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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

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Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#81

Post by hinkley »

marzell wrote: post #35

I was unaware that Game Neverending was the origin of Flickr. Interesting as Glitch[0] was also the origin of Slack. Seems to be an interesting theme in Stoot's career. [0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/

Slack the app might come from a game, but the name (and we are discussing names here) comes from the Church of the Subgenius, which existed in 1994.

There’s a reason there’s another chat app named Discord. Long before His Noodly Appendage ever waved, there was the Church if the Subgenius and Discordianism fighting it out for ridiculous pseudo religion supremacy. Until I lost my wallet around 1998 I was a Real and Genuine Pope, thanks to Project Pan-Pontification. Since then nobody has treated me well.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#82

Post by hinkley »

simonw wrote: post #7
marmee wrote: post #4

This is discussed here in detail (the entire series is highly recommended) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE

That was great! Ultima creator Richard Garriott talking about how they tried to include a "virtual ecology" system in the game with prey animals and predator animals... but the players just wiped out every living creature. It mentions "sharding" as a term they invented too.

There was a moment when I was playing a rogue in WoW, when the ridiculousness of murder hobo games really hit me full force. I played a Druid, y’know, love nature, save the animals? And they had the same quests to go murder fifty alligators for their teeth and you had to murder twenty wolves to get to the alligators. Like what in the actual fuck.

So I’m playing the rogue, and we all have quests to kill the leader of the ogres, or the ogre shaman (you had to murder so many ogres), who is in the back of the cave. So if you play a Druid or a paladin or a priest you have to kill his whole tribe just to get to him, possibly even wait for more of them to show up to murder them as well.

Meanwhile the rogue, who’s supposed to be the most ethically challenged class in the game, can sneak past all of his friends, kill the one troublemaker, and sneak back out without having to take any innocent lives. What kind of weird messages are we sending here, Blizzard?

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#83

Post by chiph »

hinkley wrote: post #81
marzell wrote: post #35

I was unaware that Game Neverending was the origin of Flickr. Interesting as Glitch[0] was also the origin of Slack. Seems to be an interesting theme in Stoot's career. [0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/

Slack the app might come from a game, but the name (and we are discussing names here) comes from the Church of the Subgenius, which existed in 1994. There’s a reason there’s another chat app named Discord. Long before His Noodly Appendage ever waved, there was the Church if the Subgenius and Discordianism fighting it out for ridiculous pseudo religion supremacy. Until I lost my wallet around 1998 I was a Real and Gen…

It wasn't hidden in any real way, but the Atari ST had a easter-egg of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs in their 8x16 font in the box-drawing section. U+250C, U+2510, U+2514 and U+2518. Computing was more fun in the 80's...

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1687936/atari-st-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#84

Post by rybar »

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…

Amazing parallel to my discovery of programming.

I distinctly remember the EUO window and the first time I was trying to understand the syntax of a random script I pasted into it. It was almost readable with and made sense “if X”, “while X”..

Who knew I was learning basic flow control, booleans and variables.

What stuck the most after all the years is that curious desire to tinker and hack at something obsessively until you get it.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#85

Post by nottorp »

mter wrote: post #61
nottorp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if you don't lose your items, getting pvped when you're pveing happily is still griefing. You don't lose ingame items but they waste your irl time.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#86

Post by taskforcegemini »

jahsome wrote: post #25
debaserab2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Me too! Ain't no way I had time at 14 to train taming. Ended up taking an equivalent amount of time learning to script it anyway though... Led me to a lifelong obsession with automation, although I never quite picked up the pure cs fundamentals. I guess I'll always be a script kiddie at heart.

sounds more like a hacker to me. script kiddies usually don't write or understand the scripts they use

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#87

Post by KomoD »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #71
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…

This is actually one of the more interesting things happening in Minecraft. The only form of anticheat is in server mods, so both sides of the coin are pretty observable. I was a little put off initially when LiveOverflow (youtube) switched to being a minecraft channel but the material ended up being pretty good.

> The only form of anticheat is in server mods

There are client-side anticheats, both as external apps and entire clients with anticheats incorporated into them

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#88

Post by xwdv »

jghn wrote: post #62
xwdv wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I didn’t always kill people, sometimes they begged for mercy and I made them hand over some loot and then took off.

But sometimes we killed people and cut up their bodies into pieces and fed them to pigs.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#89

Post by mancerayder »

I loved Ultima Online! I gravitated towards wealth accumulation through selling rare weapons and armor in towns. One day I logged in and my house got robbed, my chests of ingots, armor and swords completely empty, I'm surprised I even had the house remaining.

That was my last login.

Re: Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?

#90

Post by jahsome »

taskforcegemini wrote: post #86
jahsome wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too! Ain't no way I had time at 14 to train taming. Ended up taking an equivalent amount of time learning to script it anyway though... Led me to a lifelong obsession with automation, although I never quite picked up the pure cs fundamentals. I guess I'll always be a script kiddie at heart.

sounds more like a hacker to me. script kiddies usually don't write or understand the scripts they use

Thank you for checking my imposter syndrome! Looking back I'm realizing I was actually just using the debugger to piece things together, but I always felt like a fraud because I wasn't just magically generating it from my own mind.

I still struggle with the same feelings, but the older and more experienced I get, the more time I spend looking things up. Although "chatting" with a certain LLM has lately been replacing most of that time.

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