Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server
48 points by notsentient 5 hours ago | 7 comments
kev009 3 hours ago
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.
replyIChrisI 39 minutes ago
I enjoyed Ultimate Online, back in the day.
replyRecently, 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.
shutterkiller 2 hours ago
Posts like this are a great reminder that protocol archaeology is half software history, half debugging. The reconstruction work here sounds genuinely fun.
reply
I've been working on my own MFC C++ decompilation project. It's insane how useful LLMs are for this.