Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online

Fun fact: the word "shard" in this context was coined by the dev team of the first major commercial MMO, Ultima Online, as an in-universe explanation for why the game world was split into multiple servers. If you're looking for an exemplary server architecture for MMOs, look no further than UO. That game came out in 1997 and supported worlds with thousands of players and millions of persistent objects. Players could build their own houses within the game world, decorate (and later design) them to an incredible degree [1], and have other players visit (welcome or not). Players could run their own shops within their homes and sell their own hand-crafted, signed goods (weapons, armour, clothing, furniture) in addition to any found treasure they wanted to offer. What made UO so impressive, technically, was how they accomplished all of this on such modest hardware as was available in 1995 [2]. This second link is to the GDC postmortem of the game. If you're interested, I recommend you check it out. It may not answer all your technical questions but it's extremely interesting nonetheless. The story of how they had to shard the game is part of the talk. I'm pretty sure they did not use any off-the-shelf databases as the performance would have been terrible at the time. Everything would have been custom. The custom networking protocol is extremely reserved (not chatty), since it was designed for dial-up modems. Even when you run the game on modern hardware with broadband, the game uses on the order of a few megabytes per day of traffic. [1] link [2] ▶ this video

I was the original lead designer on Ultima Online and the key designer of this system. A few notes, because this article has MANY inaccuracies. 1. Ultima Online wasn't even in development for three years total. An early prototype was February to September 1995, done by Rick Delashmit. Starting late August and early September 1995, the core team showed up. We showed the game at E3 in spring of 1996 in alpha form. We showed it in beta form at E3 in the spring of 1997. And we launched on Sept 26th, 1997. The ecology was in the alpha test, and was removed during the beta after being rewritten by an engineer who didn't really like or understand it. 2. "Not many players know about" this is false. The strategy guide published simultaneously with the game even lists all the resource values for how much meat, hide, feathers, whatever, each creature represented. All of those statistics remained in the game and still are there to this day twenty years later. What was disabled was the AI. The values are still used by crafting, harvesting, and lots of other systems in the game. 3. Said AI is exhaustively documented on my website here: link (first article, there is a sidebar with links to the follow-ons) and also collected in my recent book POSTMORTEMS, which has a huge pile of historical info on Ultima Online as well as Star Wars Galaxies and other games I've worked on. 4. The reason the AI was disabled had nothing to do with why the ecology collapsed. The AI was disabled because of the cost of doing radial searches followed by pathfinding. "The way players fit into this equation was that the they would embark on quests to kill the carnivorous animals and the pelts that they gained from those quests would be worth more than those gained from the herbivores" doesn't make any sense. :) 5. The ecology collapsed for a different reason: we had a closed economy loop at first, where everything was spawned from a fixed resource pool. It fell victim to player hoarding: when players killed sheep, they then made zillions of shirts from the wool to grind crafting advancement. Then they hoarded them or sold them very slowly. The result was the central bank ran out of wool, and then couldn't spawn more sheep. This is documented in one of the earliest detailed analyses of MMO economies, Zach Simpson's "In-Game Economics of Ultima Online," a very influential piece which led to the widespread use of the term "faucet-drain economy" in online game design. See link 6. "This problem is also what spawned multiple instances of servers (or as they called them, “shards”) that people know and recognize from most MMOs today." This is not why we ended up with shards, either. UO was originally designed for a concurrency around 250, much like Meridian 59 and other MUD heirs of the day. Its original lifetime forecast was only 30000 or so units, but we knew from early on we'd need multiple servers, even at that population count. Meridian 59 launched with a whole bunch of them, for example. After we got 50000 tester sign-ups, we were asked to hugely increase server size, which led to Rick inventing a server boundary mirroring technology we called "multiserver," which allowed the map load to be shared across clusters of machines. The entire game was then rearchitected for that in between 1996 and 1997. The term shards came from the fiction of earlier Ultimas, see link 7. "At the time when 3D graphics cards were new" -- they were nonexistent when we started. 8. The source for the article is a more accurate video at Ars Technica, which has war stories from Richard Garriott. But Richard's memory is, alas, faulty on some of these finer details. 9. There are some great Quora answers on the tech stack for the game and whatnot which have been on HN before, but if y

