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 registers readable/writable and the server requests unencrypted.
It is a shame that the cheat vs anti-cheat war has escalated to the point where kids today would rather pay $100 per month for access to a closed binary (with who-knows-what malware) which is able to bypass anti-cheat mechanisms rather than freely play with a live application that they are already invested in.
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.
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.
PK’s in UO were never very effective at deterring unattended resource-gathering (the main ‘cheat’ the staff fought so hard against). I recall having my group of friends all make fishermen at the same time and we reached grandmaster fishing skill in a week or two of 24/7 fishing.
Once we had those characters, there was no stopping us from quickly amassing enough wealth to buy our own castle. It was rather ridiculous. We also ended up with vast numbers of magic weapons and armour, magical reagents, gems, scrolls, and furniture. It ruins the entire economy of the game.
EasyUO was a big part of that. Someone had written a MIB (message in a bottle) script which would decode the coordinates from a bag full of MIBs and allow you to sail to the nearest one to begin fishing it up. It greatlyy streamlined the process of fishing up hundreds of those shipwreck treasure chests!
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 crazy like 30k active developers worldwide. And that was classic VB, not VB.Net.
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.
And there’s more competition coming in this space with Epic’s Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN) and Verse (which is going to land into the base UE5 engine soon according to their talks, so useful outside of Fortnite!)
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 that allows modding. Or games that are focused on programming. Plenty of opportunities to learn scripting in more legit ways.
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.
There are places for this kind of play, but I suppose they don’t give the same kind of thrill. Bot vs Bot scripting challenges online, like Battlecode https://battlecode.org/
Same. Wrote scripts to level up skills, set up runes to different stores to perform automated shopping rounds. Had one script for sparring that would recall to a bank or an Inn and log out if a staff appeared in the journal; since it was illegal to macro offline on some servers. It was all good fun and I always enjoyed having it running on my PC as some sort of Tamagotchi.
Me and my brother also ran our own servers for a while. Believe the last server I played on was one of the Zuluhotel ones.
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.
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.
+1 on learning to program via UO scripting -- I learned a couple of ways (AutoHotkey was one IIRC) to macro before there were programs devoted to UO. One of them was pretty primitive and I'd actually check the color of a pixel at X,Y to see if I needed to heal.
Learning how to install ShowEQ to cheat in everquest got me my first real exposure to linux...then trying to build a emulator for it took me down a rabbit hole. Was probably 12 at the time
By the year 1998 I was using the term "shard" in slides for MySQL, and I believe mSQL as well. The term might be found in Slashdot's source code. I am pretty sure I gave a talk on sharding at the open database summit in 2001.
I had previously used the term shard for an app I wrote and distributed for VMS around '92, but that app only ever had a handful of users. It was available via FTP.
FWIW I took the term from the movie "The Dark Crystal".
I agree that the movie, released in 1982, is likely the source for the term sharding used by games, consciously realized or not. Most of the generation would have seen it. Or perhaps from where Henson and Froud likely got the idea of a crystal shard containing a complete copy of the whole, holography, which I think got into the public consciousness in the 70s and 80s.
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 certain locations. all that said, it's not too surprising lots of creativity and ingenuity was required, given in 1997 the world had really seen nothing like it.
i remember getting it right after it came out -- i had just turned 11. when i tried to explain to people that it was a massive, detailed fantasy world where you could go on adventures with people in real-time, they'd look at me like i had two heads.
this got me into scripting and mods and was a big influence on why i became interested in software and hacking, and have had a career in it since.
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.
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"
Yes, I did a lot of that stuff too. That's not my point. There has been a very strong correlation to the people who lament things using the sort of terminology you did and the crowd that caused the changes they lament.
Someone like Xavori on Lake Superior was a good counterexample. He was a well role-played villain. Meanwhile there were hordes of troglodytes with borderline (or sometimes not at all borderline) offensive names going around and straight up griefing people. And that latter crowd ruined it for everyone.
A big delimiter I use when talking to people about those days was to what extent they view the largest issue being there not being enough unwilling participants in their PvP/griefing. A lot of people liked Siege Perilous, which was awesome. But a lot of the problem players didn't - because what they really enjoyed was griefing other players.
