17 ms·

Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)

168 points by mpweiher 6y ago

tlarkworthy 6y ago
I always assumed MMO shards came from database literature. My mind is blown if it's the other way around. Though not the first time gamedev is at the edge.
artemonster 6y ago
queue in "stones theme" of the login screen and nostalgic goosebumps... The article is quite old though - maybe someone from HN can provide clues for this interesting coincedence ^^
- outworlder 6y ago
  I've made people go back to UO just by playing Stones. I'm not sure what's up with that song.
Alex3917 6y ago
Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? I stopped playing those types of games when I got into high school, so I don't really have any concept of if EVE and WoW and the like were actually definitively better, or just different and more successful do to being easier for beginners. I haven't played any of the Larian games (e.g. Divinity: Original Sin II), but noticed that only recently with these sorts of graphics do these new 3D isometric games actually have the same kind of feeling that UO had at the time when it came out, if that makes any sense.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  I've heard Legends of Aria has many things that UO veterans enjoyed about UO. I personally can't tell you how successful it is, given I didn't play UO. EVE and WoW cater to very different play styles (even and especially between each other), so "better MMO" is a loaded question with a diverse number of answers depending on your intended play style and what about an MMO you are looking for.
- rjbwork 6y ago
  Honestly, no. At least not that you can play right now. Star Wars Galaxies was something of a spiritual successor, but is defunct. There have been a few attempts at more free-form open world type games since then, but IMO, nothing really comes close to UO. I've had to give up on MMO's because it all just feels like an experience on rails that is a time sink for some virtual items rather than the kind of free form world modifying choose your own adventure that UO was.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Hmm well hopefully in 30 years or whenever I'm retired, computers hardware will have improved enough that someone will have tried to make a better version. Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was extremely fun regardless.
    - andrepd 6y ago
      >Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was extremely fun regardless. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the engine would make a great MMO :p
  - dlhavema 6y ago
    I loved galaxies back in the day. I was online when the first Jedi was unlocked that was a momentous occasion.
  - packetslave 6y ago
    Star Wars Galaxies... ironically also designed by (and destroyed by) Raph Koster. Sony managed to get middle-age housewives spending hours a day building communities in their MMO, then flushed it all down the toilet for the Jedi grind and chasing after CoD gamers.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  It depends entirely upon how you define "better" and what you're looking for in an MMO. I've also never heard anyone accuse EVE Online of being easy for beginners.
- moksly 6y ago
  Albion Online is a lot like UO.
  - tatar 6y ago
    I've played it a bit. The core mechanics was spot on but it ended up a soulless copy of what UO was. Procedurally generated levels and instances just took away any resemblance of a story for me.
- coding123 6y ago
  Of course they are better. Better mechanics, graphics, economies that work.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Have any MMOs actually put their economies on the blockchain yet though? I know people have been talking about this for years, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it actually happening yet.
    - greiskul 6y ago
      Why would anyone do that? I don't see neither a gameplay advantage for doing that, nor a technological one. Is there any applications that could take advantage of that which I am missing?
      - Alex3917 6y ago
        Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. So everything from weapons and armor to gold, ore, reagents, crafting supplies, furniture, housing, etc. Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
        SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items. It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.
        Alex3917 6y ago
- knicholes 6y ago
  Richard Garriott made Shroud of the Avatar, but the devs didn't hit their timelines on the Kickstarter. It never really took off. But they made it free. I played it and loved the story, but it didn't feel to have the staying power like UO did.
- chongli 6y ago
  has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? Nope. UO was one of a kind. What made it special is the way it brought together people with many different play styles and allowed them to form their own communities which were self-policed. Every multiplayer game since UO has tried to learn lessons from it by policing the players centrally, through the limitation of player interaction. The result is that all of the different play styles have gone their separate ways to games which cater specifically to them. This phenomenon mirrors the filter bubble phenomenon that resulted from search engines and social media recommendation engines giving people more of what they want. Edit: for examples of the games that cater to the play styles I’m referring to, look at Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Diablo 3... When I look at this list it’s rather shocking to me that one game could house all these diverse play styles. The magic of it was that it worked, for a time, until more specialized games came along and started drawing away the player base. Then EA brought in Trammel and split the player base which was the beginning of the end.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    The interesting thing also was that most of these play styles were forced to work together also. E.g. you couldn't be a fighter without blacksmiths to make armor and weapons, and you couldn't be a blacksmith without miners who were gathering ore. Because leveling up in one skill caused your other skills to atrophy at a high level, it prevented players from being able to become isolated from each other.
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  - jandrese 6y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "better". WoW certainly eclipsed UO in popularity/playerbase. Eve has a more sophisticated metagame. UO is definitely the best Ultima Online game ever created.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  As an apple gamer from the early 80's who played all of the ultimas (and bards tales, and wizardries...). WoW was the game I had always wanted. I found it better than UO because it had the interactivity and sophistication I had dreamed about. That came with a downside. I like to describe WoW in these terms: "So you like ice cream right? Here: go eat this truck full. Go on. You said you liked ice cream, go do it. /points gun at my head/ ... EAT."
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    THIS is the best description of WoW I've ever heard. Truly wonderful. I thank you.
    - btrask 6y ago
      As someone who never played WoW, I'm curious. What exactly was the ice cream, and what was the gun?
  - mrits 6y ago
    I like finding other Bard's Tale players in the wild. It was easier to learn how to use a hex editor to hack the game than to actually play the game...so that's what I did.
    - rakah 6y ago
      Same here! I remember taking a saved game file, backing it up and then earning some gold. Comparing the two roughly told me where the saved game kept its gold. Then I made that number tremendous. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade at the time - it was a lesson that's served me well :)
  - chongli 6y ago
    interactivity and sophistication I had dreamed about I'm not sure what you mean by that. Wasn't WoW just a theme park MMO? You walk around alone or with friends, killing camps of monsters and completing fetch quests? UO had ridiculous levels of interactivity. You could go into the forest, chop some wood, turn the wood into bows and arrow shafts. Kill a chicken and butcher it for meat and feathers. Use some wood to build a fire and cook the meat. Use the feathers to fletch your arrows. Now you're got a bow and arrow. Hunt a deer and butcher it for a large amount of meat and hides. Take the hides back to your house and tan them to make leather. Tailor the leather into leather armour with your character's name on it! Dye the leather a unique colour and put it for sale on your vendor NPC. Come back another day and find other players shopping for leather armour in your store! Chat with them and make friends. Go on an adventure together. Build and design a new house to live in together. UO was Minecraft before Minecraft. Servers had thousands of players and there was a ridiculous amount of interactivity between players and the environment.
- theincredulousk 6y ago
  I've played a bunch of them a bit, and nothing comes close. Some of it probably has to do with timing - a true sandbox game when there was a cultural match with the desire for that environment. Nowadays if you had a game with glitches that allowed people to steal your items outside of intended game mechanics, there would be an uproar on Twitter and punishing 1-star steam reviews. Back then it was infuriating, but part of the atmosphere. The night was dark and full of terrors, so to speak. Also the actual concept of real-estate, with a real house and your own vendors, was really next-level stuff for immersion. Exploits like duping that ruined the economy weren't beneficial to the atmosphere though, and actually broke immersion. Nostalgia holds up a lot of it though I'm sure. Just like anything else, playing it again now probably wouldn't bring back the same experience.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    To be fair UO had pretty horrible reviews at the time also, which is part of why it never became as popular as EverQuest.
- egfx 6y ago
