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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?
- marmee 3y agoThis is discussed here in detail (the entire series is highly recommended) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
- simonw 3y agoThat was great! Ultima creator Richard Garriott talking about how they tried to include a "virtual ecology" system in the game with prey animals and predator animals... but the players just wiped out every living creature. It mentions "sharding" as a term they invented too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 3y agoThere was a moment when I was playing a rogue in WoW, when the ridiculousness of murder hobo games really hit me full force. I played a Druid, y’know, love nature, save the animals? And they had the same quests to go murder fifty alligators for their teeth and you had to murder twenty wolves to get to the alligators. Like what in the actual fuck. So I’m playing the rogue, and we all have quests to kill the leader of the ogres, or the ogre shaman (you had to murder so many ogres), who is in the back of the cave. So if you play a Druid or a paladin or a priest you have to kill his whole tribe just to get to him, possibly even wait for more of them to show up to murder them as well. Meanwhile the rogue, who’s supposed to be the most ethically challenged class in the game, can sneak past all of his friends, kill the one troublemaker, and sneak back out without having to take any innocent lives. What kind of weird messages are we sending here, Blizzard?
- NegatioN 3y agoIn a similar vein to the "War Stories"-clips, (even though I never played Ultima,) their Ultima post-mortem from GDC is a great watch too. https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0 https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0
- dathinab 3y agoDatabase sharding existed in book form in the pre computation era ;=) Through using the term sharding might have come from there (which is what the article claims).
- ibnbutlAn 3y agoSorry for nitpick but its called "Ultima Online" without the t
- Widdershin 3y agoYeah I though this was about Smash Ultimate and was very confused for a second
- Dx5IQ 3y agoFixed the typo, sorry!
- simonhamp 3y agoPlease add "(2009)" to the title
- agentultra 3y agoI wish I still had my original box and cloth map. I have such good memories of that game. It's still running to this day!
- npsomaratna 3y agoFond memories of hours on hours of Ultima VII, back in the '90s. In fact, the first time I saw the intro[1], I thought my monitor had an issue. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqOZlNxbfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqOZlNxbfI — about 32 seconds in.
- jghn 3y agoI recently tried to resurrect my account. They were able to dust off my secondary account but couldn't track down my main account. It's weird as I was able to dig up old emails from Origin to the email address I told them I used, but they said there was no record of an account with that email. Alas.
- EarthLaunch 3y agoI still have the map! https://i.imgur.com/hDQulgr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/hDQulgr.jpeg Games have always been at the forefront of software innovation. I love working with them.
- pottertheotter 3y agoMy mom sent me a box of random things of mine that had been in a cupboard forever and one of the items was my UO cloth map. Great memories for sure.
- tibbon 3y agoI got my UO maps framed recently
- sublinear 3y ago[flagged]
- 29athrowaway 3y agoUltima Online is a game of great detail and there is an incredibly high number of actions available to the player. Truly an immersive experience. Kudos to those guys.
- elif 3y agoEasyUO scripting was my introduction to programming at age 14. By the time I got to college I was already a professional coder and I was able to enjoy CS as a recapitulation or reinterpretation of my foundational understanding instead of a dogmatic prescribed methodology as I saw in my object oriented/relational database bound peers. UO really sparked my whole life's passion accidentally by leaving the memory and registers readable/writable and the server requests unencrypted. It is a shame that the cheat vs anti-cheat war has escalated to the point where kids today would rather pay $100 per month for access to a closed binary (with who-knows-what malware) which is able to bypass anti-cheat mechanisms rather than freely play with a live application that they are already invested in.
- mysticllama 3y ago+1 for another CS student jump-started by UO :D
- debaserab2 3y agoExact same here. Coding a script for my miner to automatically hit the high value ore spots and detect if any PK was in the area (and recall to safety) was one of my first major programming achievements! I recall making a similar comment to Raph Koster in a hacker news thread a few years ago. He didn't seem all that pleased about it, lol.
- jahsome 3y agoMe too! Ain't no way I had time at 14 to train taming. Ended up taking an equivalent amount of time learning to script it anyway though... Led me to a lifelong obsession with automation, although I never quite picked up the pure cs fundamentals. I guess I'll always be a script kiddie at heart.
