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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

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Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#51

Post by msla »

snozolli wrote: post #50
klodolph wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of people learned using BASIC, but that never really took off for serious programming outside of a couple niches (like frontends / desktop apps made in Visual Basic).

If you're counting VB, it was huge , just not cool. Nobody ever talked about it, but people built tons of really effective custom software for banks and the like. Maybe you don't consider that serious programming, but it was probably the most successful product of the RAD desktop era. I vaguely recall a Joel Spolsky (?) podcast years ago mentioning that everyone thought it was dead, but a survey showed something craz…

BASIC as it was and VisualBasic are mostly not the same language, like how you can't say C is going strong in business because C# is so popular. Even Classic VisualBasic is more like Object Pascal than the line-numbered BASIC dialects people who learned on eight-bit micros and MS-DOS used.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#52

Post by flangola7 »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #44
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…

There are a lot of kids learning to code in Lua on Roblox, maybe it’ll be the dominant language for backend programming in 20 years.

>20 years

I got bad news

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#54

Post by WorldMaker »

canadiantim wrote: post #20

Anyone recommend a UO-like experience these days?

Shards Online was trying to be that and in what little of it I played seem to capture some of the experience, but I uninstalled and stopped following them when they pivoted into cryptocurrency and NFTs. It's maybe too bad they didn't feel confident enough in the original direction of the game.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#55

Post by nottorp »

outworlder wrote: post #46
canadiantim wrote: post #20

Anyone recommend a UO-like experience these days?

That's... pretty difficult. UO had quite a few things going for it. 1) Nowhere was safe(although many places specially remote ones in the wilderness were totally chill). Cities had guards, but you (or someone else) would have to call them. This enabled all sorts of gameplay, including theft. But this was ok because... 2) Items were not too powerful. Classic UO you could get a +9 Sword of Vanquishing or whatever. Whil…

So UO was also about griefing your fellow player, like Eve?

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#56

Post by beebmam »

mysticllama wrote: post #15

as i recall, they devised their own scripting language, and they relied solely on flatfiles to track world-state… then every day at a given time, each server would have an off-hours save where the flatfiles would be persisted. players caught on to this, and would take advantage by having "server wars" during these save windows, when changes wouldn't be persisted, and would all equip their best kit and battle at certa…

Oh this brings back so many good memories. The Britain graveyard was where shit went DOWN during these non-persistence windows. I remember there was a large Japanese player base on my server and there were Japan vs USA fights every day.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#57

Post by xwdv »

gabereiser wrote: post #41
mysticllama wrote: post #15

as i recall, they devised their own scripting language, and they relied solely on flatfiles to track world-state… then every day at a given time, each server would have an off-hours save where the flatfiles would be persisted. players caught on to this, and would take advantage by having "server wars" during these save windows, when changes wouldn't be persisted, and would all equip their best kit and battle at certa…

UO:Renaissance was the best era of UO. Two worlds separated by moonstones to separate open-pvp with non-pvp. My younger brother and I would hang out in Briton in Felucia (open-pvp) and kill anyone trying to cross over with loot or anyone coming over with gear.

No, the best time period was before this, when there was only one unified open-pvp world and people could kill you and even burglarize your house if they stole the key and knew where you lived, or even just killed you right at your front doorstep before you get a chance to close the door and lock it.

Casual players forced to live in a truly dangerous world with thieves and blood thirsty killers, we’ll never see these dynamics in an MMO again.

When Renaissance was introduced, what happened was most people lived purely in the non-pvp world and horded massive wealth and resources safely (which would have made you a big target in the old world), while the pvp side just became an arena for people to fight all the time. Boring.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#59

Post by samstave »

ilyt wrote: post #42
clemailacct1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a wholesome, nostalgic post. It makes me wish I could take a time machine back to the 90’s and do it all over again.

Man describes how they were utterly horrible to other players in multiplayer game, using $$$ advantage wholesome fucking indeed

Indeed!

but such is the way.

We invented that shit as others tried hard trying.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#60

Post by BryantD »

samstave wrote: post #28
clemailacct1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a wholesome, nostalgic post. It makes me wish I could take a time machine back to the 90’s and do it all over again.

Thanks. my buddy from that story is an EVP today at blizzard.. Gaming and 3D and Architecture formed my career... I was a design eng for Lucas Film's Presidio, and I worked with Frank Gehry on MPKW (FBs HQ) and designed shit for Namco. A confluence of all three.

Ha! I love that Presidio campus, it’s nicely integrated with the environment.
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