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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

blog.cotten.io

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#61

Post by namrog84 »

arduinomancer wrote: post #46

This is pretty specific but does anyone remember in one of the Runescape open betas back in the day there was a duping bug? I think involving a chest? If I recall it was really easy to do and by the end of the beta like everyone had totally jacked up gear Of course it all got reset eventually since it was just a beta but I recall it being pretty hilarious to play during that period

Not only that but diablo 2 had such a prolific duping problems of this 1 ring. The ring itself became a currency.

They eventually added a mechanic in game that consumed the rings for something else as a way to remove the rings from game without deleting at will.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#62

Post by [deleted] »

cottenio wrote: post #59
nordsieck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 larg…

EVE is my favorite example. There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).

[deleted]

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#63

Post by hoten »

alexose wrote: post #31
hoten wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, that's odd. I can't figure out how to get that problem to happen. Not even selected a preset works?

By the way, if you manage to get it to work, make an account starting with '@' to get admin privileges. You could also explore the local play–it's the same server code, but running in a web worker instead of on my server.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#65

Post by benlwalker »

bevacqua wrote: post #20

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bu…

There's also now an open source recreation of the original client, all written in C# that actually uses a GPU so it renders 4k at 250fps instead of 800x600 at 12.5fps. It's a very mature and stable reproduction at this point.

https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#66

Post by josephg »

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…

> 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.

You can also generate unique IDs by giving each server/node a unique hash and then use (node_id,1), (node_id,2), ... etc. Its more complex this way but this approach compresses way better if you have a lot of IDs. (Thanks Martin Kleppmann for this trick)

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#67

Post by toast0 »

zinckiwi wrote: post #55
Alex3917 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't necessarily personally disagree with this, but this counter argument is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4j-5YFKK4

I largely agree with the perspective of that video. Specifically thinking of the difference between EQ and WoW, I do think there's one objective difference though: downtime. It wasn't uncommon to spend minutes recovering from a fight, or wait 20+ minutes between spawns if you were camping a particular spot. At the time we moaned about it, so WoW came along, and "solved" the complaint. In hindsight, the downtime was t…

> In hindsight, the downtime was the best part of the game.

There's a lot of this in baseball spectation as well, maybe american football too. The game is there to bring you together and hang out.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#68

Post by the_only_law »

cottenio wrote: post #59
nordsieck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 larg…

EVE is my favorite example. There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).

> Battlefield 2

Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#69

Post by cottenio »

not2b wrote: post #58
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.

Couldn't they just use a Merkle tree, like git does, to keep track of the history? I think that's what he's referring to here. They don't need proof of work if the code that can modify the history is trusted.

As a huge fan and experienced implementer of merkle trees in my modern work I really wish I had known what they were at the time :)

Merkle trees don’t solve the forgeability issue, just the unbroken chain of what you currently have. So, if you have control over the server you can just create a set of events with your “+5 billion gold” event injected in it, recalculate the tree and root and voila: forgery.

PoW doesn’t prevent this, it just adds computational time provably spent between the events so that if you DID try to inject a false record a year ago you’d have to spend that same amount of time calculating the resulting merkle tree.

Merkle trees all the way down!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#70

Post by googlryas »

cottenio wrote: post #53
armchairhacker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Consider the sheer scale: people sell 200 million UO gold for $10. Can you imagine every gold piece having a unique UUID? Even if you didn’t use 256 bit hashes, even at 64 bits you’d be talking about 1.6gb per $10 worth of UO gold. UXTO would’ve been a neat technology to have to experiment with at least. Memory was at enough of a premium that even in the tagging system we made in the article it was just for the rares…

Are 1 UO gold coins even individually addressable?
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