- taskforcegemini 3y agosounds more like a hacker to me. script kiddies usually don't write or understand the scripts they use
- mysticllama 3y agoas i recall, they devised their own scripting language, and they relied solely on flatfiles to track world-state… then every day at a given time, each server would have an off-hours save where the flatfiles would be persisted. players caught on to this, and would take advantage by having "server wars" during these save windows, when changes wouldn't be persisted, and would all equip their best kit and battle at certain locations. all that said, it's not too surprising lots of creativity and ingenuity was required, given in 1997 the world had really seen nothing like it. i remember getting it right after it came out -- i had just turned 11. when i tried to explain to people that it was a massive, detailed fantasy world where you could go on adventures with people in real-time, they'd look at me like i had two heads. this got me into scripting and mods and was a big influence on why i became interested in software and hacking, and have had a career in it since.
- gabereiser 3y agoUO:Renaissance was the best era of UO. Two worlds separated by moonstones to separate open-pvp with non-pvp. My younger brother and I would hang out in Briton in Felucia (open-pvp) and kill anyone trying to cross over with loot or anyone coming over with gear.
- xwdv 3y agoNo, the best time period was before this, when there was only one unified open-pvp world and people could kill you and even burglarize your house if they stole the key and knew where you lived, or even just killed you right at your front doorstep before you get a chance to close the door and lock it. Casual players forced to live in a truly dangerous world with thieves and blood thirsty killers, we’ll never see these dynamics in an MMO again. When Renaissance was introduced, what happened was most people lived purely in the non-pvp world and horded massive wealth and resources safely (which would have made you a big target in the old world), while the pvp side just became an arena for people to fight all the time. Boring.
- jghn 3y agoIn my experience most of the people who say this were exactly the sort of people that ruined it for everyone else by taking things too far. Turns out people didn't find it fun to be slaughtered by a horde of 15 teenagers with names like "frogsmasha"
- canadiantim 3y agoAnyone recommend a UO-like experience these days?
- ultimafan 3y agoUO Outlands is probably the biggest/healthiest free shard out there right now, peak hours hover around 3,000 characters online.
- hbrn 3y agoMortal Online 2 is probably your best bet. Darkfall was also a good option, but it seems dead now.
- BryantD 3y agoProject: Gorgon, from two of the Asheron’s Call developers. It’s got that offbeat “we can do whatever we want” feel, no classes, and it’s fun. https://projectgorgon.com/ https://projectgorgon.com/
- wellthisisgreat 3y agoAlbion Online is the closest I’ve seen in a decade.
- devin 3y agoHonestly, I think it's impossible to recreate. Being able to use real-time voice makes a lot of group combat scenarios easy to coordinate, and those giant good vs evil battles were a real highlight of early UO to me. You'd have to coordinate with voice, or follow someone who was typing out the next target's name. Once you could hop in a group voice chat, there's someone who could say "target: Bob -- load up. 3, 2, 1, drop". The target can't heal through a coordinated scenario like this, and I think effectively killed group PvP. Of course you could do this if you were all in the same room back in the day, but that was uncommon.
- Spastche 3y agoRust matches the hardcore harshness of it I wish I could find a game more on the "numbers go up" / programming side of things. I think I enjoyed macroing in UO more than anything about it, just writing my own scripts to raise skills. I automate webgames sometimes when I'm bored, but even that's not quite the same. Maybe I'll reinstall UO this weekend and play a player server.
