FRESH

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Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

57 points by notsentient

by skerit

0 subcomment

> I worked on this project intermittently for 10 years, until recent developments in LLMs finally made it possible to complete this seemingly never-ending task.
I've been working on my own MFC C++ decompilation project. It's insane how useful LLMs are for this.

by kev009

1 subcomments

The UO emulator scene got me into network programming. I've never seen an online game capture so many ancillary/emergent/accidental gameplay mechanics as well as this, somehow all the 3d MMOs seemed to downgrade a lot of the interesting economics, building, exploring that UO delivered. PvP and quest type stuff is probably a lot better in other games but it was still compelling and you could realistically play solo or in a group or casually interact with randoms and effortlessly switch between these as you felt like it.

by IChrisI

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I enjoyed Ultimate Online, back in the day.
Recently, I've enjoyed scripting for the TazUO game client in Python; it's a slightly older version of Python 3, but still far ahead of scripting in Razor or SteamUO. If you're looking for a quiet single-player shard to play around with, I've enjoyed Memento.

by grebc

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Memories.
I played T2A a little last year, great shard & peeps running it.
https://www.uosecondage.com/

by shutterkiller

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Posts like this are a great reminder that protocol archaeology is half software history, half debugging. The reconstruction work here sounds genuinely fun.

by snickmy

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sooo many memories.
got into it with Sphere (51 and 55) if my memory doesn't trick me.
was there ever a working port of the client for OSX ? would love to revamp it.

by shevy-java

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Well, props for that effort.
I liked the old Ultima saga, in particular from 5 to 7. Ultima 8 ... I did not hate it, but they killed off the old concept. Perhaps the old genre was meant to die anyway, but it was such a big difference from 7 to 8. While 7 is often the most praised variant, I particularly hated combat; it was much easier in Ultima 6. Either way it was specific for the 1990s era for the most part, which was pretty nice. (Ok - just looked up ... Ultima 1 to 5 actually was in the 1980s era; I thought it wasn't quite that old. Ultima 6 was released in 1990.)

by youre-wrong3

0 subcomment