There were always questions about what to do with
Ultima Online after it launched. EA was moderately baffled by the project, and the lawsuit didn’t help. People had figured out the network protocol, they had figured out the asset file format, they had figured out the map format… it wasn’t long until there were people making better tools for UO data than we had in-house.
The most notable of these was probably
UOAssist, which prompted the creation of a program called “UOPro” for tools that we approved for usage and didnt’ consider exploits… as I recall, the UOPro program didn’t last very long. My favorite, though, was
the one that let you edit hues, the palette files that were used to tint clothing and monsters — our in-house tool for that was so terrible that we promptly stopped using it and used the fan-created one instead.
At the same time, we were talking a lot about ways in which players could affect the world more. Vendors had just recently gone in; there was talk of letting players place quest NPCs and build their own quests (something which I think went in eventually… gosh, my memory of these days is getting hazy).
Anyway, I came up with a crazy idea.
How about we release a binary of the server, and full docs on Wombat, the scripting language. Sure, the hue tool is nicer than what we have, but we do have nicer map edit tools and stuff than third parties do now. Let people buy a license to run UO elsewhere. But make it so that you cannot connect to these servers directly. Instead, you have to come through an official OSI server. People who run servers can place red moongates (the moongates that in the Ultima fiction meant travel between parallel universes) on the official map. These moongates would reconnect your client to the player-run world. And we can do a unidirectional copy of their character, so they can visit these worlds without losing anything — they just can’t bring anything back.
The date was 1998. Bioware’s
Neverwinter Nights didn’t exist yet (it came out in 2002).
Well, it never happened — all the questions about control, brand identity, etc, got in the way. What if someone makes a world that features XXX content? Or racism? Or… you get the idea.
Instead, the UO gray shard phenomenon happened. I don’t think people realize that to this day,
UO emulators are one of the most popular “mud” platforms in the world, with free shards in aggregate racking up thousands if not tens of thousands in concurrency every day. The server emulators at this point are hosted on SourceForge, open source, GPLed, etc. And to come full circle, the latest update for UOAssist came out just a few days ago (!).
