GDC Festival of Gaming
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2018–2024
59:47 · 184K views · Sep 25, 2018
A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.
HN recommends it as a transparent MMO postmortem and as the source of the story that the term 'shard' originated with Ultima Online.
13 comments from Hacker News
I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep 2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it) this video This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent. Absolutely great video. edit: Oh my god they bring up FlyGuys prostitution ring..
Fun fact: the word "shard" in this context was coined by the dev team of the first major commercial MMO, Ultima Online, as an in-universe explanation for why the game world was split into multiple servers. If you're looking for an exemplary server architecture for MMOs, look no further than UO. That game came out in 1997 and supported worlds with thousands of players and millions of persistent objects. Players could build their own houses within the game world, decorate (and later design) them to an incredible degree [1], and have other players visit (welcome or not). Players could run their own shops within their homes and sell their own hand-crafted, signed goods (weapons, armour, clothing, furniture) in addition to any found treasure they wanted to offer. What made UO so impressive, technically, was how they accomplished all of this on such modest hardware as was available in 1995 [2]. This second link is to the GDC postmortem of the game. If you're interested, I recommend you check it out. It may not answer all your technical questions but it's extremely interesting nonetheless. The story of how they had to shard the game is part of the talk. I'm pretty sure they did not use any off-the-shelf databases as the performance would have been terrible at the time. Everything would have been custom. The custom networking protocol is extremely reserved (not chatty), since it was designed for dial-up modems. Even when you run the game on modern hardware with broadband, the game us
> While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar. The Ultima Online postmortem session from GDC 2018 has some similar stories about in-game protests. The stories in said session are quite entertaining, and there is a lot of other interesting information too in the session. The whole thing is worth a watch. this video
Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online [1], I think that goes into the origin of Shard. ( Sorry I didn't save down the time like but it is an interesting video for those into UO ) And if you do a search on HN you will see plenty of other links about UO and sharding. [1] this video
In 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. this video