![]() New drains were proposed: taxes, maintenance fees on housing, etc. Thus, significantly increasing the decay or degradation rates is politically unfeasible. However, players are (understandably) extremely resistant to rule changes which take things away from them. The problem, they concluded, was the lack of drains – not enough stuff was flowing out. But, no matter how much they added, the resources always flowed into inventory and just sat there. > At first, the designers attempted to solve the deflation problem by pumping more resources into the world – they simply increased the total quantity of resources in the bank. I think I'm going to call such features "indulgences" in the future. Extreme examples might be titles for example, 10,000 gold buys a character the title "lord". Services such as ‘red hair dye’ which players are willing to pay for but which don’t cost server resources. A lot seems obvious to me as a sometime-MMO player, but this was written almost 10 years before I started playing MMOs! I think my favourite bit is this: It's quite a laugh and really makes you think. The workarounds individual servers made through the rudimentary scripting language was impressive (many of these hacks were then copied into the core emulation scripts).įor trips down memory lane, these sites are still live - and being updated? Wow. It was incredibly buggy and never, to my knowledge, reached feature parity with the full game. New Ultima Online releases meant being late for school to try and debug the client code changes to be able to quickly update the server, otherwise no one could log in. ![]() Debugging often meant the server administrators would give you root access to debug their running server. It also got me into Linux: while some emulation servers were run on home PCs, others were run on hosted machines. C++, with its own scripting engine built in. But for me, it was pre-RunUO: SphereServer (aka GrayServer, I think) and UOX3. Ultima Online emulators were what took small interest for me and blew it up into a career. > As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read I wrote up the bug in more details, with links to the source code: (I've actually been able to successfully apply this technique of giving HN trolls their own weapons (quoting their own words back to them), then giving them to themselves (pointing them back to their previous posts), to make them disappear from HN!)īut giving the troll to itself triggered another bug, because apparently it forgot to clear the TROLL flag, so you could still not leave the room, because when you tried to go through the exit the troll previously blocked, it said that "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture." even though there was no troll in the room.ĭecades later I finally found the Zork source code, and it turns out there was actually a troll flag called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" that it forgot to clear, which the exit depended on. To have killed him in cold blood then would have been cruel, so I tried something else: His life in the guttural tongue of the trolls. The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the giftĪnd not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it. My favorite object containment related ZORK bug (which I discovered in the origin ZORK on MIT-DM, but which persisted in the InfoCom version), involves the troll holding an axe, blocking the door to the depths of the dungeon, who eats anything you give to him: Reminds me of the "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" in Zork!ĭonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside p. Not only did the assassin manage to escape, but the demons had killed nearly every player attending the address." If that wasn’t shocking enough for the attendees, a fellow developer of the game known as Starr Long, with his in-game character Lord Blackthorn, summoned a horde of demons to kill the assassin. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag, leaving him open to being killed. "It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. ![]() But while British was giving his address, a player character known as Rainz cast a spell scroll that set the Lord on fire, killing him instantly. During the game’s online beta test, Lord British gave an address to fellow players at his Castle Britannia. Lord British had considerable protection from an entourage of bodyguards and was even explicitly coded to be invulnerable to virtually any attack. Using this character, Richard acted as Ultima’s King and would sometimes interact with other players. "Lord British was a player character created by Richard Garriott, the producer of Ultima Online. This reminds me of the assassination of Lord British:
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