Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by uo_throwaway » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 7:56 AM UTC

ztorkelson wrote: post #185

uo_throwaway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually falls over around 1000 clients if they're actually playing and encountering one another at any regularity. I have been contributing to a new RunUO based shard ( http://www.uooutlands.com ) that has become extremely popular and hit 2k clients online. The lag was pretty extreme at first, but after a few weeks of studying CPU profiles I rewrote a lot of the map search algorithms, plus a few other things, and…

Congratulations on the launch! I’ve heard great things about Outlands and have been meaning to log in and check it out. It’s been a long time since I was involved in the RunUO community, but as I recall, one of the biggest limiting factors on scalability was activated NPC/AI. Range queries and movement were the two big pieces, so I’m sure your improvements would have a big impact there. We ran load tests on Hybrid wi…

I'll get those patches out soon. Outlands generally is running much more complex AI with much faster response targets, so in conjunction with the far more detailed map it is stressing RunUO much harder than previous shards. But as noted the primary CPU consumer is definitely the map searching. My changes don't entirely change the algorithm (I've adjusted the sector size), but rather take advantage of more recent C# features that are much friendlier to the JIT and shift several allocations to the stack.

I'd also like to move away from timers for mobiles and simply call a function on a subset of them (sector by sector) each tick. This is advantageous because it groups all of the processing for a set of nearby mobiles in game space together in time, so it should greatly improve the CPU cache hit rate during the map searches. That would also require moving RunUO to a constant tick rate, which I also have patches for.

If anything, my changes have made RunUO more single threaded (and eliminated some locks in doing so). This has proven to be faster than some of the previously highly parallel code because the contention was so bad. That's not to say that it couldn't be done in a way that did scale well, but I agree with you that it would put the code out of reach of hobbyists entirely. I think the code today strikes the right balance of approachability and performance. Thanks for all of your effort on this project!

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

#192

Post by wallace_f » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 10:43 AM UTC

nrb wrote: post #81

marak830 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly similar for me, I even released my first piece of software on the runuo forms (maraks script creator haha). Never translated to working in software (couldn't afford college lol), but it did leave me with a hobbie I still do today, and love.

I didn’t go to college either, never too late to make the transition if you want it.

I wish I never went to college. Giant waste of time and money.

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

#193

Post by silexia » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

Raph_Koster wrote: post #105

I was the original lead designer on Ultima Online and the key designer of this system. A few notes, because this article has MANY inaccuracies. 1. Ultima Online wasn't even in development for three years total. An early prototype was February to September 1995, done by Rick Delashmit. Starting late August and early September 1995, the core team showed up. We showed the game at E3 in spring of 1996 in alpha form. We s…

Thank you for building this wonderful game! Helped me through a very hard time in my life when it came out. It also helped suck me into what I do today (started a web dev company that now has 130 FT team members).

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

#194

Post by esarbe » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

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…

I think you're on to something wrt to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter.

I sometimes wonder if it's possible at all for any species that evolved to compete for resources to survive the stage where humans are now.

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

#195

Post by norswap » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #154

ChuckMcM wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 user…

Based on this and my own investigation of the tech, I predict Spatial OS is going to tank. Hard.