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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

raphkoster.com

61–70 of 92 posts

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For some players, yes.

For most players, no. It was pve and role playing. Once they split the realms to pvp and non-pvp, the pvp realm had a much lower player base because it was pks, thieves, and old timers who put a house down before the split.

If the game didn't have full looting of dead bodies and stealing there probably could have been much better interactions between the 2 groups of people but getting pk'd and losing all items was so annoying for casual players.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#62
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience most of the people who say this were exactly the sort of people that ruined it for everyone else by taking things too far. Turns out people didn't find it fun to be slaughtered by a horde of 15 teenagers with names like "frogsmasha"

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#63
post #36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FblQ00Ho

That was my 1998 password to dialup in seattle for Diablo.

I have a shitty mem, but I can recall every single password I have ever used...

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The imagination for the campus was nuts. I put in for a lot more...

The idea was to avoid Big Rock, such that we didnt have a flooded DC... as the initial design req was to avoid the DC flooding...

But what ended up happening was that the DC was raided and all the DC 10G switches were stolen ($40 million) and the design had to be redone...

But Raliegh went on to be the head of Goog networking

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#66
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…

I had a similar experience in past with MUDs. I mean it provides an incentive to learn programming but cheating is cheating. Popular competitive games would be dead if they didn't fight against cheating. I consider anti-cheat measures a necessary evil Scripting menial tasks is probably lowest form of cheating but still cheating. Would it be ok if someone made a bot that plays perfect PVP? There are plenty of games th…

scripting for high level pvp was actually my favorite task. Things like automatic potions at X health, trapped pouch management and execution, teleport target timing, fast looting, etc.

UO pvp was not about being perfect, it was about selfishly manipulating a mass of fighting to loot stuff while not losing your loot. 3 people precasting flamestrike is more broken than anything an individual or bot can ever do. instant trapped pouches were the only way to escape that and the only way to activate the right one is to script it or to stop moving, mouse over to your inventory, and double click it. scripting became THE BALANCE in that regard.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#67
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was there for that. While the gameplay was indeed more fun, the separation and “hoarding of wealth” made it popular. I had a castle on either side. My feluca stronghold was only to stash ill gotten goods until I could move them to trammel. I had more fun playing dodge the pain train and get to bank than I ever did pre-separation. Pre-separation was more natural feeling but the split gave a risk vs reward buff.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#68
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.

PK or GM. I actually still have a lot of my scripts in storage.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#69
post #42

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

you are lit the best reply I have ever had. -

I am guilty

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