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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

#71

Post by DelightOne »

cottenio wrote: post #40
veleek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, my point was that an internal PoW ledger (not decentralized but still technically a blockchain) would’ve been useful because: A) stack tracking per stackable type is trivial with UXTO, and B) adding a few seconds of PoW makes the resulting chain so hard to forge for crime-of-opportunity style attacks (preventing internal employees from making untraceable gold) that it could’ve prevented a few firings/calls to t…

Are there ready-to-use blockchain libraries to simply create such a blockchain or does everything have to be custom-written and tested manually -> requiring the developer be an expert?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#72

Post by cottenio »

namrog84 wrote: post #57
cottenio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you mux the data of the coins? If you have a stack of gold containing 5 uuid and mix it with another stack of 3 uuid but only support 5 uuid per stack. Then calculate proportional weightings which 5 you store. You could probably find a way to try and wash the money but I think it could be done with right heuristics to catch a good majority of use cases but maybe not all.

I just want to note that I only started paying attention to cryptography after I left UO and got into Bitcoin, which sounds like an NFT-grifting MMO supervillain origin story - I know - but I sure did learn a lot about merkle trees and solving interesting social problems.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#73

Post by cottenio »

googlryas wrote: post #70
cottenio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, stacks are stacks. They’re an object id with a quantity counter. Each stack, however, was capable of holding its own separate script and objvars; there were event triggers to handle special cases like “onStackAdd” and such.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#74

Post by josephd79 »

waynesonfire wrote: post #41
DixieDev wrote: post #30

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…

The reason UO will never be re-created is that it was the first game of it's kind and thus every player had only one option. In modern times, the gamer population is so bifurcated that I'm not sure it'll ever be possible to have such a mix of player types in a single unforgiving ecosystem.

Plus newer game generation wouldn’t like the idea of being pk’d and losing items….

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#75

Post by cottenio »

no_wizard wrote: post #11
victorclf wrote: post #3

Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.

It appears to be still around? https://uo.com/ EDIT: looks like it changed hands a number of times, very unlikely its as good as it once was, I imagine

Not really “changed hands.”

Stages:

1. EA with original Origin devs 2. EA post-Origin 3. EA, integrated into Online group (with Westwood) 4. EA Mythic (UO & DAOC) 5. Broadsword (owned by the former GM of EA Mythic under a licensing deal)

I think that’s fairly accurate. Older devs correct me if I’m wrong.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#76

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

kmeisthax wrote: post #32
palata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...

Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.

If the funds are sent to mixers?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#77

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

benlwalker wrote: post #65
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

Now if they could just eliminate the grind, and get a thriving player base again!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#78

Post by cottenio »

no_wizard wrote: post #9

Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if…

I just want to mention that the C++ code running UO was incredibly fast at what it did, and it even wrapped a custom scripting language called Wombat that ran all the gameplay logic.

Pretty sure Jason Spangler, genius, made a JIT compiler in LLVM for Wombat just to see how much code we could execute in each 250ms tick.

During one of my live events I got 500 people on-screen (in what, an 800x600 pixel screen?) thanks to how efficient the networking, gameplay, and client rendering code had become.

Well. Then the telestorming began because I forgot to disable it…

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#79

Post by cottenio »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #19
shiftpgdn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. The technical term "sharding" literally comes from the intro video in the game where they explain why there are multiple copies of the same world.

> Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. Yeah, but not UUIDs. Those go back to the 80s.

But shards! lol

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#80

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

namrog84 wrote: post #54
DixieDev wrote: post #30

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…

One of the challenges is finding the right proportional scale. If the difficulty or fun of say blacksmithing nice items for the community. And you have it balanced out that you expect 20% of players be blacksmith. But then either 10 or 30% be blacksmiths either items skyrocket in price and make it unobtainable to most or the floor bottoms out making it not viable for most to engage in a market. I think its solvable b…

I don't understand why MMOs could never figure out how to make resource gathering as fun (or more fun) than hack & slashing.

Stardew Valley and other games - Death's Door, A Short Hike, Toem, etc - figured this out.

Why haven't any MMOs done it?

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