Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

draxinar.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 75 posts

Re: Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

#31

Post by archturtle »

pitched wrote: post #23
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, old school runescape, final fantasy online, not much else worth it. What about - Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), - The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO), - Guild Wars 2 (GW2), - EVE Online, - Black Desert?

All of them (except Eve) feel too much like WoW reskins to bother with. This is personal opinion but the feeling probably reflects why they have 1% (estimated by ChatGPT) of WoW’s subscriptions.

I'm enjoying GW2 a lot, I feel it has a lot of players. No matter which corner of the map you go to, you can always find people doing either open world group content or their own thing

Re: Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

#32

Post by tagami »

helloplanets wrote: post #12

For anyone wanting to try UO out, it's still a game with an active player base. There are 3rd party servers like UO Outlands, which gets closer to the original gameplay. Meaning very harsh in comparison to what most people are used to in today's MMOs. Players can just come to gank you and you'll lose your stuff, etc. The server has 2500+ players logged in right now, so still very much active.

OOooOooOoooOoO

Re: Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

#33

Post by devin »

curioussquirrel wrote: post #15

My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard. I wrote some really terrible PHP and HTML, but it worked for 20+ years afterwards. Great memories! I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO! In any case, this is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

My first website was for my guild on Chesapeake, and I hacked together scripts for macroing various skills as my first "actual programming" project. It is also what led me to join IRC for the first time, which then later led me to freenode.

Re: Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

#34

Post by giancarlostoro »

curioussquirrel wrote: post #15

My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard. I wrote some really terrible PHP and HTML, but it worked for 20+ years afterwards. Great memories! I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO! In any case, this is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

> I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO!

If it was an MMO, or online, there's private server communities for it endlessly.

I forget the name of the game, maybe it was City of Heroes? It was shutdown for years, and then boop, someone popped up a Private Server years later.

Heck, and I've mentioned it before, the Shockwave Online games of old have some niche communities rebuilding the servers, building Shockwave runtimes and decompilers, and they overlap between games since they find themselves trying to solve similar problems. ;)

Re: Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

#35

Post by gedge »

arthens wrote: post #22
curioussquirrel wrote: post #15

My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard. I wrote some really terrible PHP and HTML, but it worked for 20+ years afterwards. Great memories! I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO! In any case, this is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

> My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard Mine too! My second one was changing the map (remove static items, add new islands and buildings, etc), and my third one was changing verdata.mul to add new animations and item graphics. Playing Ultima Online on an unofficial POL server literally got me into IT. I was studying to be an accountant before that.

Me three! Made my own POL shard, and invited some friends to it. Wasn't a big thing, but I was proud :)

I can't remember all the things I did, but a couple of things I do remember:

1. Added 50-ish new spells. 2. Created an arena, where you could fight monsters of increasing difficulty and win prizes. There was another option where you could pick a specific monster and fight them in waves of increasing difficulty.

I actually have an archive with all of the scripts too. I'm a hoarder for my source code haha

Re: Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

#36

Post by [deleted] »

tagami wrote: post #32
helloplanets wrote: post #12

For anyone wanting to try UO out, it's still a game with an active player base. There are 3rd party servers like UO Outlands, which gets closer to the original gameplay. Meaning very harsh in comparison to what most people are used to in today's MMOs. Players can just come to gank you and you'll lose your stuff, etc. The server has 2500+ players logged in right now, so still very much active.

OOooOooOoooOoO

[deleted]
Post reply on HN