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kethinov: I'm a fan of UO and I love seeing more projects like this. Nice work!Obligatory nitpicky aside, a time-honored tradition of HN:I've long been irritated by the use of the term "server emulator" in gaming contexts. Technically these projects are just reimplementations of a proprietary networking protocol. Nobody calls Samba a "server emulator" because it reimplements the Windows file sharing protocol, because Samba isn't "emulating" anything from the perspective of the traditional definition of "emulator" in computer science.But for some reason, I guess because "emulator" has colloquially been redefined by non-CS nerd gamer normies as a term for software that lets you play proprietary games on platforms they were not designed for, we have ended up in this new status quo where the term's definition has expanded in this game of telephone way that annoys mainly me and not many other people.And what's kinda funny is I say that it is a "new" status quo, but it's not even that new. I recall, what, like 20 years ago now I was in an edit war on Wikipedia fighting with people over the "server emulator" article, insisting that the term was technically inaccurate and should not be used. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, I lost that edit war.Nowadays the whole thing feels like my first "old man yells at cloud" moment, of which I'm sure I'll experience more as I age. I certainly do find new slang introduced by gen Z like "he got the riz!" to be quite cringey, so it looks like I'm well on my way to getting crotchety and terrible about the natural evolution of language! ;)

p0w3n3d: I remember PvPGN. I believe it's still out there https://github.com/D2GSE/pvpgn-server

devin: Congratulations! I don't know how busy player-run shards are these days, but I look forward to exploring this once you've gotten it a bit further.

squidleon: Thanks! There are still a few active shards out there, mostly us "old guys" in our 40s chasing the nostalgia of our teenage years. UO has a way of never really dying. Combat and skills are still a ways off, but the foundation is solid enough that I'm adding features every week (in spare times,) I'll keep pushing updates!

D13Fd: UO was such a big part of my life back then, it’s great to hear that it’s still going. Maybe I’ll set up a server to play with my kids - although they’ll never be able to get the full experience with player killers, trolls, scammers, people hawking their stuff at the bank, dragon trainers, etc.

Fokamul: There are several PvE UO servers, which are heavily against griefing. So I would say, pretty safe environment to play there with your kids and still with other people.

daeken: > I certainly do find new slang introduced by gen Z like "he got the riz!" to be quite cringeyThis is interesting to me, if only because it's such a natural bit of slang. Given that it's a shortened form of "charisma", this one just Makes Sense to me! I figure it'd be incredibly cringe for me to use at my age, but it's a good term IMO.

squidleon: That's a great idea, UO is honestly perfect for playing with kids. The crafting, housing, exploring dungeons together. And who knows, maybe you become the dragon trainer this time around!

haolez: UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment. But the game was fun even for underpowered players, so they kept playing. The really powerful players were famous, like celebrities.It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero.

reactordev: [delayed]

Fokamul: Most active is UO Outlands. Several thousands players?They've reworked a lot of systems and it's basically 100x better than original UO.There are several systems in place, which original devs wouldn't even dream of and saying that, official Ultima Online is still running. :DIt's PvP server, but with balanced PvP which really works for everyone. Not like original devs, they just dropped PvP because cookie-cutter players cried.

squidleon: Outlands is impressive from a technical standpoint, they've put an insane amount of work into it and the player count speaks for itself. I played there for a while.Personally though, I feel they've overengineered it a bit. So many custom systems layered on top that it starts to feel more like WoW with UO graphics than actual UO. The original charm was in the simplicity you, a sword, and a world that didn't care about your feelings. But that's just my taste, and clearly thousands of players disagree with me, so what do I know. And yes, the fact that official UO is still running in 2026 is both beautiful and insane

simlevesque: I think you'd like Arc Raiders.

squidleon: This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor and still have a meaningful experience. The gap between a grandmaster swordsman in full plate and a guy selling fish at the Britain bank was enormous, and both of them were having fun.Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per win). UO was a living world where your role emerged from what you chose to do, not from a quest marker telling you where to go next.

haolez: If starting from scratch, what would an MMO need to replicate that?I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.

