Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

58 points - today at 6:31 AM

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Comments

skerit today at 8:51 AM
> 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.

kev009 today at 8:04 AM
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.
IChrisI today at 10:07 AM
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.

grebc today at 8:00 AM
Memories.

I played T2A a little last year, great shard & peeps running it.

https://www.uosecondage.com/

shutterkiller today at 8:52 AM
Posts like this are a great reminder that protocol archaeology is half software history, half debugging. The reconstruction work here sounds genuinely fun.
snickmy today at 9:08 AM
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.

shevy-java today at 11:04 AM
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.)

youre-wrong3 today at 9:09 AM
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