Long time UO emulation fan here

[Alrick]

Hello everyone

I'm Alek from Ukraine. I started playing UO in 1999 when I was 15 y.o., later got into server emulation when SphereServer 51a came out, and built my custom map private server in 2002. I feel that UO influenced me a lot during my young years: I learned programming thanks to UO macros and Sphere scripting. I've met friends in UO that helped me with RL work. I've started another shard with two other grown ups back then that tought me about money.
Then in 2004 came the era of packet hacks and SphereServer became useless without special firewall, and our shards closed. It was a lot of hassle to move everything to RunUO beta and we didn't have proper knowledge of C#. We moved on to themeparks like Anarchy Online, WoW, and Everquest 2. But I kept watching the emu scene and communicate with the community. Each winter I would read through the shards' websites, emu forums, client editing forums, and think how great it would be to create a new world again.
I wrote this and then realized I've already introduced myself in Feb 2015. I guess I'm getting old with all this nostalgia
Anyhow, what do you remember back from early days? What stories take special place in your hearts?

 

[Norman Lancaster]

I was thinking about some old memories last night as I drifted off to sleep. I started in 1997.

I remember tents were part of player housing. They had no door and a single, lockable chest for you to put your stuff in. They were larger than a small house and much cheaper, I think about 10k? They were eventually taken out over concerns that they took up too much of the available housing space.

Speaking of housing, in those days there was no limit to the number of houses you could place. There was no concept of home ownership either. When you placed a house you received a key to the front door, but anyone with the key could walk right in and take your things. For that matter, anyone with enough lockpicking skill could do the same! And there were no lockdowns and secure containers. You just dumped your possessions on the floor and they never decayed. There was no limit to the amount of stuff you could cram into a small house. Of course all of these things changed, and they were good changes. But what a wild time it was.

Another memory about housing, before there were craftable housing addons like the forge and loom we had dedicated houses for them. There was a small smithy workshop with an anvil and forge, a small tailor's workshop with a spinning wheel, loom and I think a dress form. There was even a small thieve's house with a training dip. I can't remember if there were others.

I remember that the guard zone west of Britain did not exist for the first little while. Folks placed keeps on top of farmer's fields and small houses next to the mountainside. Latter when the guard zone was added these were highly sought-after houses.

I recall some pretty interesting bugs and exploits from back then too. I remember if you placed one of those small smithy workshops and then destroyed it, the forge and anvil remained as server-side object for whatever reason. If you are ever on a production shard in Felucca and see a random forge and anvil in the wilderness, that's why.

These objects were also very interesting in another way: they were unfrozen statics. The way the OSI server seems to handle a static object is to set its weight to 255 stone, but there is a separate "freeze" flag that makes it static. These forge and anvil items did not have the freeze flag, just the weight. So, if you were strong enough, you could move them! There was some code that prevented a player from putting such an item into their backpack, but you could move them into another container and move that container into your backpack. So for a while we had miners running around with forges in their packs instantly smelting all of their ore and transferring it to pack animals. Again it was fixed in short order, but what a wild time The fix was to remove all forges and anvils from all player inventories, to force the "freeze" flag on all of them in the world, and they also fixed the bug about the small blacksmith's shop dropping the items in the first place at the same time.

Some related bugs that were during the UO:R era: The talking statues above the entrance to the third level of Covetous had been unfrozen for a time. Lots of players picked those up, again by putting them into a nested container. You couldn't put them down again as they would disappear, but it took months before this was fixed. The statues would respawn every morning after server maintenance.

Another amusing absurdity was when the "Artist" NPCs around Britain started spawning small chests with random small statues in them. If you lured the NPCs out of town with enticement or by accepting the escort quest, then killed them, you could loot the chest. Inside you would find one of a number of random small statues, again weighing 255 stones and were not dropable. There was also some way to easily duplicate these items but I never found out how.

A bug that turned into a feature were ice staves. When T2A released it introduced the Giant Ice Serpent. These creatures always dropped one piece of random gear, one random bone or organ, and one random piece of food. For what ever reason when the Giant Ice Serpent dropped a Black Staff it's hue was altered to ice blue. At first this was only a cosmetic affect, but after Origin got wind of the bug and saw the popularity of the item, they - in a rare show of acting in community interests - made the bug an official feature. The Giant Ice Serpent now drops Black Staves correctly, but also has a 1/64 chance of dropping a Glacial Staff that has some minor magical effects. I made quite a pretty penny back in the day farming these things while working on magery.

Well I've probably rambled on enough. Hope you stick around!

 

[Mukyluk]

I remember using entice to get sandals off the artist in Trinsic. Made a killing off of those. 500k+ for ten mins of work. Lol

 

[sahisahi]

Sphere player here

I played on many many sphere servers back in the 90's - 2000 such as Novus opiate, Cecil Arenas, Sacred Realm,Alejandria ...

To me sphere pvp style have been the most hardcore and enjoyable ever, im working on a server based on Sphere gameplay, it is almost done after almost a year of fixing stuff and asking for help since my scripting skills are neophyte.

You should make a new world @Alrick theres NOTHING like Ultima Online, doesnt matter what new super graphic game you play, Uo is the best ever.

 

[Valorian-Aeternum]

Haha,
well I started round 2000 with UO and I remember how the Light elves were destroyed with Explo-Llamas...
Was a sphere server and incredibly funny.
So the Drow prepard a snow white llama as a troyan horse with explo potions. The throw them, let them count to one and picked them up again. Roughly 300 of them were stored in the poor llama. Then the high priestress of the Drow went to the light elves town and offered peace between the two races. And then in the middle of the town, everyone was there, she opened a portal went through it and meanwhile said: " All drop"

Boooooooom

The shard is long gone...was a german freeshard.

Anyway, this and many other memories keep me going in what I am doing. Where else could you get such experience?

 

[sahisahi]

Haha,
well I started round 2000 with UO and I remember how the Light elves were destroyed with Explo-Llamas...
Was a sphere server and incredibly funny.
So the Drow prepard a snow white llama as a troyan horse with explo potions. The throw them, let them count to one and picked them up again. Roughly 300 of them were stored in the poor llama. Then the high priestress of the Drow went to the light elves town and offered peace between the two races. And then in the middle of the town, everyone was there, she opened a portal went through it and meanwhile said: " All drop"

Boooooooom

The shard is long gone...was a german freeshard.

Anyway, this and many other memories keep me going in what I am doing. Where else could you get such experience?

Me, all drop

*boooom*

Sphere is something special

 

[Anomaly]

Welcome!