Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

grebc

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

kev009

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.

skerit

> 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.

shutterkiller

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

snickmy

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.

IChrisI

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.

shevy-java

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.)

IG_Semmelweiss

I've been looking for a localized (Spanish or French), mobile version of Ultima 4 (NES). Others too. Something similar to what was done with FF series by Pixel Remaster. The game is currently only available via emulator. Localized, text-heavy RPGs are a very easy way to "learn-while-playing" a foreign language, and reading as well. Would love to see this built !

helloplanets

For anyone wanting to try UO out, it's still a game with an active player base. There are 3rd party servers like UO Outlands, which gets closer to the original gameplay. Meaning very harsh in comparison to what most people are used to in today's MMOs. Players can just come to gank you and you'll lose your stuff, etc. The server has 2500+ players logged in right now, so still very much active.

klvino

Great memories. The human engagement was more genuine to everyday in-person interactions than the current state of MMORPGs and even most Social platforms. The game was also great in how extensible it was. Too great in some aspects that allowed botting, but accessible enough that general public, coding novices experienced an "intro to scripting" to create sophisticated macros.

curioussquirrel

My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard. I wrote some really terrible PHP and HTML, but it worked for 20+ years afterwards. Great memories! I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO! In any case, this is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

ckbkr10

> After 10 years of on-and-off work That is truly honorable perseverance

raymond_goo

Quote: If anyone out there has the dynamic0.mul or dynamic0.bkp (server savegames) or regions.txt (spawn definitions) or resbank.mul (resources definitions) files from the original Ultima Online servers, circa 1997-2003, I’d be very grateful if you could send them to me. It seems very unlikely that the original dynamic0.mul or dynamic0.bkp files are truly lost, since they were surely backed up in multiple safe places. These files would be extremely valuable to produce a highly accurate reproduction of the Ultima Online world content.

usualtuesday

Lovely to see this here and I’m sure lots of lurkers here who played UO. For me - The Alter Realm, Imagi-Nation, Abbadon and many others. World builder on a shard as well. Great game, pity WoW came along and killed the genre but thats life.

fp64

Interesting, the reversing was done with radare2? I mean it's pretty neat and I wish I would use it more often (so I don't keep forgetting the commands and workflows...) but Ghidra or even the now-free-for-personal-use IDA Pro are so much better and move convenient, at least to me.

NBJack

I'll never forget the trailers for Ultima Online 2 back in 2000. Ironically, their choice of accompanying music had the line "this is not superstition". I never realized this demo was in the expansion pack.

jesse_dot_id

Played in the UO beta with a CD I got out of a magazine or something. It began a period more than a decade of UO -> EverQuest -> WoW addiction. I sincerely believe that if I never discovered MMORPGs, I would be a billionaire lol

deadbabe

Is this better than a server emulator?

jdmoreira

Wow. I spent a lot of time, probably around the year 2000, playing UO on a Portuguese shard named "Lusitania". Such great memories!

darknavi

I love old MMO server reverse-engineering. MapleStory custom servers helped get me into programming in middle school/high school. I still have an inkling to get back into MapleStory custom servers (or other MMOs) but to be honest something about the vast open world that is empty of players is really creepy/sad/liminal to me. I'd want to take a spin at adding some "life" to the servers, even if it is just extra player-ish NPCs.