NDizzle: Well, it was kind of the only game in town. Sure, you had Dark Sun Online and Meridian 59, but in 96/97 you were playing UO if you liked the idea of online worlds.I think the barrier to entry is the equivalent of several complete, fun, balanced single player games operating together in balanced harmony. Not impossible, but highly improbable.

theultdev: Yup. Tibia you had this too. People begging in the depot for gold and "itens plx"

squidleon: I've never heard of Tibia, I'll check it out!

theultdev: I haven't played in 10 years or so, but it's still going.That game was my life. It's how I learned how to code among many other skills.

axus: Haven and Hearth has "sprucecaps" and "hermits". The elite in these games arise when they are willing to work in groups, willing to use violence against isolated players, and willing to use automation.Haven't put any time in MMORPGs for 15 years, but aren't there still "exclusive" guilds that do things regular players can only aspire to?

swaminarayan: Very cool project. MMO server codebases tend to accumulate a lot of architectural complexity over time, so starting fresh with a cleaner separation between networking and game logic makes a lot of sense.Curious about the sector-based delta sync — how do you avoid packet bursts when a player enters a busy area with lots of items and mobiles?Also interesting to see NativeAOT used here. Was that mainly for deployment simplicity or performance?

stackghost: Impressive work! Does it support the smooth boat movement packets from the newer clients?

deadbabe: It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural.UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.

stackghost: >The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.I mean there absolutely were bad experiences. Griefing drove lots of players away, which is why they implemented Trammel.

deadbabe: Grief is a natural consequence of player freedom, but it’s not worth giving up that freedom for some safety.

wellthisisgreat: yes, this really nails it. UO didn't chase "endgame content" which, imo, is the bane of today's multiplayer games. Designers expect everyone to max out and reach the end of the road so everyone is the same in the end.

squidleon: Ha, you're absolutely right from a CS perspective! it's a protocol reimplementation, not emulation in the traditional sense. I've thought about this too. "Server emulator" stuck in the UO/MMO (other example Mangos is "Wow emualtor") community because RunUO and similar projects used the term 20 years ago and it just became the standard label. At this point fighting it feels like your Wikipedia edit war, technically correct but practically hopeless. ! That said, I'll take the nitpick as a compliment :) means you actually read the project description. Thanks for the kind words!

orphea: > other example Mangos is "Wow emualtor" Do they call themselves an emulator? I'm seeing "a server" or "a reference implementation".

squidleon: Just update repo and README from server emulator -> server !

orphea: While I have your attention - let me wish you good luck with your project! While I'm not an UO gamer (my MMORPG has been WoW - that's where I know Mangos from :P), I'm happy to see a .NET project - I think it's an underappreciated platform; for once, Microsoft made something very cool

squidleon: Thank you! And yeah, as a fellow .NET developer I totally agree modern .NET is genuinely impressive. The jump from the old .NET Framework to what we have now with .NET 8/9/10 is massive. NativeAOT, source generators, the performance work the runtime team does every release — it's a great platform that doesn't always get the credit it deserves. And funny you mention Mangos — the WoW emulation scene was a huge inspiration for UO server development back in the day. Different game, same passion for reverse-engineering and rebuilding these worlds. The community-driven server scene is one of the best things about MMO gaming in general. Thanks for the kind words and good luck with your WoW adventures! :*!

vunderba: You’d need to start with the premise that combat shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of the game. Work on making other aspects (farming, hunting, taming animals, etc) to be equally compelling mechanics.

thewebguyd: > to be equally compelling mechanics.I'd go a step further, not just equally compelling, but it'd be interesting to see some games, particularly RPGs, where combat is effectively optional. One of many ways to level up your character and complete the objectives of the game.There aren't many out there where you could have a complete pacifist playthrough, for example, and if there is, you usually still have to resort to theft, or use of paralyze & calm spells.In most RPGs your professions (farming, herbalism, mining, etc.) are just secondary skills to help you progress in combat, and all the good stuff comes from killing enemies.

mapt: You approach that from a game design perspective to reduce the reward and set bounds on how much fun a player is allowed to destroy maliciously and what kind of counterplay is available, but if you completely eliminate it the world loses a lot of its drama. Conflict drives narrative.

codezero: Oh boy, you reminded me of the tag teamers where a pick pocket would steal your bag of runes (that you use to teleport to safety), then attack you while you try to fumble a teleport back home, only to find you can't locate your bag of runes.The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection.Also the defense to your home was to literally circle it in tents/buildings creating an empty courtyard that you could only teleport into with a rune you kept safely in your bank box. There were some warping bugs that would allow you into a courtyard though, or even through the front door (circle of visibility bug, as well as flour tile warping).

kpw228: panda king slot game

tyjen: My preferred methods at the time, sneaking/breaking into houses, stealing, and ganking/PKing unsuspecting souls (emphasis on graveyards, dungeons, and miners). Stealing items, often the offensive spell reagents, out of someone's bag before a fight made for no shortage of quality interactions.It was a sad day when UO introduced Trammel.