  >if that makes any sense. Makes perfect sense. I was an Elder in UO (a player character with special powers that advanced the storyline) Or basically; as I realize today, an unpaid intern at Origin. And afterwards QA lead on WOW and I can definitively say UO wasn’t a game. It was an alternate universe. It was transcendent unlike any game and blizzard games included. It wasn’t the first as there was “Meridian59” which came out before and people were basically divided into 2 camps. After “City of Heroes” and “Dark Age of Camelot” came out, then it (mmo) became a genre.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Nice. I was a counselor in UO, but got fired after they realized I was 13.
    - egfx 6y ago
      Haha so you were a customer support intern. What shard?
      - Alex3917 6y ago
        Catskills. IMHO the game went downhill with the T2A release in 1998, and then was completely ruined by the time Renaissance came out in 2000 (although I had already quit well before then). It's a shame because I feel like the gameplay was kind of already destroyed by the time the servers were relatively stable and bug free, so it feels like it never really lived up to its potential. But during the few hours a day when it actually worked properly, damn.
        swozey 6y ago
        Catskills had the best roleplaying community I've ever seen. I miss it. I also had so much fun on Siege Perilous when it was those color wars with the 4 castles. I can't believe they ever changed that.
    - kingnothing 6y ago
      Haha, awesome. I was also a counselor in UO at roughly the same age.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  I think part of it is that when UO came out it was this visual imaginary world that allowed us to do what we wanted rather than drive us in a particular direction. And even if there was a UO clone with updated graphics. It just wouldn’t be the same as that first experience we had. I miss UO. It’s what got me into programming to begin with. I ran a shard with 250 people on at peak times called Sacred. And was GM on Alphanine, and for a short time before it died, Novus Opiate. I got into programming to make my own UO game but ended up just making software.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  What is "better"
- abhijitr 6y ago
  > Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? Piggybacking on this, has anyone made an open world single player RPG better than Ultima 7 yet?
  - xsmasher 6y ago
    Divinity: Original Sins was that game for me; everything I loved about U7, minus the annoying bits (collecting arrows, eating food every x minutes, time-of-day changes for NPCs).
    - mintplant 6y ago
      And Divinity: Original Sin 2 improves on its predecessor in every way. It's the game Larian have been trying to make since their inception. Honestly, I'd recommend that new players skip straight to the sequel—you won't miss anything story-wise.
- root_axis 6y ago
  Absolutely. EVE today is a much better MMO than UO ever was. Of course, the space setting is a hard sell for those who are looking for a game with the all the Tolkien trappings of old school RPGs, but as an MMO it is the most sophisticated game available today and is unparalleled in terms of how player driven behavior impacts the game world. Most notably Eve has managed to succeed in keeping veteran players satisfied while also providing a path for new players to have a meaningful impact on the game world. This is a major problem WoW was never able to overcome despite its commercial success and has instead relied on periodic invalidation of veteran player progress every 8 to 16 months to keep things fresh (a well-worn strategy for most blizzard games). edit: tough crowd, I'd be interested in the details of the dissenting opinions
  - debug-desperado 6y ago
    Cool. What sort of "path for new players to have a meaningful impact on the game world" does EVE provide?
    - outworlder 6y ago
      I can only think of joining alliances. Alliances with thousands of players and immense military power have been brought down by single individuals before(or crippled by spies).
    - root_axis 6y ago
      Almost all MMOs gate content in the form of linear "levels" which essentially function like a several-dozen hour tutorial until the player grinds to the point of "max level" so that they can then begin to participate in "end game" content. In EVE, player progress isn't so narrowly constrained or defined in terms of an aggregate statistic, rather, player skills can be trained automatically over time without grinding and, similar to the golden era of UO, player skills function in the game with respect to their individual utility rather than as a function of player level. This means new players can target specific skills based on how they want to play the game rather than picking the skills that facilitate the most efficient grind to max level, after which they reset all their skills and reallocate them with respect to the "real" game. Thus new players begin to experience the "real game" early on without having to grind through 30 hours of cookie-cutter content before the "real game" begins.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  The current trend in MMO-like games are basically sandbox games like UO. The thing about MMOs is that your first great experience is going to be tough to top. Even if I tell you there are 20+ sandbox MMOs that do what UO did, it will never live up to UO for you.
- andrepd 6y ago
  I'm of the honest opinion that no game ever made truly lives up to the potential of the MMORPG. Of a virtual, persistent, shared world. It's quite sad. UO and Star Wars Galaxies probably came the closest.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    It's really hard to strike the balance between giving players ultimate freedom to make a permanent mark on the world and providing a fun experience for new players, especially if you are trying to avoid pushing new players way out into the wilderness where they will never see anybody. Ultimately players want to interact with other friendly players, but that's impossible because some players will be assholes and will try their hardest to make life miserable for your new players. If your have wide open PvP you have roving gank squads.
- xwdv 6y ago
  It is unlikely there will ever be an MMO better than what UO was at its peak in the old days. Those were savage days, where simply being killed and having your body cut up and looted dry was considered acceptable for an MMO. At one point even having someone steal your house key meant they could enter your entire house and loot it dry. Another thing is the graphics. Yea everyone thinks 3D graphics are cool but 2D graphics allow for imagination to fill in the blanks more. The graphics are less literal, the less detail is shown the more your mind fills in the blanks. Your mind begins to imagine what these characters would look and sound like if they were real people. Also consider that even the GUI in UO was often in-character, you open a bag it looks like a bag, open a backpack and it looks like a backpack. And items could be dragged anywhere and positioned however you wanted, sometimes causing a mess. Organizing your backpack was like a little mini-game within a game. Most games these days abandon those kinds of details in favor of grids where you can neatly place items into discrete slots. Convenient, but a lost opportunity for emergent game play. Also, text appearing above peoples heads when they speak instead of a chat window meant you always kept your focus on the world in front of you and conversations felt natural, it feels more like reading a comic book, as opposed to some instant messenger.
  - mentos 6y ago
    You’ve hit a lot of the important points. I’d add that there were very few alternatives so the ‘care bear’ players who preferred crafting were forced to be fodder for the more aggressive ‘wolf’ players. It was an incredibly special time in video game history I’ll always cherish
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  Ok, first, the answer is really no, but there have been two main attempts, in Darkfall and Mortal Online. I jumped on the Mortal Online bandwagon in beta and stuck with it for a long time, being part of one of the best guilds in game. The bad: Unfortunately, while it had a ton of potential, there were lots of issues and eventually it just stopped being as fun. For me dealing with a red was easy, but for new players the learning curve was so steep what ended up happening was roving gangs of reds and gank guilds griefing new players into literally quitting forever. A world that was too open, so didn't feel living, despite the player impact and control. Much later players could build walls on game vital paths and completely block off areas of the world. Basically the freedom of working towards a UO system has a lot of potential weaknesses and the devs at StarVault learned all this the hard way. The good: some amazing emergent gameplay I have yet to experience anywhere else. A crafting system that should be an inspiration to every game that has crafting. Hidden things, with not everything in a database you can just look up, guilds and people that horded info, and political intrigue and subterfuge. Really fun combat for it's time if you had a good connection. Full loot pvp. A large world that was very fun exploring (there is no in game map, I was one of the people who literally participated in a guild mapping of the continent that is still used at https://www.mortalonlinemap.info/ https://www.mortalonlinemap.info/ A large single persistent instance (no sharding). The devs, recognizing many of the issues stemmed from complications of using UE3, are now working on Mortal Online II in the UE4 engine. I hope it goes well for them but haven't tried it yet. https://www.mortalonline2.com/ https://www.mortalonline2.com/
- haolez 6y ago
  UO is/was pretty unique. It had poverty. Some players were so poor that they had to beg for food! Funny and depressing at the same time :) Overpowered players were really rare (in the golden age, at least). And they were usually very famous, like celebrities. It was very very hard to improve your character's skills. The game wasn't tailored to boost your ego with custom looks and mean-looking armors and weapons - it was what it was, and that usually meant frustration. At least for me, it was fun and unique. I don't see anything like that in the current generation of blockbuster MMO games.
- lowbloodsugar 6y ago
