMO game that is kind of like it is Old School RuneScape as leveling a character takes ages.

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience. I mean there absolutely were bad experiences. Griefing drove lots of players away, which is why they implemented Trammel.

Grief is a natural consequence of player freedom, but it’s not worth giving up that freedom for some safety.

That's great until a game designer discovers that grief chases away the majority of players, and the griefers themselves will leave if they have no one to grief.

So from a philosophical perspective sure you're right. But from a dollars and cents perspective it's just good business to find ways to legislate griefing out of games. And that's why the market moved the direction it did.

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, you reminded me of the tag teamers where a pick pocket would steal your bag of runes (that you use to teleport to safety), then attack you while you try to fumble a teleport back home, only to find you can't locate your bag of runes. The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection. Also the defense to your home was to literally…

Stealing black pearl was great because it prevented recall AND energy bolt!

don't forget that Corp Por was not always the dominant combat spell. For instance there was the An Mani era of combat, and while i don't remember their names bot lightning bolt and meteor swarm were the dominant combat spell for a while as well

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#154
post #116
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it was kind of the only game in town. Sure, you had Dark Sun Online and Meridian 59, but in 96/97 you were playing UO if you liked the idea of online worlds. I think the barrier to entry is the equivalent of several complete, fun, balanced single player games operating together in balanced harmony. Not impossible, but highly improbable.

Btw, I've never met a player of Meridian 59, but seeing YouTube videos about it, it might have been popular in my community if we had access to it at the time. Looks super interesting, although it didn't age well, of course.

A big cluster of my in game UO friends had come from playing together on M59. Just like we view UO to have been ahead of its time, the stories they told me made it feel ahead of its time back then. It wasn't *that* different from the MUDs of the day, but more video gamey, which was a big step up

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here! tinkering with private servers is what got me into programmig in the first place. There's something about reverse-engineering a game protocol at 15 that hooks you for life. Thanks for the kind words on the name and art!

Most of my sick days in high school were after big Ultima Online patches dropped, I believe, usually on Tuesdays. A neighbor had much faster internet - I think his dad did work from home? - so I'd download the patch onto a ZIP drive and sprint back home. Then spent the day debugging changes (client changes and network/protocol changes) with others on IRC to get SphereServer to connect again. Learned so much.

> A neighbor had much faster internet

In the very, very early days I had a 6ms ping to my server on a then high bandwidth connection. This was when most players were at best on a 28.8 modem with multihundred ms ping times. I remember being able to easily outrun people who were on horses.

My roommate and I could sit next to each other and between the combination of our connection and the advantage voice communication provided for coordination was an enormous advantage. We spent a lot of time in PK hot spots pretending to be lagged newbies, only to give the PK gangs a rude awakening when they'd come to grief us. Turns out a pair of toons who were multi-GMs when most weren't a single GM yet, who were lighting fast compared to others, and with perfect coordination made short work of your average PK gang back then

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#156
I will absolutely host one of these servers.. I used to be the admin of Sphereservers 15+ years ago and I've lost all of my scripts, and world files... and graphics.

But I would love to play some old school UO again with people

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#157

I will absolutely host one of these servers.. I used to be the admin of Sphereservers 15+ years ago and I've lost all of my scripts, and world files... and graphics. But I would love to play some old school UO again with people

First mention of Sphere server I have seen in the wild in quite some time. I too had a lot of custom scripts for my instance that I have lost. Sphere server is what finally got me to learn how to script.

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#158
Why did you choose C# for this project?

Does it have something to do with the fact that we already have plenty well established Ultima online server emulators in the training set of your llm of choice despite you claiming it is from scratch?

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#159

Very cool work! This is giving me a big nostalgia hit, as a LONG time ago (when UO was a current game ;) I maintained a C++ UO emulator called UOX3. To be clear I absolutely did not initially develop it or even write any particularly large or difficult features. I just took over maintaining the codebase, taking patches and cutting releases, managing the community, that sort of thing. The original author decided to st…

Hey, I am just reaching out to say: "thank you."

When I was in high school, I played a lot of UO. It was actually the last computer/video game I ever played regularly, because I convinced myself as a teenager that I was addicted to it and needed to drop it "cold turkey" to focus on academics and extracurriculars.

(A sign of the times for the late-1990s nostalgics: I sold my UO account on eBay for a few thousand dollars and an MTG Mox Pearl. I owned a bunch of virtual real estate, e.g. a UO tower on an island only accessible via moongate. The high bidder "threw in" a Mox Pearl as a kind of informal escrow, to make sure I completed the account transfer after getting paid.)

Before I dropped UO from my life, I discovered UOX. I was learning C++ and UOX was a great way for me to practice my emerging C++ skills.

My clearest memory of feeling the power of programming was when I created a mod for my UOX server that allowed me to drop an unlimited number of interconnected and color-coded moongates all over my server, creating something akin to the feeling of the game "Portal," but long before Valve released "Portal."

It was after having a blast with UOX that I decided to dig into programming much more. Somehow, the UOX server mod made programming feel "real" for me in the way my prior forays into coding simply didn't.

That led to me learning Python -- as a way of toying around with the Slackware Linux server I had in my basement. I left C++ behind, but it was an important stepping stone for me. Now, decades later, learning Python was probably the single most important decision of my life in childhood. (See e.g. https://amontalenti.com/about)

UOX is such a cool project. UO was a really ahead-of-its time internet game, as well. Great memories. Thank you.

Re: Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting

#160
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think 90% of what made UO unique is the fact there was no Google or central repository of expert knowledge. Yes, UOStratics existed, but it wasn't perfect. A lot of the fun was in the fact basically nobody knew the BEST way to play, and therefore everyone was just doing whatever they thought was fun.

If someone create a new MMORPG in which rules changes a little every day or several days in unpredictable manner then no one will be knowing the BEST way to play or at least harder to find the BEST way. But maybe there will be no balance.

I don't think that would work: either the rules change little enough that you can still document meta-strategies, or the rules change too much and players can't learn them either.
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