- havblue 3y agoFun semi-related video from DefCon regarding hacking Ultima online. https://youtu.be/ZAUf_ygqsDo https://youtu.be/ZAUf_ygqsDo
- samstave 3y agoUltima ][ Was one of my first games, which I found on a floppy left in an Apple ][e in 8th grade ~1990 or so... which got me and my best friend into gaming (and trouble) Later, I was one of two on the Developer Relations Group (along with said best friend) @SC5 Intel and my cube was right next to Andy Grove - we had the same pee-schedule, for whatever reason Andy and I always seemed to only intersect in the restroom to pee.. Anyway - UO was a huge part of us validating the Celeron CPU as an acceptable gaming platform, aiming for a <$1,000 PC... This is when NURBS dolphin was 'THEE demo' (I had gone to school for 3D animation in Seattle (Mesmer, which became UW's animation course a year after I graduated, and thus I didnt get an 'accredited' degree because they bought the school, on SGIs - and was when NT4 was porting Softimage, Maya to PCs, we had the first AGP cards, first OpenGL ports of things and a new engine, Unreal) Anyway - we ran a bank of Intel's highest end machines at the time and had 6 UO accounts connected with a T3 - so we dominated UO PK scene because we had zero lag, and everyone else was on 56K... Man that was the golden era of my gaming life... We had an unlimited expense account at Frys Electronics and could buy anything we liked. But the best thing was how we were able to PK others with our bank of 6 acccounts, and we had a Canadian Pot Dealer who had a T1 (he shipped Cannabis via fedex to the states and made enough to pay $1,500/month for the T1 to his house) that played with us and was the 3rd member in our guild... We had two accounts which were 'Snoop' and 'Sneak' and we would follow our Great Lords and Dread Lords ; all with 100 Hide Skill... so we would hide our Great Lords next to our Dread Lords with the same name... We would taunt folks, with Dread - then hide right next to the Great Lord as the attacked and they would attack and kill the Great Lord, lose reputation, and then our hidden Snoop and Sneak chars would loot our Great Lords so that the enemy wouldnt get any loot... and only after the battle did they realize how duped they were... Later, after Intel, I ran IT for the company that published (physically manufactured) Everquest and had same early beta access to everquest... but that game was not the same as UO. I was there when Lord British was assassinated. (dont get me started on Lag Death when playing against one of the top Quake players on a T3 at Intel (MyM)
- clemailacct1 3y agoThis is such a wholesome, nostalgic post. It makes me wish I could take a time machine back to the 90’s and do it all over again.
- marzell 3y agoI was unaware that Game Neverending was the origin of Flickr. Interesting as Glitch[0] was also the origin of Slack. Seems to be an interesting theme in Stoot's career. [0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/ https://www.glitchthegame.com/
- hinkley 3y agoSlack the app might come from a game, but the name (and we are discussing names here) comes from the Church of the Subgenius, which existed in 1994. There’s a reason there’s another chat app named Discord. Long before His Noodly Appendage ever waved, there was the Church if the Subgenius and Discordianism fighting it out for ridiculous pseudo religion supremacy. Until I lost my wallet around 1998 I was a Real and Genuine Pope, thanks to Project Pan-Pontification. Since then nobody has treated me well.
- chiph 3y agoIt wasn't hidden in any real way, but the Atari ST had a easter-egg of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs in their 8x16 font in the box-drawing section. U+250C, U+2510, U+2514 and U+2518. Computing was more fun in the 80's... https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1687936/atari-st-1 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1687936/atari-st-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs
- intellix 3y agoI worked on a private sphere server and dropped my toes in programming there which helped later in life. I remember really struggling and not understanding the concept of arrays... All I could muster was static variables and needed help creating a paginated list of heads you collected from players
- NelsonMinar 3y agoI remember joining Google in 2001 and being struck they were using the term "sharding" for the ads databases (MySQL) instead of "partitions". I understood it at the time to be referring to Ultima Online. Raph's memory dates to 1996, the blog post he references seems to be from 1999. I imagine the idea of database partitioning goes back at least to the 80s, anyone know what earlier terms were used? Other than "partition", of course.
- ChancyChance 3y agoGarriott explains all of this in the documentary "Get Lamp".
- brianaker 3y agoBy the year 1998 I was using the term "shard" in slides for MySQL, and I believe mSQL as well. The term might be found in Slashdot's source code. I am pretty sure I gave a talk on sharding at the open database summit in 2001. I had previously used the term shard for an app I wrote and distributed for VMS around '92, but that app only ever had a handful of users. It was available via FTP. FWIW I took the term from the movie "The Dark Crystal".
- stubish 3y agoI agree that the movie, released in 1982, is likely the source for the term sharding used by games, consciously realized or not. Most of the generation would have seen it. Or perhaps from where Henson and Froud likely got the idea of a crystal shard containing a complete copy of the whole, holography, which I think got into the public consciousness in the 70s and 80s.
- mancerayder 3y agoI loved Ultima Online! I gravitated towards wealth accumulation through selling rare weapons and armor in towns. One day I logged in and my house got robbed, my chests of ingots, armor and swords completely empty, I'm surprised I even had the house remaining. That was my last login.