  Ugh. Lots of nostalgic views here made fonder through absence I think. UO sucked was amazing but it sucked. I can't recall how many empty dungeons we walked through, only to get to the treasure room filled with gold? No. Filled with other players. All just camping out, waiting for loot to drop. In fact it would be true to say I can only recall such dungeons. And then the Lich would respawn and all the n00bs would shit themselves while someone else killed it, and then everyone frantically trashed the place looking for loot like an FBI raid at the drug dealer's girlfriend's place. Honestly it was so utterly pointless to try to "play the game" that my friend and I actually indulged (I am ashamed to say) in some naked griefing. Which is to say, the only fun we had was in trying to figure out the games state machines, i.e. to goad people into killing us such that we could get the guards to kill them. How it works: stand outside a town. Be offensive. Wait till someone attacks you. Run into town. Yell "Guards! Guards!". Guard appears and kills aggressor. Take all his stuff. There were various iterations of this that Raph Koster actually wrote up [1], and it was fun. For us. Neither my friend nor I are actually assholes, and only resorted to this because it was literally the only "game" present in the entire system. We'd paid for a game, we rationalized, and by golly we were going to find one. Ok, we probably were just entitled assholes. Perhaps it got better later, but we'd gone by then. [Naked griefing, because every now and again we'd grief a wizard and they'd freeze us in place and then kill us. But we were naked. Didn't even lose a shoe.] There was also "The Great Unused!" which we had "fun" with for a while. This was an item that was called "Unused", and its icon was a photoshop lens flare. It also weighed 255, the max amount. So you couldn't move if you were carrying it. So my friend and I spent hours standing next to it, picking it up, and then dropping it on the other side, moving it two squares at a time, leapfrogging each other. We could put it on a boat (much to our relief, as we'd been lugging it for an hour by that point) and managed to bring it from a far island back to "town". Where upon, we tried to start a cult to worship "The Great Unused!" People tried to steal it, by picking it up, and we would laugh as they ran in place for an unreasonably long time (some people are just so determined), but eventually they would drop it. It didn't catch on. Now Raph's first go at Star Wars Galaxies I really enjoyed. I couldn't play very often, and yet I could still be useful, even as my friends leveled far ahead of me. I played a medic, and sometimes my heal would be the thing that saved someone from death and a long walk back. Most MMOs (that I played), once your friends are four levels ahead of you, you don't get any experience points at all if you join their party. So UO was a great starting point, and very smart, very passionate people have made significantly better games, learning every time. [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A_brief_history_of_murder_in_Ultima_Online.php https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A...
- outworlder 6y ago
  > Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet No. EVE comes close. In particular, it actually surpasses UO in many ways, like a complete player-based economy. Almost anything you could ever need or want is crafted by players. There are 'loot drops', but ones that are actually better than what players can craft are rare. And are sold in the market. Similarly to UO, death has consequences. You lose your ship, everything on it, all cargo. There's 'insurance', but it will only pay for the 'market price' of the ship. You yourself may have paid more (but usually not less, otherwise people would build and destroy ships to claim insurance). EVE also has skills, much like UO. Unlike UO, those are 'trained' over time, not by usage. But there are no 'levels' and for the most part there aren't any ships which are 'better' for any role. An unprepared battleship can be destroyed by a couple of fast moving frigates that cost a tiny fraction of resources and skills to pilot. One that's fitted against small fighters will suck against other battleships, and so on. Like Ultima Online, movement is very important in combat. In EVE, even more so, due to gun tracking(and how missile explosions work). This is the main reason why the battleship scenario above works. EVE also has forms of 'housing', as in player made starbases, corporation offices and apparently stations now. EVE has consumables. Other than laser-based weaponry (mostly Amarr), you have to buy ammo. Like casting spells in UO requires reagents. WoW has very little consumables, and you certainly can cast spells all day long. It also has a very 'lawless' world. Some systems have no security response at all, others will have delayed response depending on the security rating. Just like UO, if someone really wants to kill you they can, although there may be consequences. Unlike UO, there are no 'shards'. Everyone is on the same server (or more specific, cluster). Even 'instancing' (used for NPC missions) is part of the universe, you can join the instance if you have the location(or can scan). So, EVE has very deep and detailed systems, to the point that people used to call it 'spreadsheets in space'. But I can't directly compare it with Ultima Online – mostly because they are quite different games, thematically. One is a fantasy world full with dragons and spells. The other is a very futuristic and highly advanced space game. WoW... is entertaining. Has amazing and detailed lore (although EVE's is good, it's not even in the same league). Locations can be such an eye candy. Even boring 'collect item' quests can be very entertaining. Have I mentioned how quests can be entertaining? Because there are some incredible ones. World of Warcraft also has 'classes'. Which is again a completely different philosophy from either UO or even EVE. Take a Mage. Maybe it will be specialized as a 'frost' mage. No matter, two frost mages at the same level will have the exact same skills and spells. Equipment may change, but it is not like they will have a bow, they will just have different stats. But WoW suffers from a very simplistic gameplay. You have 'levels' – which will immediately set it apart from Ultima Online. You have also lots of skills. Using them effectively and timing them is important, but in the end it's just about selecting a target and pressing a few function keys(this is actually something that it has in common with EVE, except for the role of movement and position in EVE). Death is essentially meaningless in WoW. You don't lose any items. You may have to pay repair, but that's it. Compare to UO: you drop everything you are carrying – you can try to get it back, but someone (or something) may get to your corpse before then. Or EVE, you lose your ship, items, equipment and even skills if you can't GTFO with your pod and forgot to update your clone. PVP in either UO or EVE is much more of an experience than WoW. And in either game you won't necessarily have a level 100 one-shotting a level 10 character. Ok, this is already too long, but I could contrast even further. But WoW is more popular for a reason: one can log in, start a queue for a dungeon, go complete some quests and have _guaranteed progression_. While on EVE, there were a few days where I logged in and got incredibly lucky, but in other days I wished I didn't login, as things went very badly. Similarly on Ultima Online. On both, you learn a few rules: trust noone, don't carry(or fly) what you can't afford to lose, etc. I'm keeping an eye on the likes of Ark, they might be onto something. I still think that good MMORPG games will have to develop a mostly player-based economy if they want to stay relevant long term.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's definitively not the same genre but Shores of Hazeron was an empire building MMO where you start as a simple caveman on a random planet in a fully procedurally generated universe and you are supposed to create a city from scratch and figure out space travel. Colonize other planets or moons in your solar system to create a FTL drive and then fight other empires. It looks awful and the developer made some questionable decisions but hey it was just a one man show. Nowadays the closest spiritual successor is No Mans Sky. Huge procedurally generated universe. Check. Randomly generated animals. Check. Spacecraft with combat and seamless transition from planet to space. Check. The ability to create your own spacecraft designs? Nope. The ability to actually do interesting things with the planets like build a colony on them? Nope. Massive multiplayer? Hell no. No mans sky is just eye candy. Imagine the benefits of reaching the center of the galaxy and thereby being teleported to a completely different one if you could colonize that new galaxy! You'd have a massive edge over the other empires. The reality is that all universes and planets in no mans sky are functionally the same. You can stop playing as soon as you see your first planet and nobody could claim that you didn't see everything the game had to offer.
gavman 6y ago
This was discussed by one of the game's creators in the Ultima Online episode of Ars Techica's War Stories (around the 5:10 mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
eordano 6y ago
It seems that SHARD is a term used already in 1988, meaning "System for Highly Available Replicated Data" Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14914487445955020264&hl=en&oi=scholarr https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14914487445955020...
- chongli 6y ago
 While interesting I don’t think this old paper led to the popularization of the term. It only has 12 citations!
 - gojomo 6y ago
