Urilia
Urilia is a small world floating in the etheral mists of the Internet. This world is currently under construction, please observe all posted work zone speed limits.
I started playing Ultima Online in 1999, after my wife had been turned on to this "cool online game that's just like Dungeons & Dragons" by a friend at work. I was appalled, at first; internet games were a pale bastardization of the "pure" form of role-playing that my friends and I enjoyed.
The first time I allowed my wife to convince me to try the game out, I loved and hated it at the same time. This thing was graphically just like you'd imagine the towns and characters in AD&D. The number crunching and die rolling seemed to be fairly handled by this invisible Dungeon Master called "the server". Still, the emulator the shard ran on was so unstable, there were times I could count 20 seconds between taking a step with my character.
See, this Ultima Online shard was running on a free server. If you paid the money for the installation CD, you could put the standard client on your hard drive. Go make a few file changes and instead of paying $10.00 U.S. a month to play on the corporate servers, you paid only your ISP fees to connect and play on a free server.
Apparently, some internet geek with too much time and brains on his hands got sick of dealing with jerk players on the pay-for-play servers and reverse engineered the code in order to create his own server-emulator. Within 6 months, we had moved on to a more stable emulator running a similar set of scripts as our first server and were hooking back up with old friends on the new server, Mytharria.
3 months later, my wife and I were making names for ourselves on Mytharria. She was friendly and fun and would help anyone at any time. She went out of her way to welcome new players and help show them "the ropes". We were careful to maintain the context of the game and encourage others to stay in character and make our virtual world a better place for all. I was known for killing player characters who were rule breakers. At the time, I caught flak from the staff because most of the people I was killing were flagged PvP-, but the fact that they were breaking the rules often let me slide by. I was also the kind of guy who would open a gate to a remote part of the map, run through, let my persuer come through after me, kill them and then leave their ghost trapped on the remote island. It was cool to be helpful to Game Masters. They often gave you Runes to locations that were only accessible to a GM, but then they'd forget to ask for them back:-)
Mytharria was a pretty cool server run by a guy who went by the Internet chat handle, DreamWeaver. Mytharria ran on the POL (Pen-Ultima Online) emulator and E-script scripting language. The creator of this most stable and customizable of server emulators was Eric Swanson. Eric was a Canadian who had moved to St. Louis with his wife. His day job was a programming gig for a place that did slide-card readers.
Eric was going through an ugly divorce with his wife when we first heard of him, and later started hanging out with our group of Pen & Paper gaming buddies for a couple years. Eric went on to bigger and better things, no doubt, and has since handed over maintenance and developement to a group of guys.
Anyway, my wife, Stacey, was asked to become a GM for Mytharria. At the time, DreamWeaver was busy making preparations for a huge wedding to his new fiance. Many of his Game Masters had stopped logging in (people just get busy with real life). By default, Stacey became the only GM to log any real time in-game. At that time, Mytharria sported an active account base of 300 players, with a peak player count of 21 players on big nights.
Stacey was the Lone GM for about 3 months before she convinced the 1 or 2 guys who did occasionally log in to make me a Game Master as well. Inside the next month, we brought the peak online player count to 50+ on an almost nightly basis.
In the months before I came on board, Stacey and I found we made the perfect GM couple. Every idea I proposed, she would hone and vice-versa. We'd be breathless with excitement building idea upon idea and then jumping on-line to make things happen in-game. We both learned a great deal about what it meant to be a Game Master and what players expect from you and from other players in that time.
As with all good things, those times had to end. DreamWeaver's old Head Game Master (Internet handle of Razi) dropped by after an 8 month absence and saw this incredibly vibrant world. He immediately contacted DreamWeaver and convinced him to bring on 5 other "old buddies". Suddenly, we found that Razi was "back in charge" with a brand new group of friends to run the server AND he had some new rules for how things would be done moving forward. I think I lasted 15 minutes in the IRC meeting that morning before Stacey told Razi and DreamWeaver they could "F" themselves. I quit about 5 minutes after that.
We had put so much of ourselves and our lives into that little world, we felt totally betrayed by DreamWeaver. The "new rules" included telling us we could no longer do anything we'd been doing before without prior approval from Razi. Where were we going to go, and what were we going to do?
It was probably 6 months of major Mytharria withdrawl before I realized I'd never be happy playing on anyone else's server. I convinced one of my best friends (Eldred) to buy a server class machine and host some bandwidth.
Sounds easy, I know. Actually, I'd been formulating some of the ideas I thought would make a good server for many months and convinced Eldred and Stacey that we could do the whole thing. We could put up a server to end all servers.
As are many people who dive into something unprepared, I was totally lacking in the requisite skills to put together my own, on-line world. You'd think that a vision of brilliance would be enough. It's not.
I poured on all my charm and personality in an attempt to put together a staff of scripters. It was actually easy to get scripters to come and help, but it was impossible to get them to script anything I wanted scripted. It ended badly time after time and I burned a lot of bridges by firing scripter after scripter.
Finally, I taught myself VB6 and came back to scripting. Now, I'm able to do about 70% of what I need done on a pretty regular basis. I badgered Eldred until he learned some scripting and now he's doing it with us. I also got REAL lucky when an old gaming buddy contacted me from out of state and it turned out he was a scripter, too.
I started playing Ultima Online in 1999, after my wife had been turned on to this "cool online game that's just like Dungeons & Dragons" by a friend at work. I was appalled, at first; internet games were a pale bastardization of the "pure" form of role-playing that my friends and I enjoyed.
The first time I allowed my wife to convince me to try the game out, I loved and hated it at the same time. This thing was graphically just like you'd imagine the towns and characters in AD&D. The number crunching and die rolling seemed to be fairly handled by this invisible Dungeon Master called "the server". Still, the emulator the shard ran on was so unstable, there were times I could count 20 seconds between taking a step with my character.
