Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside players (2014)

- Large towers in UO were expensive player owned homes that are narrow at the base, but wider on the higher floors. Some players would place them near water and the widest roof area would hang over the water. At that point in UO you could look inside a container if you were close enough to it (3 tiles?) regardless if it was inside of a building. The game does a check to see if you can remove an item from a container based on walls and other rules, so you couldn't get items out of them, only see their contents. For some reason this can-I-take-item check didn't include the Z axis when over water. My friends and I bought a boat and would sail around for hours looking for towers near the water, sail under their wings and loot them.

- UO had items that were stackable (you could place one on top of another, and they would stack up along the Z axis). For most items that allowed you to pass through them, when you're on the same tile as the item stacked, nothing happens: Your character is standing inside of a stack of shirts for example but doesn't have their own Z axis changed. Early in the game, there was one item that didn't behave like this: fur. Players found that if you stacked fur in a certain way, you could make a ladder that would move your character's Z axis up higher and higher. They would stack enough fur to allow a character to walk on to the roof of houses and fall through to break in.

- When you died in UO you were a ghost. Your screen turned grey and you could walk through doors and other objects, but couldn't interact with anything. When a player resurrects another player, the player being resurrected would get a prompt asking them to confirm. Early in UO, players could walk around with the prompt still on their screen. So! You find a house you wanted to break into, kill yourself, have your friend resurrect you, walk through the front door with the prompt up, once inside, confirm, and you'd be brought back to life inside the house.

UO in 1998 was a special time - I love seeing threads pop up on HN because there are always interesting stories shared by players of that era.

I think there's a deeper link between the kind of players who play hardcore MMOs and the mechanics of the game itself beyond the lack of games in this genre. The allure of real loss/real displays of skill draws naturally competitive people. Sure, you can pubstomp in TF2 but at the end of the match, what changed? Maybe someone has a new hat. In EVE you can blow up someone's structure that took them hours of space work or real money. There's no real "risk&reward" when the risk is basically nothing, no matter how great the reward is. What kind of person is drawn to this kind of gameplay? Sociop^H^H^H^H^H^H Competitive people.

This is it really. I've tried a few such games over the years and it felt like a majority of people were just trying to get powerful enough to kill & loot other players a little under their strength and then repeat the process to bootstrap themselves higher & higher. Players that want to play that way are attracted to such games, and they inevitably drive out players who want the balance shifted a little in the other direction.

I don't see how game design can easily shift this balance because it's more about attracting a different balance of players than in how you design the game itself.

I agree that it's curious that newer games don't offer the sandbox model though. Instancing is so boring and UO's land ownership concept remains fairly unique.

It has its warts, but as far as full loot sandboxes go, I enjoy it more than any other I've tried.

When somebody else will pay for this.

I participated in one uo group, we gather money, buy powerful server, paid for hosting. All this based on big enough group with positive economy.

Exist games which cheaper than uo in terms of need server power, but they are much less fun.

But first, remember Eternal September; basically it will never be like it was back then, even if it is exactly the same. See WoW Classic.

Anyway, I think people are experiencing the same things nowadays in games like Runescape, Minecraft and Roblox, where in especially the latter two there are a number of servers offering MMO-like gameplay, including heaps of weird bugs. I wouldn't recommend them for people looking for an UO experience though. I never played any of those myself.

Before they finally patched the hole, I used to enjoy running through crowds of high level monsters in dungeons to get a whole parade of them chasing me, then quickly casting a portal into the middle of town, usually next to the bank, then ducking behind the portal without going through, as the whole line of monsters walked towards me and popped through the portal and into town!

I hope they got you. Pththth!!!

Doing this before blessed items might have yielded good returns, but there were far more exploitable avenues in that game.

Selling UO gold is how I bought many things in my youth.

edit:

Oh I also use to search through a farm area below town, where people would hide items to transfer between characters.

I used to play a shard called Novus Opiate. It was the biggest early shard.

After it died I went on to run a couple of servers and teaching myself to code. Alphanine and Sacred.

When I wanted to drop out of school I wanted to do 3d animation to make a game like UO. But realised I have 0 talent in design but I love programming. So ended up doing that. Thankfully I never became a game dev tho. The stories scare me.

I liked how I could chop a body up and spread the pieces which is really fun when you are at war with your neighbor and you see their ghost standing over their dead body saying OOOoooOoo OooOOOO

The closest thing is probably heavily modded private servers in various games, that are still big enough to feel like mini MMOs. Minecraft has some for sure. Project Zomboid recently. Some very specific Rust or GTA servers. In the past there was some permadeath Neverwinter Nights persistant worlds (there might even still be.)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrap...

    >GIVE AXE TO TROLL

    The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift 
    and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.

    The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for 
    his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls.