 Looking at a single academic paper's citation count won't reveal much about a term's historical currency. For example, there are also papers in Google Scholar (findable via query [database shard], through 1987) mentioning this same SHARD system in 1986 and 1987, with 33 and 97 citations respectively. And further, there's a 1986 MIT technical note that mentions a commercially-in-development version of this SHARD system, but refers back to a 1985 paper, "System architecture for partition-tolerant distributed databases", as an authoritative source about SHARD – though that 1985 paper doesn't declare the name SHARD. That's suggestive that SHARD was adopted as a catchy name for that particular work around 1985-1986, then becoming more widespread in the 1986-1988 timeframe. But perhaps more interesting: that original 1985 paper mentions in its acknowledgements Hector Garcia-Molina – a definite 'hub' person in databases/indexing/networked-information for decades, among many other things Google cofounder Sergey Brin's advisor at Stanford from 1993-1997. (See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-Molina>. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-Molina...) So it's likely safe to assume that from the late 80s into the 90s, top CS students/researchers around the world discussing partitioned distributed databases would often have this particular sense of SHARD mentioned to them, or appear in their readings. Notably, that 1985 SHARD involved a system where each replica contained the entire database – so did not capture the modern connotations of 'shard', as horizontal partitions. But that vivid & apropos analogy was "in the air" around partitioned/distributed databases. Thus I'd strongly suspect uses in the modern, non-overlapping sense in that same era, likely predating Ultima Online's 1996ish use. (I'd especially look around precursor work to the 1997 'Consistent Hashing' paper, & other caching-centric work – because there the idea of partition-by-key was central.) So UO might have devised, but I'd guess more likely popularized, our modern sense of 'sharding'.
fcatalan 6y ago
I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for coming up by yourself with things that are now considered "obvious" or just the way things are done. Things happened fast: by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an "experienced" web developer. We had websites, but we didn't have good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard way. The biggest thing I remember to have "invented" by myself in early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database driven website: I was tasked with creating a "virtual campus" kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades, news... and the sparse examples and models I had found for all those functionalities used plain text files as storage. After completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with those files and suddenly thought: "hey, dumping all this crap on a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!" It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that databases were for internal "databasey" things: Accounting, addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of stuff. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing website felt almost like a revolutionary concept. By the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs/ the Active Record stuff from Rails. So I sort of "invented" that too. Another thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C through CGI. The database was mysql. I tried to run it a couple years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the makefile, 20 years after the fact. My current projects seem to rot every time I take a short vacation.
- agentultra 6y ago
  I had the same experience pulling together personal home pages in chronological descending order from a database of text files. A bunch of folks online had their own scripts as well. Eventually a few people would release their scripts and it would become known as a "weblog" and eventually a "blog" and many people profited from that. Wild times.
- gtsteve 6y ago
  I started PC programming in about 1997 before I had an internet connection at home. I had to either research at school and make notes or get books from the library. The fun result of that was for a few weeks I thought that I was going to get rich from having invented unit testing. What we have today is far more efficient, I don't miss it but I definitely look back on those days with nostalgia.
efitz 6y ago
I hadn't ever heard of the term "sharding", but the team I was on was "partitioning" databases in the early 2000's (effectively sharding at the table level so that we could drop table instead of deleting rows).
- mywittyname 6y ago
  So my understanding is that there is are practical differences between a partition and a shard. They both are ways to stored separately, based on the partition key. But a partitioned table has one table, while a shard uses multiple tables which share the same schema. For example, with a partitioned database, you might have a single `transaction` table, partitioned by date, but with a shard database, you'd have multiple `transaction_${date}` tables which needed to be queried from, but they'd share a common schema.
  - greenshackle2 6y ago
    Last time I did partitioning by date in postgres (on postgres 9.?), multiple transaction_${date} tables is exactly what I got. They are exposed as a single 'transaction' table but they were really different physical tables. My understanding is that partitioning is a more general term. Partitioning can be on one or multiple servers. Sharding is a type of partitioning that is always across multiple servers.
dws 6y ago
Google mentions sharding in a 2005 patent. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2007011957A2 https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2007011957A2 http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/sharding-for-startups.html?showComment=1231392480000#c9054865638836100787 http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/sharding-for-st... notes the term in use within Google by 2003.
- gojomo 6y ago
  This 2009 reminiscence discusses the term’s use in the UO context in 1996, so 2003-2005 mentions don’t affect the author’s conjecture at all. (I’d guess there are uses of ‘sharding’/‘shards’ in this sense from much earlier, perhaps decades earlier, database/caching work, but I could be wrong.)
- theincredulousk 6y ago
  Probably some UO players at Google then - UO was old by 2003.
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  I worked at Google 2001-2006 and we definitely talked about "database shards", particularly for the AdWords MySQL database. (this architecture has long, long since changed). At least from 2002, and the database was partitioned far before that. I remember at the time thinking the term "shard" was odd but perhaps Ultima Online inspired. I'm curious now about the history of database partitioning. So much of the early work was about trying to hide the partitions, to pretend it was all one big reliable system. It took awhile for folks to realize that was foolish.
staycoolboy 6y ago
Garriot talks about this in the documentary "Get Lamp!", which is about the history adventure games. He talks about the challenges of maintaining a huge MMO, especially how they were broadsided by the challenges of managing an economy because everyone was so greedy. He mentions how the admins came to work one day to find that players had killed every living thing on the planet and could no longer generate income. Kinda like a miniature "dark forest" theory.
- pradn 6y ago
  Computer games work best with numbers, so RPGs end up being about numbers. So, naturally, people try to min-max because 1) it's something to do 2) you progress that way 3) you can show off to others. Maybe a child would be hesitant to kill a video game creature, but it seems like, since pretty much every video game lets you do violent things, that taboo against violence is erased very quickly. So, all these combine to, what looks like to people who don't play games, a propensity to kill en masse. It's a shadow of the same situation one encounters in an abbatoir. Maybe killing the first few animals makes you feel terrible, but you get out of it quickly. The human ability to adapt to any circumstance has this disturbing side to it, too.
  - staycoolboy 6y ago
    Which is ironic given the nature of U4 and it's moral system. That game REALLY floored me the summer I spent playing it (literally the entire summer, it was before I was old enough to get a job). > RPGs end up being about numbers. For me, this was the final, sad conclusion to computer-based RPGs after nearly 40 years playing them. In tabletop D&D, a +1 sword is a rarity, and +2 is super special; magic users focused more on creativity because the cost to the caster for Lvl9 spells (if you ever got there, which was never in real games) was prohibitive to use them on a regular basis (memorization, physical aging). In fact, the level tables in AD&D stopped around 10 or 12 I think because that much XP simply didn't happen. Computer RPGs turned it all into numbers games, as you can see in WoW where the top tier armor today has stats like +30,000 attribute, when in the first release, top T3 geat from C'thon was like, +50 key attribute per piece. Am I ranting? I'm ranting.
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pixelmonkey 6y ago
This comes up from time to time. Here is a Twitter thread with some more links about the various usages of "shard" in the context of early internet and gaming services, including Ultima Online (UO), other early MMORPGs, and even MUDs. https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/615116231092371456?s=20 https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/615116231092371456?s=...
- Raph_Koster 6y ago
  Everyone just called them "servers." Not shards.
mfontani 6y ago
In the year 2000, my (telnet + MCP & MCCP & other acronyms-supporting) C-based MUD boasted a _web_ interface. With colors, buttons to move, and even _images_. A web request is just a TCP socket, and browsers were gracious enough to start displaying stuff as soon as it came in (so long as tags were properly closed). So long as you sent stuff fairly routinely, the connection wouldn't be closed. Frames helped... well, "frame" the interface: main frame would be the mud's output; another frame for user input - both using a shared "key" to ensure output and input were linked to the same user. Users' input could therefore easily just be sent on another web request, checked for key correspondance, and the command ran as if the user input the same command via telnet: action -> response. A sprinkle of that new-fangled JavaScript helped ensure the screen would scroll properly as soon as new output came by. Having previously abstracted all color-related stuff (to ensure strings like "&WFoo&GBar&X" would send ANSI colours to users opting-in to them, and nothing to users opting out of them) meant that it was "easy" to send "FooBar" to the HTML interface instead. Websockets? We don't need no stinkin' websockets! _really long_ polling suffices ;)