carverauto: the original moongate (moongate.net 4000) was a MUD written by Vassago and still exists today as Materia Magica

nebezb: Wow! This is no small feat... am I reading the contribution graph[0] correctly, you've done all this yourself?This endeavour sounds a whole lot like a server emulator for Infantry Online that was started by an incredibly talented developed 16 years ago ("aaerox"). I found the original svn commit on Sourceforge [1]. It's since moved to GitHub but has been active for 16 years and it has much of the same functionality you've already built, but done by more than a dozen developers over a decade-and-a-half.Kudos to you. You've gotta explain how you've managed to do so much all by yourself.[0] https://github.com/moongate-community/moongatev2/graphs/cont... [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/infserver/code/1/

squidleon: I forgot to mention, the entire web part in React was done by Codex. I hate developing frontends!

freedomben: Did you have to massage/guide the UI quite a bit? I've had terrible luck with codex, claude, and gemini at doing frontend. It's always so close but so far at the same time

codezero: I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it part of my "persona" at the time.Also there was a whole niche industry of collecting non-droppable items which spawned in the game world but were not fixed on the map (we think they were added post map creation), so they could be "pick pocketed" off the surfaces they were on and taken back to your home every wipe. There was a huge rush after servers came back on after a wipe for folks to go find the most rare items to stock up their towers and keeps.

eclipticplane: UO came out when I was in high school. I would time my morning routines around the server reboot to grab those special items, some of which didn't respawn during routine reboots.The bugs were part of the game culture. The first time that you learned that items in the bottom right corner of your first house -- because they could be stolen through a bug even if your house was locked -- was something everyone jointly went through.UO also had maybe the closest thing to a true player economy than any game. There was a legitimate path to making money (and having fun) to just mining ore and selling ingots. You would sell your iron bars in an unattended vendor to other players at your own price. Those bars would get bought by a blacksmith player to produce armor that they sold to other players... who would buy it to go adventuring in the dungeons.

eclipticplane: Core memories of carefully setting my fisherman on a boat with `ezmacro` before I got ready for school. I'd come home to either a boat full of fish (to later cook into fish steaks), or be dead from a player killer who found my boat and killed my macroing guy to try and steal the boat.

thetoon: Great news. Haven't played UO in forever. What kind of client are people using on modern systems, these days? Is there a client working well on linux?

doctorwho42: > to reach the end of the road...This is honestly the best way I have ever heard this described! It really is that 'end of the road' feeling that I get, once I have experienced a large chunk of the game loop, that has me disconnect from games and feel hollow.This is probably why I keep going back to huge modpacks for Minecraft with a friend. It is so open and expansive, with so much to do, that you never really feel like it's the end... You just feel like you have had your fill, until next time.I personally only got to watch my older brother play UO, and then he brought me into the launch of WoW which was a pivotal experience. But the end game always felt like it falls flat.

nzeid: UO didn't have a global concept of a level. You had a maximum number of points per character, which you allocated to skills by doing the corresponding activity. This is how you can skill cap your character without killing monsters or players.

SenHeng: Was it actually that hard?I played on the JP/KR asian servers in a PK/APK/PVP guild so maybe it was just my bubble but it was pretty common to see players with 7 skills maxed out. If I remember correctly- sparring- swordsman or fencing- magic- magic resistanceI don't remember the rest. It's not quick or easy like modern games, but we would regularly power level each other's alts and it took maybe 2 weeks to max out all 7 skills? We had a bear trapped in the guild house so we could power level wrestling and other combat skills.

_doctor_love: UO was the best online game for me. All others stand in its shadow. It was the most "free" in terms of what you could do and the appeal was the non-gamification.I loved Everquest and World of Warcraft but those didn't feel "raw" enough for me.The Realm is my dark horse submission for best MMO. (Yea, yea, yeah Meridian 59 and Underlight too)

knicholes: Right!? Skill loss for dying while red ruined everything for me. Ganking and being ganked is what gave that adrenaline rush.

squidleon: So: I took most of the infrastructure from the my first attempt at moongate (https://github.com/moongate-community/moongate, which failed miserably along with https://github.com/tgiachi/Prima). From there, I had a good starting point to quickly build the foundations. I had already done the Lua scripting part in another project (https://github.com/tgiachi/Lilly.Engine). Codex helped me with all the testing, implementing functionality and creating tests, so at least I have a good sparring pattern. For the data import part (which I called FileLoaders), I took the logic from ModernUO. For the items part, I created a script (scripts/dfn_*.sh) to import items from POL! Thanks for the compliments! The way I am, if I fixate on something, it becomes an obsession!

