All Shards migrate to new Kingdom Reborn

[Anti-Basic]

You're a decade off. EA has owned Origin since 1992. Granted, they exerted more control over OSI a little bit later, but they've owned Origin for much longer than UO has been around. The relationship seemed more friendly at first, there's a few in jokes in Ultima VII regarding the acquisition, but things definitely turned sour later on (Garriot quit btw, he wasn't fired)

Originally Posted by HellRazor

The UO development community has always been small and its getting smaller. Talking about custom clients is all well and good, but its been over 10 years and we haven't seen one that is 100% complete and functional yet - so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. Like it or not, we're pretty much stuck with using what is available.

Is a new client really needed though? I mean aside from the resolution stuff (which can be fixed somewhat with razor, grey corner tiles are annoying, but withstandable) the regular UO client is fine. I mean for a game made 10 years ago its still very pretty.

[minion552]

Never said Garriot was fired but a lot of people were long before he quit (dont blame him by the way since UO-2 was a huge influence of his). And yes EA has owned orgin but never took full control of Ultima Online till 2002. And when they started firing more and more people they filled those positions with people from Sims online. We all saw how that game turned out and their main coder Alex Fitz went to work on his own game then when EA pulled the plug on his project he left to help destroy SWG.

No we do not need a new client the one we have is great and there is still a lot of life left in it the concern I think many have is whats next in future plans. Do we leave this the way it is build on it until its done and all go to other projects or do we focus on a future client for UO. Me personally I am working on my own game and in spare time I have been known to write some things for UOX but came here to, in my opinion a better community and a better project.

The only thing I can say is I been using irs2 and yes there are bugs and needs more support it is open source I been looking into what I can add to it to help them and runuo out. And you can run iris 2 on a 22 inch monitor and still have full screen 3d problem is you need to up your hertz from 60 to 75 to have 60 FPS and less lag on server loads. I woulds say use iris 2 if you want 3d and better Res they have a stable version out.

[Arkryal]

Originally Posted by Anti-Basic

Is a new client really needed though? I mean aside from the resolution stuff (which can be fixed somewhat with razor, grey corner tiles are annoying, but withstandable) the regular UO client is fine. I mean for a game made 10 years ago its still very pretty.

Yeah, point taken. But I have a 30" widescreen monitor running at it's native res of 2560x1600. I have 3 options, move it to my old 17" standard monitor, which sucks, Stretch the window so the character's head is as big as mine, but composed of 24 easy to count brick sized pixels, or run the game in it's native res which fills about 1/8 of my screen, covering the same area on my desktop as about 8x6 icons and then squinting to read blurred text.

My other PC runs a 22" widescreen (1400x900), which is pretty common these days, but it's still no pleasure. I fear the standard technologies used by PC gamers will grow beyond the support of the client. As that happens, I imagine many will simply drop out of the community (as I did for 3 years) and the whole project will slowly stagnate or fade into nothingness. UO remains my favorite game of all time, but I can not reconcile what EA/Origin has done to it in the last 5-6 years. In that way RunUO has been a godsend for me and many like me. If the technology doesn't grow beyond it's current state, I believe the game will die. Not because of bad choices made by the official devs, not because of poor marketing or aging graphics. We simply won't be able to play it on modern hardware.

Others who have predicted the game's death have done so on the faulty premise that people are just losing interest in it. They have been proven wrong time and time again. But if the technologies that are rapidly becoming commonplace simply can't support the game in a satisfactory manner, even those who love the game will be forced to make a difficult choice. Tolerate the growing inequities of support, or move on. A new client, while admittedly a monumental task, is as I see it the one chance this game has to get ahead of that trend and preserve it's self.

Many will disagree with my argument, suggesting I keep an old PC with an aging CRT on my desk and an antique videocard to run it. That is a solution, in fact it's what I do now. But how many in that position will be willing to do that, and how many will say "screw it" and start their own WoW servers instead?

But then again, I'm paranoid, like proposing monumental tasks as solutions, and type responses that are too long. Maybe it's just my nature leading me to the wrong argument here, it's happened before.

[Radwen]

I play a lot of DOS games :-\.
UO won't die but will eventually turn into a popular abandonware. Still got a few years ahead of us though.