168 points by mpweiher 6y ago

I always assumed MMO shards came from database literature. My mind is blown if it's the other way around. Though not the first time gamedev is at the edge.

artemonster 6y ago

queue in "stones theme" of the login screen and nostalgic goosebumps... The article is quite old though - maybe someone from HN can provide clues for this interesting coincedence ^^

outworlder 6y ago
I've made people go back to UO just by playing Stones. I'm not sure what's up with that song.

Alex3917 6y ago

Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? I stopped playing those types of games when I got into high school, so I don't really have any concept of if EVE and WoW and the like were actually definitively better, or just different and more successful do to being easier for beginners. I haven't played any of the Larian games (e.g. Divinity: Original Sin II), but noticed that only recently with these sorts of graphics do these new 3D isometric games actually have the same kind of feeling that UO had at the time when it came out, if that makes any sense.

WorldMaker 6y ago
I've heard Legends of Aria has many things that UO veterans enjoyed about UO. I personally can't tell you how successful it is, given I didn't play UO. EVE and WoW cater to very different play styles (even and especially between each other), so "better MMO" is a loaded question with a diverse number of answers depending on your intended play style and what about an MMO you are looking for.
rjbwork 6y ago
Honestly, no. At least not that you can play right now. Star Wars Galaxies was something of a spiritual successor, but is defunct. There have been a few attempts at more free-form open world type games since then, but IMO, nothing really comes close to UO. I've had to give up on MMO's because it all just feels like an experience on rails that is a time sink for some virtual items rather than the kind of free form world modifying choose your own adventure that UO was.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Hmm well hopefully in 30 years or whenever I'm retired, computers hardware will have improved enough that someone will have tried to make a better version. Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was extremely fun regardless.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    >Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was extremely fun regardless. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the engine would make a great MMO :p
- dlhavema 6y ago
  I loved galaxies back in the day. I was online when the first Jedi was unlocked that was a momentous occasion.
- packetslave 6y ago
  Star Wars Galaxies... ironically also designed by (and destroyed by) Raph Koster. Sony managed to get middle-age housewives spending hours a day building communities in their MMO, then flushed it all down the toilet for the Jedi grind and chasing after CoD gamers.
bcrosby95 6y ago
It depends entirely upon how you define "better" and what you're looking for in an MMO. I've also never heard anyone accuse EVE Online of being easy for beginners.
moksly 6y ago
Albion Online is a lot like UO.
- tatar 6y ago
  I've played it a bit. The core mechanics was spot on but it ended up a soulless copy of what UO was. Procedurally generated levels and instances just took away any resemblance of a story for me.
coding123 6y ago
Of course they are better. Better mechanics, graphics, economies that work.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Have any MMOs actually put their economies on the blockchain yet though? I know people have been talking about this for years, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it actually happening yet.
  - greiskul 6y ago
    Why would anyone do that? I don't see neither a gameplay advantage for doing that, nor a technological one. Is there any applications that could take advantage of that which I am missing?
    - Alex3917 6y ago
      Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. So everything from weapons and armor to gold, ore, reagents, crafting supplies, furniture, housing, etc. Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
      - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items. It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.
        Alex3917 6y ago
knicholes 6y ago
Richard Garriott made Shroud of the Avatar, but the devs didn't hit their timelines on the Kickstarter. It never really took off. But they made it free. I played it and loved the story, but it didn't feel to have the staying power like UO did.
chongli 6y ago
has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? Nope. UO was one of a kind. What made it special is the way it brought together people with many different play styles and allowed them to form their own communities which were self-policed. Every multiplayer game since UO has tried to learn lessons from it by policing the players centrally, through the limitation of player interaction. The result is that all of the different play styles have gone their separate ways to games which cater specifically to them. This phenomenon mirrors the filter bubble phenomenon that resulted from search engines and social media recommendation engines giving people more of what they want. Edit: for examples of the games that cater to the play styles I’m referring to, look at Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Diablo 3... When I look at this list it’s rather shocking to me that one game could house all these diverse play styles. The magic of it was that it worked, for a time, until more specialized games came along and started drawing away the player base. Then EA brought in Trammel and split the player base which was the beginning of the end.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  The interesting thing also was that most of these play styles were forced to work together also. E.g. you couldn't be a fighter without blacksmiths to make armor and weapons, and you couldn't be a blacksmith without miners who were gathering ore. Because leveling up in one skill caused your other skills to atrophy at a high level, it prevented players from being able to become isolated from each other.
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- jandrese 6y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "better". WoW certainly eclipsed UO in popularity/playerbase. Eve has a more sophisticated metagame. UO is definitely the best Ultima Online game ever created.
staycoolboy 6y ago
As an apple gamer from the early 80's who played all of the ultimas (and bards tales, and wizardries...). WoW was the game I had always wanted. I found it better than UO because it had the interactivity and sophistication I had dreamed about. That came with a downside. I like to describe WoW in these terms: "So you like ice cream right? Here: go eat this truck full. Go on. You said you liked ice cream, go do it. /points gun at my head/ ... EAT."
- moron4hire 6y ago
  THIS is the best description of WoW I've ever heard. Truly wonderful. I thank you.
  - btrask 6y ago
    As someone who never played WoW, I'm curious. What exactly was the ice cream, and what was the gun?
- mrits 6y ago
  I like finding other Bard's Tale players in the wild. It was easier to learn how to use a hex editor to hack the game than to actually play the game...so that's what I did.
  - rakah 6y ago
    Same here! I remember taking a saved game file, backing it up and then earning some gold. Comparing the two roughly told me where the saved game kept its gold. Then I made that number tremendous. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade at the time - it was a lesson that's served me well :)
- chongli 6y ago
  interactivity and sophistication I had dreamed about I'm not sure what you mean by that. Wasn't WoW just a theme park MMO? You walk around alone or with friends, killing camps of monsters and completing fetch quests? UO had ridiculous levels of interactivity. You could go into the forest, chop some wood, turn the wood into bows and arrow shafts. Kill a chicken and butcher it for meat and feathers. Use some wood to build a fire and cook the meat. Use the feathers to fletch your arrows. Now you're got a bow and arrow. Hunt a deer and butcher it for a large amount of meat and hides. Take the hides back to your house and tan them to make leather. Tailor the leather into leather armour with your character's name on it! Dye the leather a unique colour and put it for sale on your vendor NPC. Come back another day and find other players shopping for leather armour in your store! Chat with them and make friends. Go on an adventure together. Build and design a new house to live in together. UO was Minecraft before Minecraft. Servers had thousands of players and there was a ridiculous amount of interactivity between players and the environment.
theincredulousk 6y ago
I've played a bunch of them a bit, and nothing comes close. Some of it probably has to do with timing - a true sandbox game when there was a cultural match with the desire for that environment. Nowadays if you had a game with glitches that allowed people to steal your items outside of intended game mechanics, there would be an uproar on Twitter and punishing 1-star steam reviews. Back then it was infuriating, but part of the atmosphere. The night was dark and full of terrors, so to speak. Also the actual concept of real-estate, with a real house and your own vendors, was really next-level stuff for immersion. Exploits like duping that ruined the economy weren't beneficial to the atmosphere though, and actually broke immersion. Nostalgia holds up a lot of it though I'm sure. Just like anything else, playing it again now probably wouldn't bring back the same experience.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  To be fair UO had pretty horrible reviews at the time also, which is part of why it never became as popular as EverQuest.
