101–110 of 265 posts
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
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!
Over 2k active players daily (edit: by active I mean there are over 2k players logged in and playing at any given time). The devs are incredibly active, and there is a lot more to do here than original UO.
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…
Probe is one of the developers of Sphere who was admin to NOS (Novus Opiate Seclorum)
I believe he rebuilt NOS on POL which ultimately died :(
After NOS died I was admin for a shard which I think was called UOX, and built a server called Alphanine which we had ~250-450 players on. That's what got me into programming, at the time I believe I built the first in-game capture the flag (unaware of any other shard doing it, but got the idea from Team Fortress)
I really miss UO and the feeling I got playing as a kid. Nothing to date gives me that same feeling.
I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…
It is still as fun today as it was back then.
It's possible that the story went through a bad case of ‘broken telephone’—and my few feeble attempts of finding the truth in more recent years were unsuccessful. Still I wonder: was there such a thing as described above? Did it work? Was the ‘police’ really an NPC?
I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…
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…
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.
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…
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…
More than that, in regard to MMOs in general: both Cory Doctorow and Neil Stephenson wrote books involving exchange of money in MMOs, remarking that bringing a bag of gold to another dude in the game is an actual method of transferring money cross-border without oversight, used by mobs. I vaguely heard (and again mentioned by Doctorow) that the size of economy of larger games like WoW can dwarf not-so-small countries.
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…
It's all about programmer skill. You can write bloated C++ just as easily as bloated C# and bloated Java.