[erichurkman]

> As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read

Ultima Online emulators were what took small interest for me and blew it up into a career. But for me, it was pre-RunUO: SphereServer (aka GrayServer, I think) and UOX3. C++, with its own scripting engine built in. It wasn't exactly closed or open source. It also got me into Linux: while some emulation servers were run on home PCs, others were run on hosted machines. Debugging often meant the server administrators would give you root access to debug their running server. 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.

It was incredibly buggy and never, to my knowledge, reached feature parity with the full game. The workarounds individual servers made through the rudimentary scripting language was impressive (many of these hacks were then copied into the core emulation scripts).

For trips down memory lane, these sites are still live -- and being updated? Wow.

https://www.sphereserver.com/

https://www.uox3.org/

[philliphaydon]

There was another server software prior to SphereServer, which I just cannot remember the name of. Despite running a server off it for 2 years.

Probe is one of the developers of Sphere who was admin to NOS (Novus Opiate Seclorum)

I believe he rebuilt NOS on POL which ultimately died :(

After NOS died I was admin for a shard which I think was called UOX, and built a server called Alphanine which we had ~250-450 players on. That's what got me into programming, at the time I believe I built the first in-game capture the flag (unaware of any other shard doing it, but got the idea from Team Fortress)

I really miss UO and the feeling I got playing as a kid. Nothing to date gives me that same feeling.

https://www.polserver.com/

[v8xi]

I was like 10 years old when I started playing on free shards - was even GM on one that had about 100 players and I remember putting an event together with giants invading a town and I had made a whole mini town out of little model houses in the mountains...

There really was something about it...I used to play with my brothers and we were just the absolute worst griefers but man did we have fun. For us, it was the lawlessness of it all. That you could actually steal from other players and it was a valid part of the game with skills like hiding and stealth to make it easier... My favorite was filling a pack llama with greater explosion potions, "all drop" and then magic missile-ing it in the middle of a crowded bank to kill everyone nearby.

[RektBoy]

Can you imagine that there are servers which is running on sphere to this day? It will be like 23years of runtime for this one server in CZ. Czechs had a lot of servers, I remember time when there was like 15 different server running, each with own lore and everything. Great times.