doctorpangloss: while i understand the motivation to have codex like, do this problem for you, that's fine. what is the ethos of corresponding with people on Hacker News through the chatbot too? like i get that this particular comment i am replying to, you authored, but ChatGPT authored your post, and your documentation, and some of your other comments.the big picture question is, if you can mess around with the bot to do anything, why spend it on this game? why not make your own original game instead?

gopher_space: I just have them stub out something I can open in a more specialized tool. Sometimes I can use the results as an example.

godrae369: Hey man, read your breakdown on the Moongate architecture. Using Source Generators for DI and Lua for behavior decoupling so you never have to recompile C# is a beautiful setup. Strict domain separation is the way to go. I saw your 'What's missing' list includes NPC AI. I build AI agent workflows. Instead of building traditional, boring finite-state machines for NPCs, what if we plugged an LLM microservice into your Lua scripts? We could give key NPCs actual contextual memory and dynamic dialogue. Players could physically type to a merchant, negotiate prices, or ask for rumors, and the NPC would generate a response strictly within the lore of Ultima, triggering the correct Lua events (like handing over an item or opening a door). Since you have the packet layer and Lua environment solid, the integration would be incredibly clean. I'd love to contribute and map out the AI logic for this if you're open to exploring it.

general_reveal: Sounds like Vanilla WoW before Blizzard killed 40 man hardcore raiding. Only a few guilds on the whole server had the top gear.

shiftpgdn: I still think 90% of what made UO unique is the fact there was no Google or central repository of expert knowledge. Yes, UOStratics existed, but it wasn't perfect. A lot of the fun was in the fact basically nobody knew the BEST way to play, and therefore everyone was just doing whatever they thought was fun.

NoOn3: If someone create a new MMORPG in which rules changes a little every day or several days in unpredictable manner then no one will be knowing the BEST way to play or at least harder to find the BEST way. But maybe there will be no balance.

7bit: Cool Project. How did you know how to talk to clients?

SenHeng: I always forgot where I parked my boats. Or that I even had one.

faidit: I always checked the harbor for unlocked boats and took them on joyrides.

zorm: Very cool to see! I was active in the UO emulator communities back in the day but mostly with SphereServer. It is interesting to see here in the comments how many people were inspired to programming because of UO!All the recent LLM advances would make for very interesting and very fun NPC interactions in a MMORPG today too. Even small player community servers could be viable long term because of the ability to seed complex interactions with NPCs into on-going story lines.

eclipticplane: > SphereServerThrowback!Pretty sure I still have the source to SphereServer sitting somewhere on my NAS. It was my first exposure -- in early high school -- to coding in a group and operating a Linux server.

squidleon: the Hacker News post itself was written by me.I do use ChatGPT sometimes as a tool while working on the project (similar to using documentation, Stack Overflow, or an IDE assistant), but the post and the project direction are my own. So what?

haolez: Btw, I've never met a player of Meridian 59, but seeing YouTube videos about it, it might have been popular in my community if we had access to it at the time. Looks super interesting, although it didn't age well, of course.

havblue: Is scarcity part of it? Making sure there are some jobs people have to do that don't involve combat but still drive the in-game economy?

haolez: I think a component of it is a zero sum model. Like, not everybody can be incredibly successful. Not sure how to implement this, though.

GardenLetter27: I love the Ultima renaissance now with Ultima VII: Revisited and the Ultima Online servers.

throwway120385: I still remember those dumb combat clouds.

Barrin92: turns out it is for a lot of players which is why the kind of game is extinct. Just like in the real world, there's a fine line between risk and adventure and walking into something that looks like Liu Cixin's the Dark Forest.You want enough friction to generate interesting interactions, you don't want so much freedom that the worst exploiters start to crowd out every honest player, because then, just like in a rundown lawless neighborhood, you're getting a lesson in the broken window theory and you're only left with the scammers.

ongedierte: UO outlands (most popular shard) has pretty alright support and guides for linux

HanClinto: I never played it, but from what I've heard, it sounds like the original Star Wars: Galaxies MMO (before they added all the NGE stuff?) had fairly mundane / commoner roles as well.It sounds like a fan-driven reboot of this game has a fairly decent following, in a very similar way to what UO experiences? It feels like there is still player desire to have mundane sorts of immersive RPG experiences in this way.