    >GIVE TROLL TO TROLL

    The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift 
    and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.

(I've actually been able to successfully apply this technique of giving HN trolls their own weapons (quoting their own words back to them), then giving them to themselves (pointing them back to their previous posts), to make them disappear from HN!)

But giving the troll to itself triggered another bug, because apparently it forgot to clear the TROLL flag, so you could still not leave the room, because when you tried to go through the exit the troll previously blocked, it said that "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture." even though there was no troll in the room.

Decades later I finally found the Zork source code, and it turns out there was actually a troll flag called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" that it forgot to clear, which the exit depended on.

I wrote up the bug in more details, with links to the source code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436

DonHopkins on April 16, 2019 | prev | next [–]

I wrote some comments on the Wikipedia Zork talk page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_origin...

Link to the original Zork source code in MDL

I suggest linking to the original Zork source code in MDL which is available here:

http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/

Is it OK to link to that source code from Wikipedia? I don't know who officially owns it, though. It was never a commercial product, and was developed at MIT. As the Zork article mentions, the Zork source code was leaked way back in 1977, so the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. A link to the actual source code would be a nice thing to cite in that section.

It is fascinating to read, and really beautiful code, quite understandable even if you don't know MDL, and practically a form of literature.

I played the original Zork on MIT-DM and also the Infocom versions of course. Reading the source code is like seeing the behind-the-scenes underground rooms and passages at Disneyland!

While I was playing Zork, I found a bug. First some context: when you're battling the troll, you can give things to him, and he eats them! Sometimes he drops his axe, and you can pick it up and kill him with it. He blocks the exits until you kill him.

So I tried "give axe to troll," and he ate his own axe, then cowered in terror: "The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls."

Not satisfied with that, I tried "give troll to troll", and he devoured himself: "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the troll and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it."

...Except that I still could not get out of the exit, because every time I tried, it said "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture."

I figured there must be a troll flag that wasn't getting cleared when the troll devoured itself. And sure enough, I found it in the code, and it's called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG"!

Here is an excerpt of the MDL troll code, where you can see the bug, where it should clear the troll flag when the troll devours itself, but doesn't (well that's how I would fix it!):

               <COND (<VERB? "THROW" "GIVE">
                      <COND (<VERB? "THROW">
                             <TELL
    "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the " 1 <ODESC2 <PRSO>>>)
                            (<TELL
    "The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift">)>
                      <COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "KNIFE">>
                             <TELL
    "and being for the moment sated, throws it back.  Fortunately, the
    troll has poor control, and the knife falls to the floor.  He does
    not look pleased." ,LONG-TELL1>
                             <TRO .T ,FIGHTBIT>)
                            (<TELL
    "and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.">
                      <REMOVE-OBJECT <PRSO>>)>)
                     (<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE">
                      <TELL
    "The troll spits in your face, saying \"Better luck next time.\"">)
                     (<VERB? "MUNG">
                      <TELL
    "The troll laughs at your puny gesture.">)>)
              (<AND ,TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG
                    <VERB? "HELLO">>
               <TELL "Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you.">)>>

You can give something that you don't have? I was under the impression that it wouldn't work. Double sharp (talk) 13:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

You can give anything that's in the room or your inventory to the troll. So if his axe falls on the floor, "give axe to troll" will work without having to pick it up first, which is supposed to work. But even before he drops the axe you can go "give axe to troll" and he'll eat it while he's holding it, since it's transitively in the room. That's the first thing I did, that made me think of typing "give troll to troll"! Xardox (talk) 03:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

They also had some extremely high level custom monsters patrolling the area too, which I thought was kind of fun.

This "jail" was a place on the corner of the green acres, a place for the developers/GMs to test on a endless grass field.

http://www.leagueofpirates.com/tales.htm

This gave players more degrees of freedom to arrange their inventory as compared to a one-dimensional slot-based system.

This spilled over to the UI/UX design - so having a free form inventory meant it felt like you had a backpack.

The hash function was poorly chosen which had the effect that if you found a tile where you gained a skill point, there was a good chance the tile 8 steps to your North would let you gain another skill point.

So the algorithm became: 1. Run boat continuously trying the skill over and over 2. Stop when there is a skill gain 3. Move boat 8 steps north 4. Do skill again 5. Gain? Go to 3 6. Otherwise, go to 1

Generally people used the technique similar to leveling melee skills in towns but there was always a work-around to killing people in towns. In downs you would kill someone macroing by dropping like 5 explosion potions on the ground around them, then throwing 1 in and teleporting out while a friend would loot the body.

Magic on the boat involved walking in front of the mast to cancel the spell.

So while it has had a lot of problems, it’s done bloody well considering 25 years later people are still playing.

Still being praised, played, and respected with all its bugs is kind of a validation.