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Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

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Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#151

Post by space_fountain »

ehnto wrote: post #147
space_fountain wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that a was part of for a long time which I thought had a good mix of this was Civcraft a Minecraft sever/collection of mods. It made pretty much all resources scarcer and plants and animals harder to grow (biomdepenedent). Then mods allowed users to reinforce blocks meaning it would take repeated breaks for them to actually disappear. (cooked stone meant 25, iron 255 I think and diamond 1255 or similar). Re…

My solution was to play modpacks that no sane person would be bothered grinding in order to grief. Svens and Test Pack Please Ignore are what our servers were based on. If you wanted to grief you would uabe to grind for hours before being capable enough to bother anyone. So in your case and mine it seems the solution was giving serious players tools to defend themselves that were resource or time intensive to defeat,…

Getting sort of off subject, but one of the things I liked about this set of mods was that they were entirely server side. It got a bit awkward in that it required text commands in the place of interfaces in a lot of places, but it meant that the difficulty of getting people to join was a lot smaller. I think at the peak it was still fairly small but a healthy 100+ on most days.

My first big bit of software development was a mod that ended up getting used on the server and that's still updated by some of the copycat servers that got created after.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#152

Post by Animats »

cosarara wrote: post #90
egypturnash wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using the simple in-game 3D modeller, or by using an external 3D modeller and importing meshes. Plus time writing or adapting scripts in SL's scripting language, if there's any interactivity needed. It is a similar amount of effort to what goes into making the equivalent object in a 3D game, and if you have the skills and the time, sure, clone other people's stuff, or make your own riffs on them!

Wouldn't it be possible to rip the mesh of the existing object directly out of the game client's memory? And then import it again as a new (copyable) object.

Yes, but if you try to sell it, that gets noticed, and the copier has DMCA problems.

Also, scripting is entirely server side, so that's not copyable.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#153

Post by philliphaydon »

debaserab2 wrote: post #141
starpilot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol owned

don't forget to stand over the corpse and spam your bow hotkey to keep the animation on that one particular frame where it looks hunched over the corpse...

Or use bandages to resurrect the person so you can kill them again with lightening.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#154

Post by Animats »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #57
Animats wrote: post #42

MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven b…

Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems. There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs. What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of m…

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

Which is what Second Life does. Land payments support Linden Labs.

There is a new generation of virtual worlds - VRchat, Sansar, Sinespace, and High Fidelity. The last three have numbers of concurrent users well below 100. VRchat had around 10,000 at peak, and is now down to around 5,000. There's also Facebook Spaces, which is a VR interface to Facebook that didn't catch on, and Decentraland, which was an excuse for an initial coin offering and whose blog is down. Those are all holdovers from the VR boom that didn't happen.

The next new technology is Spatial OS, a back-end game engine for really big MMOs and virtual worlds. A few games are just starting to use this. The company behind it is valued at $500M, which means they have to charge so much to use it that big game developers are staying away. You have to run it on Google servers, and they don't publicly disclose the price schedule. It's generally said to be high, though.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#155

Post by qwerty456127 »

jghn wrote: post #9
zaroth wrote: post #2

The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.

That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.

Why? Isn't ecology indivisible from economy in almost any system that includes humans?

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#156

Post by firekvz »

chii wrote: post #127
andrepd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effo…

> we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied WoW. True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want more about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

Let me tell you this, but.. WoW was the clone, it tried to copy already existings MMOs, the only reason WoW was sucessfull was because all the advertising it got

Asia (KR/JP) had already huge mmo games before WoW

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#157

Post by erichurkman »

nrb wrote: post #39

I owe my career to this game. I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith. That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-…

I think a fair number of us owe our careers to UO; I'm in a similar boat to you, dabbled with UOX, POL, spent a good deal of time with Sphere (my first foray into 'large' C++ projects and, also my first real Linux exposure sshing into the servers to run `sphere &` when it inevitably crashed), and later with RunUO. It also is what made me learn data structures, in working with tools and programs to read/write (and distribute) changes to UO data files to create your server's own maps, art assets, etc.

(Or, as I used it for, replacing the tree art assets to be smaller, making it easier to see through the 2D isometric trees.)

My favorite tidbit about UO is around the technical term 'shard'. It comes from lore from Ultima I, where the wizard fractures the gem that contains the world into shards, and each shard contains a copy of the world. Ultima Online needed a word to describe multiple servers, they picked a term from the lore.. and now 20 years onward, we talk about database sharding.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#158

Post by _qbjt »

philliphaydon wrote: post #153
debaserab2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't forget to stand over the corpse and spam your bow hotkey to keep the animation on that one particular frame where it looks hunched over the corpse...

Or use bandages to resurrect the person so you can kill them again with lightening.

Or use a sword / dagger on the corpse and collect the body parts. IIRC the head would carry the name of the player that died (although this feature may have been a byproduct of free shards).

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#159

Post by nrb »

firekvz wrote: post #156
chii wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied WoW. True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want more about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

Let me tell you this, but.. WoW was the clone, it tried to copy already existings MMOs, the only reason WoW was sucessfull was because all the advertising it got Asia (KR/JP) had already huge mmo games before WoW

That’s not completely fair... WoW was successful because it was outstandingly polished (no other game was even close at the time) and fun to play.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#160

Post by schiffern »

schiffern wrote: post #79
wmil wrote: post #49

I've seen plenty of articles along this line, but the author always seems to blame the players for the system failing. To me it looks like their ecological model failed because it was deeply flawed. Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. There's generally constant energy coming in from the sun, and that energy is the limiting factor. Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this ene…

>Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our own ecosystem. >Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy. A rose-colored summary. We also frequently engage in futile activities that seem profitable, but in fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical life-support system of…

Just to add: best analogy I've heard is that humanity is collectively acting like a crazed astronaut who's taken a hammer to the oxygen recycler.
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