egfx 6y ago
>if that makes any sense. Makes perfect sense. I was an Elder in UO (a player character with special powers that advanced the storyline) Or basically; as I realize today, an unpaid intern at Origin. And afterwards QA lead on WOW and I can definitively say UO wasn’t a game. It was an alternate universe. It was transcendent unlike any game and blizzard games included. It wasn’t the first as there was “Meridian59” which came out before and people were basically divided into 2 camps. After “City of Heroes” and “Dark Age of Camelot” came out, then it (mmo) became a genre.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Nice. I was a counselor in UO, but got fired after they realized I was 13.
  - egfx 6y ago
    Haha so you were a customer support intern. What shard?
    - Alex3917 6y ago
      Catskills. IMHO the game went downhill with the T2A release in 1998, and then was completely ruined by the time Renaissance came out in 2000 (although I had already quit well before then). It's a shame because I feel like the gameplay was kind of already destroyed by the time the servers were relatively stable and bug free, so it feels like it never really lived up to its potential. But during the few hours a day when it actually worked properly, damn.
      - swozey 6y ago
        Catskills had the best roleplaying community I've ever seen. I miss it. I also had so much fun on Siege Perilous when it was those color wars with the 4 castles. I can't believe they ever changed that.
  - kingnothing 6y ago
    Haha, awesome. I was also a counselor in UO at roughly the same age.
philliphaydon 6y ago
I think part of it is that when UO came out it was this visual imaginary world that allowed us to do what we wanted rather than drive us in a particular direction. And even if there was a UO clone with updated graphics. It just wouldn’t be the same as that first experience we had. I miss UO. It’s what got me into programming to begin with. I ran a shard with 250 people on at peak times called Sacred. And was GM on Alphanine, and for a short time before it died, Novus Opiate. I got into programming to make my own UO game but ended up just making software.
NikolaeVarius 6y ago
What is "better"
abhijitr 6y ago
> Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? Piggybacking on this, has anyone made an open world single player RPG better than Ultima 7 yet?
- xsmasher 6y ago
  Divinity: Original Sins was that game for me; everything I loved about U7, minus the annoying bits (collecting arrows, eating food every x minutes, time-of-day changes for NPCs).
  - mintplant 6y ago
    And Divinity: Original Sin 2 improves on its predecessor in every way. It's the game Larian have been trying to make since their inception. Honestly, I'd recommend that new players skip straight to the sequel—you won't miss anything story-wise.
root_axis 6y ago
Absolutely. EVE today is a much better MMO than UO ever was. Of course, the space setting is a hard sell for those who are looking for a game with the all the Tolkien trappings of old school RPGs, but as an MMO it is the most sophisticated game available today and is unparalleled in terms of how player driven behavior impacts the game world. Most notably Eve has managed to succeed in keeping veteran players satisfied while also providing a path for new players to have a meaningful impact on the game world. This is a major problem WoW was never able to overcome despite its commercial success and has instead relied on periodic invalidation of veteran player progress every 8 to 16 months to keep things fresh (a well-worn strategy for most blizzard games). edit: tough crowd, I'd be interested in the details of the dissenting opinions
- debug-desperado 6y ago
  Cool. What sort of "path for new players to have a meaningful impact on the game world" does EVE provide?
  - outworlder 6y ago
    I can only think of joining alliances. Alliances with thousands of players and immense military power have been brought down by single individuals before(or crippled by spies).
  - root_axis 6y ago
    Almost all MMOs gate content in the form of linear "levels" which essentially function like a several-dozen hour tutorial until the player grinds to the point of "max level" so that they can then begin to participate in "end game" content. In EVE, player progress isn't so narrowly constrained or defined in terms of an aggregate statistic, rather, player skills can be trained automatically over time without grinding and, similar to the golden era of UO, player skills function in the game with respect to their individual utility rather than as a function of player level. This means new players can target specific skills based on how they want to play the game rather than picking the skills that facilitate the most efficient grind to max level, after which they reset all their skills and reallocate them with respect to the "real" game. Thus new players begin to experience the "real game" early on without having to grind through 30 hours of cookie-cutter content before the "real game" begins.
runawaybottle 6y ago
The current trend in MMO-like games are basically sandbox games like UO. The thing about MMOs is that your first great experience is going to be tough to top. Even if I tell you there are 20+ sandbox MMOs that do what UO did, it will never live up to UO for you.
andrepd 6y ago
I'm of the honest opinion that no game ever made truly lives up to the potential of the MMORPG. Of a virtual, persistent, shared world. It's quite sad. UO and Star Wars Galaxies probably came the closest.
- jandrese 6y ago
  It's really hard to strike the balance between giving players ultimate freedom to make a permanent mark on the world and providing a fun experience for new players, especially if you are trying to avoid pushing new players way out into the wilderness where they will never see anybody. Ultimately players want to interact with other friendly players, but that's impossible because some players will be assholes and will try their hardest to make life miserable for your new players. If your have wide open PvP you have roving gank squads.
xwdv 6y ago
It is unlikely there will ever be an MMO better than what UO was at its peak in the old days. Those were savage days, where simply being killed and having your body cut up and looted dry was considered acceptable for an MMO. At one point even having someone steal your house key meant they could enter your entire house and loot it dry. Another thing is the graphics. Yea everyone thinks 3D graphics are cool but 2D graphics allow for imagination to fill in the blanks more. The graphics are less literal, the less detail is shown the more your mind fills in the blanks. Your mind begins to imagine what these characters would look and sound like if they were real people. Also consider that even the GUI in UO was often in-character, you open a bag it looks like a bag, open a backpack and it looks like a backpack. And items could be dragged anywhere and positioned however you wanted, sometimes causing a mess. Organizing your backpack was like a little mini-game within a game. Most games these days abandon those kinds of details in favor of grids where you can neatly place items into discrete slots. Convenient, but a lost opportunity for emergent game play. Also, text appearing above peoples heads when they speak instead of a chat window meant you always kept your focus on the world in front of you and conversations felt natural, it feels more like reading a comic book, as opposed to some instant messenger.
- mentos 6y ago
  You’ve hit a lot of the important points. I’d add that there were very few alternatives so the ‘care bear’ players who preferred crafting were forced to be fodder for the more aggressive ‘wolf’ players. It was an incredibly special time in video game history I’ll always cherish
arminiusreturns 6y ago
Ok, first, the answer is really no, but there have been two main attempts, in Darkfall and Mortal Online. I jumped on the Mortal Online bandwagon in beta and stuck with it for a long time, being part of one of the best guilds in game. The bad: Unfortunately, while it had a ton of potential, there were lots of issues and eventually it just stopped being as fun. For me dealing with a red was easy, but for new players the learning curve was so steep what ended up happening was roving gangs of reds and gank guilds griefing new players into literally quitting forever. A world that was too open, so didn't feel living, despite the player impact and control. Much later players could build walls on game vital paths and completely block off areas of the world. Basically the freedom of working towards a UO system has a lot of potential weaknesses and the devs at StarVault learned all this the hard way. The good: some amazing emergent gameplay I have yet to experience anywhere else. A crafting system that should be an inspiration to every game that has crafting. Hidden things, with not everything in a database you can just look up, guilds and people that horded info, and political intrigue and subterfuge. Really fun combat for it's time if you had a good connection. Full loot pvp. A large world that was very fun exploring (there is no in game map, I was one of the people who literally participated in a guild mapping of the continent that is still used at https://www.mortalonlinemap.info/ https://www.mortalonlinemap.info/ A large single persistent instance (no sharding). The devs, recognizing many of the issues stemmed from complications of using UE3, are now working on Mortal Online II in the UE4 engine. I hope it goes well for them but haven't tried it yet. https://www.mortalonline2.com/ https://www.mortalonline2.com/
haolez 6y ago