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.
You could try playing Tibia, it has exactly what you're describing, save for being able to enter other player's houses uninvited. It's kinda dead though
Thank you, anyone claiming otherwise is fucking sheltered. They never bothered to opened up a regular shard other than seige perilous which had extra difficulties cranked up so nobody bothered, and other games filled the gap (until those too were banned).
agreed, the introduction of safe zones ruined what made the game special. while the old way was brutal and could be outright toxic to new players, the pure lawlessness and unpredictability of open PVP was unique -- you could even murder players in town if you managed to do it without witnesses! the thrills i had in that game i haven't had since
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.
Ultima ][ Was one of my first games, which I found on a floppy left in an Apple ][e in 8th grade ~1990 or so... which got me and my best friend into gaming (and trouble)
Later, I was one of two on the Developer Relations Group (along with said best friend) @SC5 Intel and my cube was right next to Andy Grove - we had the same pee-schedule, for whatever reason Andy and I always seemed to only intersect in the restroom to pee..
Anyway - UO was a huge part of us validating the Celeron CPU as an acceptable gaming platform, aiming for a <$1,000 PC... This is when NURBS dolphin was 'THEE demo' (I had gone to school for 3D animation in Seattle (Mesmer, which became UW's animation course a year after I graduated, and thus I didnt get an 'accredited' degree because they bought the school, on SGIs - and was when NT4 was porting Softimage, Maya to PCs, we had the first AGP cards, first OpenGL ports of things and a new engine, Unreal)
Anyway - we ran a bank of Intel's highest end machines at the time and had 6 UO accounts connected with a T3 - so we dominated UO PK scene because we had zero lag, and everyone else was on 56K...
Man that was the golden era of my gaming life...
We had an unlimited expense account at Frys Electronics and could buy anything we liked.
But the best thing was how we were able to PK others with our bank of 6 acccounts, and we had a Canadian Pot Dealer who had a T1 (he shipped Cannabis via fedex to the states and made enough to pay $1,500/month for the T1 to his house) that played with us and was the 3rd member in our guild...
We had two accounts which were 'Snoop' and 'Sneak' and we would follow our Great Lords and Dread Lords ; all with 100 Hide Skill... so we would hide our Great Lords next to our Dread Lords with the same name...
We would taunt folks, with Dread - then hide right next to the Great Lord as the attacked and they would attack and kill the Great Lord, lose reputation, and then our hidden Snoop and Sneak chars would loot our Great Lords so that the enemy wouldnt get any loot... and only after the battle did they realize how duped they were...
Later, after Intel, I ran IT for the company that published (physically manufactured) Everquest and had same early beta access to everquest... but that game was not the same as UO.
I was there when Lord British was assassinated.
(dont get me started on Lag Death when playing against one of the top Quake players on a T3 at Intel (MyM)
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 explosion + ebolt combo.
When UO came out I had a ~5ms ping to LS server on a substantial university connection. I thought I was amazing at PvP until several months later when I was downgraded to a 56K modem :(
But for a while it was awesome being able to outrun people who were riding horses.
That wasnt 1998, my bad - it was 1996 with an ISP in seattle... I cant recall the name - and I want to attribute that password to ix.netcom, but thats not correct... who was the indy ISP in seattle at the time?
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.
I remember joining Google in 2001 and being struck they were using the term "sharding" for the ads databases (MySQL) instead of "partitions". I understood it at the time to be referring to Ultima Online.
Raph's memory dates to 1996, the blog post he references seems to be from 1999. I imagine the idea of database partitioning goes back at least to the 80s, anyone know what earlier terms were used? Other than "partition", of course.
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.
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.
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...
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?
In a similar vein to the "War Stories"-clips, (even though I never played Ultima,) their Ultima post-mortem from GDC is a great watch too.
https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0
Ultima Online is a game of great detail and there is an incredibly high number of actions available to the player. Truly an immersive experience. Kudos to those guys.
