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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#31

Post by alexose »

hoten wrote: post #17
victorclf wrote: post #3

Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.

I've been working on this sort of game for awhile now. Never too seriously, though that will change in 2023. Hardly worth sharing at this point, but I will anyway. https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/ I need to seriously think about what I want out of this game (more of a mmo game engine), but "UO-like" is definitely top of mind.

I was excited to play but I couldn't make it past the character creation screen. There's a bug preventing me from spending all of my attribute points.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#32

Post by kmeisthax »

palata wrote: post #27
furyofantares wrote: post #22

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; I would hope not! Lots of MMOs exist, for example. > but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Right, blockchain and more narrowly Proof-of-Work have loads of use cases. They're just the worst solution available for almost all of them.

They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...

Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#33

Post by nordsieck »

DixieDev wrote: post #30

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…

> Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players?

I think Eve Online is the classic example. It's not technically true that players are limited in the sense that you mean. Rather, the limits are emergent.

The areas with the most valuable resources also have the least game provided security, so players are forced to band together into large organizations to protect themselves - essentially true virtual countries.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#34

Post by veleek »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #29
tiagobraw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also known as database

The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'. Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one. I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness…

All of the server nodes are run by the same entity (the game developer). Blockchain is a good solution when the nodes are not necessarily trusted (thus the need to prove that you did the work). If all the nodes are trusted you can accomplish the whole decentralized thing much more easily.

As a super simplified example, if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so each node is guaranteed not to overlap. You trust to nodes so you don’t need blockchain.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#35

Post by Avicebron »

DixieDev wrote: post #30

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've heard Ashes of Creation is trying to implement something like this (but they don't have a release date yet, just some interesting conversations with devs on their tooling and schedule)

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#36

Post by cottenio »

kmeisthax wrote: post #32
palata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...

Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.

Ironically I gave an interview to VICE News about exactly this during the Mueller investigation and they had to cut my Monero comments out for time.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#37

Post by Globz »

DixieDev wrote: post #30

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…

Yes, Mortal Online 2 is the closest thing to UO to this day.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#38

Post by armchairhacker »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #5

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Do you need a proof-of-work ledger, or just a central sequentially-consistent transactional ledger shared between all servers (without burning energy for rare SHA checksums)?

Is there any efficiency benefit to blockchain vs just storing a unique ID for every item, so that even a stack of coins has a stack of UIDs?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#39

Post by munk-a »

xwdv wrote: post #10

Ultima Online is the only MMO that felt like a true virtual world and not just a grindy RPG game played with a lot of people. It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. A shame.

I would strongly strongly suggest investigating MUDs if that's your bag. They're non-graphical so they can be built and maintained by small numbers of people with low programming skills and they tend to be almost entirely about community experiences. I'll just leave http://www.middle-earth.us/ here because it's where I met my now SO and it's an absolutely wonderful community - but there are hundreds of them out there. They do take a serious time commitment though, since they're all about building up that interesting social world.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#40

Post by cottenio »

veleek wrote: post #34
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'. Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one. I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness…

All of the server nodes are run by the same entity (the game developer). Blockchain is a good solution when the nodes are not necessarily trusted (thus the need to prove that you did the work). If all the nodes are trusted you can accomplish the whole decentralized thing much more easily. As a super simplified example, if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so eac…

Yeah, my point was that an internal PoW ledger (not decentralized but still technically a blockchain) would’ve been useful because: A) stack tracking per stackable type is trivial with UXTO, and B) adding a few seconds of PoW makes the resulting chain so hard to forge for crime-of-opportunity style attacks (preventing internal employees from making untraceable gold) that it could’ve prevented a few firings/calls to the authorities during my time. Oh, and C) it might’ve resolved the duping issues with cross-server character transfer exploits (a different beast than areaservs), and D) heh, maybe conned an engineer into making a block explorer dashboard so we could see the global state of currency/stackable amounts

Like you said: most of these except B) could’ve been done with traditional techniques and relational databases, but I maintain A) might’ve been easier than the message passing code required to synchronize and emulate it.

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