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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

raphkoster.com

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Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#31

Post by devin »

samstave wrote: post #26

Ultima ][ Was one of my first games, which I found on a floppy left in an Apple ][e in 8th grade ~1990 or so... which got me and my best friend into gaming (and trouble) Later, I was one of two on the Developer Relations Group (along with said best friend) @SC5 Intel and my cube was right next to Andy Grove - we had the same pee-schedule, for whatever reason Andy and I always seemed to only intersect in the restroom…

I had the very unusual situation of having a T1 to my house when I was ~13. I could run circles around everyone in UO (until cable modems started to become more widespread). I was decent at the game, but the difference in lag definitely made a big difference. One additional trick was to have macros that would spam text before casting a spell. This would cause even more lag for people on the receiving end of an explosion + ebolt combo.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#32

Post by devin »

canadiantim wrote: post #20

Anyone recommend a UO-like experience these days?

Honestly, I think it's impossible to recreate. Being able to use real-time voice makes a lot of group combat scenarios easy to coordinate, and those giant good vs evil battles were a real highlight of early UO to me. You'd have to coordinate with voice, or follow someone who was typing out the next target's name. Once you could hop in a group voice chat, there's someone who could say "target: Bob -- load up. 3, 2, 1, drop". The target can't heal through a coordinated scenario like this, and I think effectively killed group PvP. Of course you could do this if you were all in the same room back in the day, but that was uncommon.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#33

Post by elif »

debaserab2 wrote: post #19
elif wrote: post #13

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 reg…

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.

exactly!! PK's are the best anti-cheat. just make your game full loot and competitive, you dont need anti-cheat.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#34

Post by devin »

elif wrote: post #13

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 reg…

+1 on learning to program via UO scripting -- I learned a couple of ways (AutoHotkey was one IIRC) to macro before there were programs devoted to UO. One of them was pretty primitive and I'd actually check the color of a pixel at X,Y to see if I needed to heal.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#36

Post by rsync »

devin wrote: post #31
samstave wrote: post #26

Ultima ][ Was one of my first games, which I found on a floppy left in an Apple ][e in 8th grade ~1990 or so... which got me and my best friend into gaming (and trouble) Later, I was one of two on the Developer Relations Group (along with said best friend) @SC5 Intel and my cube was right next to Andy Grove - we had the same pee-schedule, for whatever reason Andy and I always seemed to only intersect in the restroom…

I had the very unusual situation of having a T1 to my house when I was ~13. I could run circles around everyone in UO (until cable modems started to become more widespread). I was decent at the game, but the difference in lag definitely made a big difference. One additional trick was to have macros that would spam text before casting a spell. This would cause even more lag for people on the receiving end of an explos…

Not to flex, but …

In 1998 I had a pc co-located in a yahoo data center that was running UO 24/7 on 100mb.

Ping times were low single digit.

I used pcanywhere to remotely control the client and the rest of the time It was macroing. Never disconnected and never had a power outage.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#37

Post by intellix »

I worked on a private sphere server and dropped my toes in programming there which helped later in life. I remember really struggling and not understanding the concept of arrays... All I could muster was static variables and needed help creating a paginated list of heads you collected from players

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#39

Post by Spastche »

canadiantim wrote: post #20

Anyone recommend a UO-like experience these days?

Rust matches the hardcore harshness of it

I wish I could find a game more on the "numbers go up" / programming side of things. I think I enjoyed macroing in UO more than anything about it, just writing my own scripts to raise skills. I automate webgames sometimes when I'm bored, but even that's not quite the same.

Maybe I'll reinstall UO this weekend and play a player server.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#40

Post by NelsonMinar »

I remember joining Google in 2001 and being struck they were using the term "sharding" for the ads databases (MySQL) instead of "partitions". I understood it at the time to be referring to Ultima Online.

Raph's memory dates to 1996, the blog post he references seems to be from 1999. I imagine the idea of database partitioning goes back at least to the 80s, anyone know what earlier terms were used? Other than "partition", of course.

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