Uhh the red flags were there in 1997 when you all started buying client-server software. Intel and the industry know you are idiots at computers. MMO's/steam are signs of idiocracy, aka you are bad at understanding you are getting robbed. That's why we have TPM and client-server crapware in windows 10/11. If you buy any client-server SaaS you are a moron, everyone was expecting local applications forever until 1997. Even EA would have never imagined you'd all be dumb enough to buy incomplete programs where they take files hostage on a 2nd computer half a world away. So no the time to be alarmed was over 20 years ago, since there is no software or game that requires an internet connection, there was no steam, no stupid fucking login screens, nothing. The public has told the tech industry it is chimp factor five levels of stupid over the last 23+ years. So they are locking us out of our PC's, windows 10/11 is building copyright enforcement into the cpu so future applications won't run and your bios can be remote updated like a console to disable any pirated software or cracked exe's that are found on your PC. You all gave them this access to your PC, so why wouldn't intel and the rest just keep going? See here on EA and ultima, and the death of games as local applications: ▶ this video

" As longtime poweruser all the dark patterns and user hostile behavior was astonishing." Two or more computers in a network become and behave as a single PC, so if you buy any client-server software you are literally stealing programs for yourself. Because all programs are the same to a PC. AKA all programs executables can be divided into two or more exe's and run over a network it's called the client-server or mainframe dumb client model of computing and you don't want that because that's the end of the personal computer you own and control. Client-server apps are the ultimate security risk because you can't audit the code. The last 23 years there's been a war to kill the general computer. If you've touched steam, xbox live or mmo's, they are all client-server exe's, windows 10 is a client-server operating system. They've been stealing software from 1997 with ultima online, how can you be astonished when valve and everyone were stealing PC games from 1997 onward? See this patent by microsoft here: link On games: It's not, the average gamer and PC buyer has been stealing software from himself for the last 23+ years. Straight, steam/mmo's are just back ended c applications, there's no reason for any piece of software to require a "internet connection" (aka a second computer) half a world away. The 1990's were great because it was before the computer illiterate got internet. Everyone was expecting level editors and free maps, mods and skins Level editors link Free maps mods and skins link ... to continue in all the big budget games but that didn't happen because the computer illiterate masses gave up game ownership giving birth to all the evils of modern gaming (shut down games, mtx, always online drm, which is the same as mmo's, aka client-server back ended c apps). So we're losing game history down the shitter and games just disappear from history because stupid got internet. Pub g and Apex, are just back ended quake 3 and UT2004, minus game ownership. When the computer illiterate started buying MMO's (which were just rebranded rpg's with stolen networking code), the game industry started stealing PC games on a massive scale, notice how Transformers fall of cybertron a game from 2014, doesn't have basic features like dedicated servers and server lists like every fps from 1996-2004. (aka pre-steam, pre-mmo). Once game developers realized gamers were stupid in 1997, there was a war on on local applications. Don't think so? Don't think mmo's killed quake 1-3 and warcraft 1-3? See here the ultima dev's themselves: ▶ this video Ultima 9 was cancelled for the scam game ultima online, so there was no ultima 10, ultima 11, ultima 12, with dedicated servers and level editors. So we didn't get the awesome future of PC gaming, we got the computer illiterate dumbass future that undid the personal computer revolution taking us back to mainframe computing of the 60's and the average gamer is unaware of it. Everyone was expecting diablo 2+ to have server browsers and level editing and huge modding, that never happened because they started stealing RPG's and rebranding them mmo's and just started back ending the shit out of every PC game, once they realized the public was stupid as fuck at computers. Don't think so? We already had infinite multiplayer game sin the 90's with quake 2, until the shit for brains who bought UO and everquest fucked up the future of the personal computer and gaming more generally, taking us back to mainframe computing of the 60's. "No limit to the # of players - JC, quake 2 link We could take quake 2 engine an clone all "MMO's and have those same games run locally with ability to host multiplayer from your machine with no logins, subscription fees. If you have to infinity multiplayer videogames, one allows you to own it and cos