UO is/was pretty unique. It had poverty. Some players were so poor that they had to beg for food! Funny and depressing at the same time :) Overpowered players were really rare (in the golden age, at least). And they were usually very famous, like celebrities. It was very very hard to improve your character's skills. The game wasn't tailored to boost your ego with custom looks and mean-looking armors and weapons - it was what it was, and that usually meant frustration. At least for me, it was fun and unique. I don't see anything like that in the current generation of blockbuster MMO games.
lowbloodsugar 6y ago
Ugh. Lots of nostalgic views here made fonder through absence I think. UO sucked was amazing but it sucked. I can't recall how many empty dungeons we walked through, only to get to the treasure room filled with gold? No. Filled with other players. All just camping out, waiting for loot to drop. In fact it would be true to say I can only recall such dungeons. And then the Lich would respawn and all the n00bs would shit themselves while someone else killed it, and then everyone frantically trashed the place looking for loot like an FBI raid at the drug dealer's girlfriend's place. Honestly it was so utterly pointless to try to "play the game" that my friend and I actually indulged (I am ashamed to say) in some naked griefing. Which is to say, the only fun we had was in trying to figure out the games state machines, i.e. to goad people into killing us such that we could get the guards to kill them. How it works: stand outside a town. Be offensive. Wait till someone attacks you. Run into town. Yell "Guards! Guards!". Guard appears and kills aggressor. Take all his stuff. There were various iterations of this that Raph Koster actually wrote up [1], and it was fun. For us. Neither my friend nor I are actually assholes, and only resorted to this because it was literally the only "game" present in the entire system. We'd paid for a game, we rationalized, and by golly we were going to find one. Ok, we probably were just entitled assholes. Perhaps it got better later, but we'd gone by then. [Naked griefing, because every now and again we'd grief a wizard and they'd freeze us in place and then kill us. But we were naked. Didn't even lose a shoe.] There was also "The Great Unused!" which we had "fun" with for a while. This was an item that was called "Unused", and its icon was a photoshop lens flare. It also weighed 255, the max amount. So you couldn't move if you were carrying it. So my friend and I spent hours standing next to it, picking it up, and then dropping it on the other side, moving it two squares at a time, leapfrogging each other. We could put it on a boat (much to our relief, as we'd been lugging it for an hour by that point) and managed to bring it from a far island back to "town". Where upon, we tried to start a cult to worship "The Great Unused!" People tried to steal it, by picking it up, and we would laugh as they ran in place for an unreasonably long time (some people are just so determined), but eventually they would drop it. It didn't catch on. Now Raph's first go at Star Wars Galaxies I really enjoyed. I couldn't play very often, and yet I could still be useful, even as my friends leveled far ahead of me. I played a medic, and sometimes my heal would be the thing that saved someone from death and a long walk back. Most MMOs (that I played), once your friends are four levels ahead of you, you don't get any experience points at all if you join their party. So UO was a great starting point, and very smart, very passionate people have made significantly better games, learning every time. [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A_brief_history_of_murder_in_Ultima_Online.php https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A...
outworlder 6y ago
> Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet No. EVE comes close. In particular, it actually surpasses UO in many ways, like a complete player-based economy. Almost anything you could ever need or want is crafted by players. There are 'loot drops', but ones that are actually better than what players can craft are rare. And are sold in the market. Similarly to UO, death has consequences. You lose your ship, everything on it, all cargo. There's 'insurance', but it will only pay for the 'market price' of the ship. You yourself may have paid more (but usually not less, otherwise people would build and destroy ships to claim insurance). EVE also has skills, much like UO. Unlike UO, those are 'trained' over time, not by usage. But there are no 'levels' and for the most part there aren't any ships which are 'better' for any role. An unprepared battleship can be destroyed by a couple of fast moving frigates that cost a tiny fraction of resources and skills to pilot. One that's fitted against small fighters will suck against other battleships, and so on. Like Ultima Online, movement is very important in combat. In EVE, even more so, due to gun tracking(and how missile explosions work). This is the main reason why the battleship scenario above works. EVE also has forms of 'housing', as in player made starbases, corporation offices and apparently stations now. EVE has consumables. Other than laser-based weaponry (mostly Amarr), you have to buy ammo. Like casting spells in UO requires reagents. WoW has very little consumables, and you certainly can cast spells all day long. It also has a very 'lawless' world. Some systems have no security response at all, others will have delayed response depending on the security rating. Just like UO, if someone really wants to kill you they can, although there may be consequences. Unlike UO, there are no 'shards'. Everyone is on the same server (or more specific, cluster). Even 'instancing' (used for NPC missions) is part of the universe, you can join the instance if you have the location(or can scan). So, EVE has very deep and detailed systems, to the point that people used to call it 'spreadsheets in space'. But I can't directly compare it with Ultima Online – mostly because they are quite different games, thematically. One is a fantasy world full with dragons and spells. The other is a very futuristic and highly advanced space game. WoW... is entertaining. Has amazing and detailed lore (although EVE's is good, it's not even in the same league). Locations can be such an eye candy. Even boring 'collect item' quests can be very entertaining. Have I mentioned how quests can be entertaining? Because there are some incredible ones. World of Warcraft also has 'classes'. Which is again a completely different philosophy from either UO or even EVE. Take a Mage. Maybe it will be specialized as a 'frost' mage. No matter, two frost mages at the same level will have the exact same skills and spells. Equipment may change, but it is not like they will have a bow, they will just have different stats. But WoW suffers from a very simplistic gameplay. You have 'levels' – which will immediately set it apart from Ultima Online. You have also lots of skills. Using them effectively and timing them is important, but in the end it's just about selecting a target and pressing a few function keys(this is actually something that it has in common with EVE, except for the role of movement and position in EVE). Death is essentially meaningless in WoW. You don't lose any items. You may have to pay repair, but that's it. Compare to UO: you drop everything you are carrying – you can try to get it back, but someone (or something) may get to your corpse before then. Or EVE, you lose your ship, items, equipment and even skills if you can't GTFO with your pod and forgot to update your clone. PVP in either UO or EVE is much more of an experience than WoW. And in either game you won't necessarily have a level 100 one-shotting a level 10 character. Ok, this is already too long, but I could contrast even further. But WoW is more popular for a reason: one can log in, start a queue for a dungeon, go complete some quests and have _guaranteed progression_. While on EVE, there were a few days where I logged in and got incredibly lucky, but in other days I wished I didn't login, as things went very badly. Similarly on Ultima Online. On both, you learn a few rules: trust noone, don't carry(or fly) what you can't afford to lose, etc. I'm keeping an eye on the likes of Ark, they might be onto something. I still think that good MMORPG games will have to develop a mostly player-based economy if they want to stay relevant long term.
imtringued 6y ago
It's definitively not the same genre but Shores of Hazeron was an empire building MMO where you start as a simple caveman on a random planet in a fully procedurally generated universe and you are supposed to create a city from scratch and figure out space travel. Colonize other planets or moons in your solar system to create a FTL drive and then fight other empires. It looks awful and the developer made some questionable decisions but hey it was just a one man show. Nowadays the closest spiritual successor is No Mans Sky. Huge procedurally generated universe. Check. Randomly generated animals. Check. Spacecraft with combat and seamless transition from planet to space. Check. The ability to create your own spacecraft designs? Nope. The ability to actually do interesting things with the planets like build a colony on them? Nope. Massive multiplayer? Hell no. No mans sky is just eye candy. Imagine the benefits of reaching the center of the galaxy and thereby being teleported to a completely different one if you could colonize that new galaxy! You'd have a massive edge over the other empires. The reality is that all universes and planets in no mans sky are functionally the same. You can stop playing as soon as you see your first planet and nobody could claim that you didn't see everything the game had to offer.

