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Comment by penetrarthur | Hacker News Reader

No gaming experience has ever been as involving as the good old UO. And I also started my programming by coding automation scripts for one of at that time popular and mostly prohibited playing assist programs called "UO Inject". No other motivation keeps you as engaged in programming as writing scripts that automatically cut the trees for you while you sleep!

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One of the very first actually useful programs I wrote was a simple macro program for UO. It would read a text file, parse the very basic commands in the file and then send them to the UO client by finding its HWND via FindWindow and calling SendMessage to send the key presses. I used this to macro easy skills like hiding with scripts like (I don't remember the exact command names now):

STARTLOOP

KEYPRESS F1 // client macro key for hiding skill

WAIT 1000

MOVERANDOM 4 // move 4 times in a random direction to get around server checks for using a skill in the same spot

WAIT 8000

ENDLOOP

You wanted to move 8, not 4. Skill gains were made through an 8x8 grid. All the latter skill macros through RunUO were set up for being done on a boat sailing up and down to the east of Moonglow (where you could wrap around the map). They spammed the skill until you got a skill gain, then halted the boat, stepped it forward 8, and tried agian. Rinse and repeat until the 'run' stopped, then resume just moving forward trying until you hit the next run.

This gives a good summary: http://www.uoguide.com/8x8

Before the graphics, there were thousands of MUDs. In fact, UO took PvP inspiration from a (still active) MUD called MUME [0], which I have played for over twenty years, and met my wife through. Not many people know about that, but you can find quotes out there by the creators of UO about it. Anyways, MUME doesn't allow scripting, but for me, it was MajorMUD back in the early 90s that started me on the scripting path. Good stuff!

[0] http://www.mume.org

I used to write scripts to chop down trees, practice healing, mine and smelt ore, cast "fireball" on myself so I could level up my magic skills...lol

I remember a specific time when I was setting up my mining operation. I took the time to figure out how long it took for ore to re-spawn, and had my character mine in an elaborate circuit several times before starting the smelting process. I was super proud of myself, haha. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time.

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