See, this Ultima Online shard was running on a free server. If you paid the money for the installation CD, you could put the standard client on your hard drive. Go make a few file changes and instead of paying $10.00 U.S. a month to play on the corporate servers, you paid only your ISP fees to connect and play on a free server.
Apparently, some internet geek with too much time and brains on his hands got sick of dealing with jerk players on the pay-for-play servers and reverse engineered the code in order to create his own server-emulator. Within 6 months, we had moved on to a more stable emulator running a similar set of scripts as our first server and were hooking back up with old friends on the new server, Mytharria.
3 months later, my wife and I were making names for ourselves on Mytharria. She was friendly and fun and would help anyone at any time. She went out of her way to welcome new players and help show them "the ropes". We were careful to maintain the context of the game and encourage others to stay in character and make our virtual world a better place for all. I was known for killing player characters who were rule breakers. At the time, I caught flak from the staff because most of the people I was killing were flagged PvP-, but the fact that they were breaking the rules often let me slide by. I was also the kind of guy who would open a gate to a remote part of the map, run through, let my persuer come through after me, kill them and then leave their ghost trapped on the remote island. It was cool to be helpful to Game Masters. They often gave you Runes to locations that were only accessible to a GM, but then they'd forget to ask for them back:-)
Mytharria was a pretty cool server run by a guy who went by the Internet chat handle, DreamWeaver. Mytharria ran on the POL (Pen-Ultima Online) emulator and E-script scripting language. The creator of this most stable and customizable of server emulators was Eric Swanson. Eric was a Canadian who had moved to St. Louis with his wife. His day job was a programming gig for a place that did slide-card readers.
Eric was going through an ugly divorce with his wife when we first heard of him, and later started hanging out with our group of Pen & Paper gaming buddies for a couple years. Eric went on to bigger and better things, no doubt, and has since handed over maintenance and developement to a group of guys.
Anyway, my wife, Stacey, was asked to become a GM for Mytharria. At the time, DreamWeaver was busy making preparations for a huge wedding to his new fiance. Many of his Game Masters had stopped logging in (people just get busy with real life). By default, Stacey became the only GM to log any real time in-game. At that time, Mytharria sported an active account base of 300 players, with a peak player count of 21 players on big nights.
Stacey was the Lone GM for about 3 months before she convinced the 1 or 2 guys who did occasionally log in to make me a Game Master as well. Inside the next month, we brought the peak online player count to 50+ on an almost nightly basis.
In the months before I came on board, Stacey and I found we made the perfect GM couple. Every idea I proposed, she would hone and vice-versa. We'd be breathless with excitement building idea upon idea and then jumping on-line to make things happen in-game. We both learned a great deal about what it meant to be a Game Master and what players expect from you and from other players in that time.
As with all good things, those times had to end. DreamWeaver's old Head Game Master (Internet handle of Razi) dropped by after an 8 month absence and saw this incredibly vibrant world. He immediately contacted DreamWeaver and convinced him to bring on 5 other "old buddies". Suddenly, we found that Razi was "back in charge" with a brand new group of friends to run the server AND he had some new rules for how things would be done moving forward. I think I lasted 15 minutes in the IRC meeting that morning before Stacey told Razi and DreamWeaver they could "F" themselves. I quit about 5 minutes after that.
We had put so much of ourselves and our lives into that little world, we felt totally betrayed by DreamWeaver. The "new rules" included telling us we could no longer do anything we'd been doing before without prior approval from Razi. Where were we going to go, and what were we going to do?
It was probably 6 months of major Mytharria withdrawl before I realized I'd never be happy playing on anyone else's server. I convinced one of my best friends (Eldred) to buy a server class machine and host some bandwidth.
Sounds easy, I know. Actually, I'd been formulating some of the ideas I thought would make a good server for many months and convinced Eldred and Stacey that we could do the whole thing. We could put up a server to end all servers.
As are many people who dive into something unprepared, I was totally lacking in the requisite skills to put together my own, on-line world. You'd think that a vision of brilliance would be enough. It's not.
I poured on all my charm and personality in an attempt to put together a staff of scripters. It was actually easy to get scripters to come and help, but it was impossible to get them to script anything I wanted scripted. It ended badly time after time and I burned a lot of bridges by firing scripter after scripter.
Finally, I taught myself VB6 and came back to scripting. Now, I'm able to do about 70% of what I need done on a pretty regular basis. I badgered Eldred until he learned some scripting and now he's doing it with us. I also got REAL lucky when an old gaming buddy contacted me from out of state and it turned out he was a scripter, too.
posted by Jaycen Rigger at 1:40 AM
2 Comments:
Sentack,
I knew you looked familiar. Do you still post to the POL forums from time to time? I always associated your name with POL.
Eric was a great guy, and POL is a genius data base manager. Scripting is "fun", and the core takes care of the rest.
Thanks for the support. If you're ever interested in coming on and bumming around, just e-mail or icq me. I'd be happy to make you and account.
The documentation is light years better than it was. The main POL website moved (after Eric stopped supporting the core) and you can find that link on this site.
I couldn't tell you about the crafting stuff since I'm using 3rd generation custom scripts. I have no idea how close they are to distro because I've never looked at the distro since 095 came out.
My co-admin just went through Tailoring and Blacksmithy. I re-did Tinkering to be a series of Case statements. Seemed to make the whole thing more modular and easy to follow. We'll probably do something similar with the rest.
We're eventually going to do the atomistic thing (started adding some of the props to raw resources to support the up coming change). You can read about that in one of my older posts on this site.
I'd be happy to BS with you about specifics on IRC or ICQ, if you use either of those media.
Maybe I can talk you into re-opening your interest in UO, if not POL;-P
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