Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

Fond memories of hours on hours of Ultima VII, back in the '90s.

In fact, the first time I saw the intro[1], I thought my monitor had an issue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqOZlNxbfI — about 32 seconds in.

EasyUO scripting was my introduction to programming at age 14. By the time I got to college I was already a professional coder and I was able to enjoy CS as a recapitulation or reinterpretation of my foundational understanding instead of a dogmatic prescribed methodology as I saw in my object oriented/relational database bound peers. UO really sparked my whole life's passion accidentally by leaving the memory and registers readable/writable and the server requests unencrypted.

It is a shame that the cheat vs anti-cheat war has escalated to the point where kids today would rather pay $100 per month for access to a closed binary (with who-knows-what malware) which is able to bypass anti-cheat mechanisms rather than freely play with a live application that they are already invested in.

as i recall, they devised their own scripting language, and they relied solely on flatfiles to track world-state… then every day at a given time, each server would have an off-hours save where the flatfiles would be persisted. players caught on to this, and would take advantage by having "server wars" during these save windows, when changes wouldn't be persisted, and would all equip their best kit and battle at certain locations. all that said, it's not too surprising lots of creativity and ingenuity was required, given in 1997 the world had really seen nothing like it.

i remember getting it right after it came out -- i had just turned 11. when i tried to explain to people that it was a massive, detailed fantasy world where you could go on adventures with people in real-time, they'd look at me like i had two heads.

this got me into scripting and mods and was a big influence on why i became interested in software and hacking, and have had a career in it since.

I still have the map! https://i.imgur.com/hDQulgr.jpeg

Games have always been at the forefront of software innovation. I love working with them.

Exact same here. Coding a script for my miner to automatically hit the high value ore spots and detect if any PK was in the area (and recall to safety) was one of my first major programming achievements!

I recall making a similar comment to Raph Koster in a hacker news thread a few years ago. He didn't seem all that pleased about it, lol.