gavman 6y ago

This was discussed by one of the game's creators in the Ultima Online episode of Ars Techica's War Stories (around the 5:10 mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE

eordano 6y ago

It seems that SHARD is a term used already in 1988, meaning "System for Highly Available Replicated Data" Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14914487445955020264&hl=en&oi=scholarr https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14914487445955020...

chongli 6y ago
While interesting I don’t think this old paper led to the popularization of the term. It only has 12 citations!
- gojomo 6y ago
 Looking at a single academic paper's citation count won't reveal much about a term's historical currency. For example, there are also papers in Google Scholar (findable via query [database shard], through 1987) mentioning this same SHARD system in 1986 and 1987, with 33 and 97 citations respectively. And further, there's a 1986 MIT technical note that mentions a commercially-in-development version of this SHARD system, but refers back to a 1985 paper, "System architecture for partition-tolerant distributed databases", as an authoritative source about SHARD – though that 1985 paper doesn't declare the name SHARD. That's suggestive that SHARD was adopted as a catchy name for that particular work around 1985-1986, then becoming more widespread in the 1986-1988 timeframe. But perhaps more interesting: that original 1985 paper mentions in its acknowledgements Hector Garcia-Molina – a definite 'hub' person in databases/indexing/networked-information for decades, among many other things Google cofounder Sergey Brin's advisor at Stanford from 1993-1997. (See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-Molina>. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-Molina...) So it's likely safe to assume that from the late 80s into the 90s, top CS students/researchers around the world discussing partitioned distributed databases would often have this particular sense of SHARD mentioned to them, or appear in their readings. Notably, that 1985 SHARD involved a system where each replica contained the entire database – so did not capture the modern connotations of 'shard', as horizontal partitions. But that vivid & apropos analogy was "in the air" around partitioned/distributed databases. Thus I'd strongly suspect uses in the modern, non-overlapping sense in that same era, likely predating Ultima Online's 1996ish use. (I'd especially look around precursor work to the 1997 'Consistent Hashing' paper, & other caching-centric work – because there the idea of partition-by-key was central.) So UO might have devised, but I'd guess more likely popularized, our modern sense of 'sharding'.

fcatalan 6y ago

I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for coming up by yourself with things that are now considered "obvious" or just the way things are done. Things happened fast: by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an "experienced" web developer. We had websites, but we didn't have good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard way. The biggest thing I remember to have "invented" by myself in early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database driven website: I was tasked with creating a "virtual campus" kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades, news... and the sparse examples and models I had found for all those functionalities used plain text files as storage. After completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with those files and suddenly thought: "hey, dumping all this crap on a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!" It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that databases were for internal "databasey" things: Accounting, addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of stuff. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing website felt almost like a revolutionary concept. By the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs/ the Active Record stuff from Rails. So I sort of "invented" that too. Another thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C through CGI. The database was mysql. I tried to run it a couple years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the makefile, 20 years after the fact. My current projects seem to rot every time I take a short vacation.

agentultra 6y ago
I had the same experience pulling together personal home pages in chronological descending order from a database of text files. A bunch of folks online had their own scripts as well. Eventually a few people would release their scripts and it would become known as a "weblog" and eventually a "blog" and many people profited from that. Wild times.
gtsteve 6y ago
I started PC programming in about 1997 before I had an internet connection at home. I had to either research at school and make notes or get books from the library. The fun result of that was for a few weeks I thought that I was going to get rich from having invented unit testing. What we have today is far more efficient, I don't miss it but I definitely look back on those days with nostalgia.

efitz 6y ago

I hadn't ever heard of the term "sharding", but the team I was on was "partitioning" databases in the early 2000's (effectively sharding at the table level so that we could drop table instead of deleting rows).

mywittyname 6y ago
So my understanding is that there is are practical differences between a partition and a shard. They both are ways to stored separately, based on the partition key. But a partitioned table has one table, while a shard uses multiple tables which share the same schema. For example, with a partitioned database, you might have a single `transaction` table, partitioned by date, but with a shard database, you'd have multiple `transaction_${date}` tables which needed to be queried from, but they'd share a common schema.
- greenshackle2 6y ago
  Last time I did partitioning by date in postgres (on postgres 9.?), multiple transaction_${date} tables is exactly what I got. They are exposed as a single 'transaction' table but they were really different physical tables. My understanding is that partitioning is a more general term. Partitioning can be on one or multiple servers. Sharding is a type of partitioning that is always across multiple servers.

dws 6y ago

Google mentions sharding in a 2005 patent. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2007011957A2 https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2007011957A2 http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/sharding-for-startups.html?showComment=1231392480000#c9054865638836100787 http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/sharding-for-st... notes the term in use within Google by 2003.

gojomo 6y ago
This 2009 reminiscence discusses the term’s use in the UO context in 1996, so 2003-2005 mentions don’t affect the author’s conjecture at all. (I’d guess there are uses of ‘sharding’/‘shards’ in this sense from much earlier, perhaps decades earlier, database/caching work, but I could be wrong.)
theincredulousk 6y ago
Probably some UO players at Google then - UO was old by 2003.
NelsonMinar 6y ago
I worked at Google 2001-2006 and we definitely talked about "database shards", particularly for the AdWords MySQL database. (this architecture has long, long since changed). At least from 2002, and the database was partitioned far before that. I remember at the time thinking the term "shard" was odd but perhaps Ultima Online inspired. I'm curious now about the history of database partitioning. So much of the early work was about trying to hide the partitions, to pretend it was all one big reliable system. It took awhile for folks to realize that was foolish.

staycoolboy 6y ago

Garriot talks about this in the documentary "Get Lamp!", which is about the history adventure games. He talks about the challenges of maintaining a huge MMO, especially how they were broadsided by the challenges of managing an economy because everyone was so greedy. He mentions how the admins came to work one day to find that players had killed every living thing on the planet and could no longer generate income. Kinda like a miniature "dark forest" theory.

pradn 6y ago
Computer games work best with numbers, so RPGs end up being about numbers. So, naturally, people try to min-max because 1) it's something to do 2) you progress that way 3) you can show off to others. Maybe a child would be hesitant to kill a video game creature, but it seems like, since pretty much every video game lets you do violent things, that taboo against violence is erased very quickly. So, all these combine to, what looks like to people who don't play games, a propensity to kill en masse. It's a shadow of the same situation one encounters in an abbatoir. Maybe killing the first few animals makes you feel terrible, but you get out of it quickly. The human ability to adapt to any circumstance has this disturbing side to it, too.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  Which is ironic given the nature of U4 and it's moral system. That game REALLY floored me the summer I spent playing it (literally the entire summer, it was before I was old enough to get a job). > RPGs end up being about numbers. For me, this was the final, sad conclusion to computer-based RPGs after nearly 40 years playing them. In tabletop D&D, a +1 sword is a rarity, and +2 is super special; magic users focused more on creativity because the cost to the caster for Lvl9 spells (if you ever got there, which was never in real games) was prohibitive to use them on a regular basis (memorization, physical aging). In fact, the level tables in AD&D stopped around 10 or 12 I think because that much XP simply didn't happen. Computer RPGs turned it all into numbers games, as you can see in WoW where the top tier armor today has stats like +30,000 attribute, when in the first release, top T3 geat from C'thon was like, +50 key attribute per piece. Am I ranting? I'm ranting.

deleted 6y ago

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pixelmonkey 6y ago

This comes up from time to time. Here is a Twitter thread with some more links about the various usages of "shard" in the context of early internet and gaming services, including Ultima Online (UO), other early MMORPGs, and even MUDs. https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/615116231092371456?s=20 https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/615116231092371456?s=...

Raph_Koster 6y ago
Everyone just called them "servers." Not shards.

mfontani 6y ago

In the year 2000, my (telnet + MCP & MCCP & other acronyms-supporting) C-based MUD boasted a _web_ interface. With colors, buttons to move, and even _images_. A web request is just a TCP socket, and browsers were gracious enough to start displaying stuff as soon as it came in (so long as tags were properly closed). So long as you sent stuff fairly routinely, the connection wouldn't be closed. Frames helped... well, "frame" the interface: main frame would be the mud's output; another frame for user input - both using a shared "key" to ensure output and input were linked to the same user. Users' input could therefore easily just be sent on another web request, checked for key correspondance, and the command ran as if the user input the same command via telnet: action -> response. A sprinkle of that new-fangled JavaScript helped ensure the screen would scroll properly as soon as new output came by. Having previously abstracted all color-related stuff (to ensure strings like "&WFoo&GBar&X" would send ANSI colours to users opting-in to them, and nothing to users opting out of them) meant that it was "easy" to send "FooBar" to the HTML interface instead. Websockets? We don't need no stinkin' websockets! _really long_ polling suffices ;)