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.
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.
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.
I got bad news
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.
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.
Amazing that you can't script your most-used computer - your phone.
(seriously, why can't we write an automated script to handle new phone calls?)
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.
I was a little put off initially when LiveOverflow (youtube) switched to being a minecraft channel but the material ended up being pretty good.
There are client-side anticheats, both as external apps and entire clients with anticheats incorporated into them
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 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.
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.
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)
But for a while it was awesome being able to outrun people who were riding horses.
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.
wholesome fucking indeed
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.
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.
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.
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1687936/atari-st-...
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?
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.
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. 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.
Kal Vas Xen Corp!
Games have always been at the forefront of software innovation. I love working with them.
In fact, the first time I saw the intro[1], I thought my monitor had an issue.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqOZlNxbfI — about 32 seconds in.
That was my last login.
Through using the term sharding might have come from there (which is what the article claims).