Honestly, I think it's impossible to recreate. Being able to use real-time voice makes a lot of group combat scenarios easy to coordinate, and those giant good vs evil battles were a real highlight of early UO to me. You'd have to coordinate with voice, or follow someone who was typing out the next target's name. Once you could hop in a group voice chat, there's someone who could say "target: Bob -- load up. 3, 2, 1, drop". The target can't heal through a coordinated scenario like this, and I think effectively killed group PvP. Of course you could do this if you were all in the same room back in the day, but that was uncommon.
Haven and Hearth has all the player-killing, house-building, and crafting. Takes a lot of work to travel to a player-built town and set up a "bank", though.
I wish I could find a game more on the "numbers go up" / programming side of things. I think I enjoyed macroing in UO more than anything about it, just writing my own scripts to raise skills. I automate webgames sometimes when I'm bored, but even that's not quite the same.
Maybe I'll reinstall UO this weekend and play a player server.
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.
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. While it did give you a nice edge (pun intended), it wasn't really worth walking around with it in your normal activities, because of (1) and also...
3) Items stayed in your corpse when you died(until the 'insurance system' that is). So even if you had better gear, you would normally walk around with gear that was easier to replace. And you didn't have to necessarily pay for that because there was...
4) Lots of crafting skills. One could train blacksmithing/mining and mine away. There was a risk involved in these activities, as usual. But other than time, you could have a character that could build any gear you would need - they would be plain boring non-magical, but good enough for any foe in the world, if you knew what you were doing. You would probably do this with another character because...
5) 700 skill cap. So you could grandmaster 7 skills, or spread this across more skills(some characters would get just enough magery to use recall runes). Which also meant that characters would not get exponentially powerful. As long as you had trained the skills you wanted to use, it didn't really matter if your character was one month old or 5 years old. The field was pretty level pretty quick, no one-shotting newbies (really [young] characters were protected) and one could not just spam magic due to...
6) Reagent requirements. Spells were really powerful but really expensive. They took mana and physical reagents that you had to buy in order to cast them. Ran out of reagents? Too bad, time to use that stick. Someone stole them from you? If you survive you are walking home today. If you died, you won't respawn somewhere else, you still need to walk home. But that's fine as you had...
7) Items. Items galore. The land itself had resources. Want some arrows? If you have the skills, go kill some birds and chop trees. Want bandages? Cut up the ressurrection robe (after you found a wandering healer or a friendly player to ressurrect you). Saw a horse? If you have taming, go tame it. I remember dying in the middle of nowhere and returning home fully equipped - bow, arrows, leather armor, horseback. This was revolutionary at that time - and kinda still is in massively multiplayer games. This also leads to memorable moments. Like the time when people got fed up at some 'player killer' and a group stood outside their house. Dude wouldn't come out, so people started bringing tables, chairs, food, and they had a whole picnic in front of his house.
I could go on and on. I am not even touching on the lore, which had many previous games to draw from.
There are games that are harsh(nowhere is safe, dying has stakes, etc), have no classes, player created items, no 'respawns', lots of items to play with, but the exact interplay of gameplay elements is difficult to find. I've considered EVE Online as 'UO in space'. Being a corporate space dystopia it does not have the same "cozy" vibe that even the harshest Ultima Online environments had. Dying was actually fun a lot of the time. Valheim has the closest "vibe" but it's still a little bit on the soft side, and is not an MMO (A MMORPG Valheim, if properly done, would be phenomenal). Rust was mentioned but I do not think it hits the same spot.
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.
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.
I recently tried to resurrect my account. They were able to dust off my secondary account but couldn't track down my main account. It's weird as I was able to dig up old emails from Origin to the email address I told them I used, but they said there was no record of an account with that email. Alas.
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.
I worked on a private sphere server and dropped my toes in programming there which helped later in life. I remember really struggling and not understanding the concept of arrays... All I could muster was static variables and needed help creating a paginated list of heads you collected from players
It is a shame that the cheat vs anti-cheat war has escalated to the point where kids today would rather pay $100 per month for access to a closed binary (with who-knows-what malware) which is able to bypass anti-cheat mechanisms rather than freely play with a live application that they are already invested in.