[minion552]

Many will disagree with my argument, suggesting I keep an old PC with an aging CRT on my desk and an antique videocard to run it. That is a solution, in fact it's what I do now. But how many in that position will be willing to do that, and how many will say "screw it" and start their own WoW servers instead?

No I agree hence why I said it was a fear of the community that once we get everything out of what we have now the choice to make a new client or work on something else will be a road we all will have to take. For me its not about the graphics I have AMD phenom 2.8ghtz 8 gigs of 1066 OCZ ram and 2 9600 xfx SLI video cards all over clocked if I was in the market to play a high tech game I could but for me MMO's are all the same forced team play, 10 year olds running the community support has huge sink holes and gold sellers that annoy my general chat on a daily basis. I love Runuo since I the user have control over ever aspect of my shard including banning people I fit to be a huge problem. I too have an old pc I keep around that I have hooked up to my TV as a Rom box that I still indulge in some original Nintendo just re beat Zelda and I recommend anyone to re play Ninja Gaiden miss old games that skip the plot points and just get to some butt kicking action.

I will keep that pc until it dies but problem with old hardware is when it dies its gone and parts become harder to replace I mean look for anyone selling old Pentium 3 systems they are hard to find a good one anyways you can find a celeron still but might as well slam your head in a door would be better then working with a celeron. And video cards like Nivida 6 series is starting to be hard to find you can find a 7600 gt card still since it is still better then most 8 series cards but not for long give it a year or more. and ATI well I am not a fan of ATI so not sure how old they support their hardware.

So for me I will keep working with Iris2 and see what help I can lend them and with that said who knows what will come out of it.

[Arkryal]

Iris is becoming a more appealing option (to spite the fact that I can't get it to run on Vista64). Real life demands are putting a strain on my time and there are some old scripts I did years back that I'd like to update and revive. Once I've completed that and time is available, I'd be happy to join the Iris movement. I'm well versed in C++, though it's been self taught since I was 10 years old, so my code is an awful mess of redundancy... But if I can contribute to the project in a meaningful way, I will make every attempt.

Still it's a departure from my "ideal" client, but it's already far more advanced than any project just starting out could hope to be within the next 2-3 years, so it's really the only viable option.

On the point of NES roms and other oldschool emulation, with my present displays, that becomes a non-option as well. That and many of the old emus cant down cycle multicore processors and virtual frame rate buffers fail abysmally making the game speed progress 800x faster than it should. There are other emu packages have addressed this but fail in scaling the screen. Fortunately, I soft-modded a Nintendo DS and and loaded all my NES, Sega, SNES, NeoGeo, and N64 roms on it. N64 is shakey, but all others work without a hitch and they're on a dedicated device that costs almost nothing, so no worries. But PC emulation of old consoles has already fallen into the realm of obsolescence and most emu projects have been abandoned by their creators for this reason, leaving an inadequate handful of choices left in a once thriving scene. They still technically work, but the challenges are simply mounting too quickly and few will survive. Having seen the difficulties these many projects have suffered, it's worth being aware that UO is a prime candidate for falling into the same trap. I would hate that.

Straying from the topic a bit, I intend to immortalize the game in my own way: 1 old arcade cabinet, a 1Ghz junk PC running linux, the original game client, and a custom paint job. Low priority on my to do list, and I have to write an on-screen keyboard gump (I'm gonna hate doing that), but if I get around to putting it together, it will be awesome. Got everything already, just need to swap out the joystick for a trackball for mouse control and make some decals... so if anyone has the original box & manual art... 1 high res scan and me love you long time. Barring that, I have the tarot cards from Ultima 9 laying around somewhere and they look easy to vectorize. Just need to find the time.

[minion552]

For the most part yes Iris is a good way out right now and to be honest might be the only one we have. Since it supports both 2d and 3d clients it is great for all parties. And not having time I understand that completely getting older brings more things in a day to do. I myself am 26 years old have plenty of things to do and making a new custom client from scratch would not be in my cards anytime soon.

I been working on my own game for 2 years and that takes the majority of my time when I have free time I work at IBM and they have been upping my hours more and more from 40 to 48. I have the source code for Iris and most of it is all c++ the scripting is not as bad as I thought it was going to be so might luck out. As far as the emulators I have a psx/ps2 emulator I had to re write to work and get the bios from Sony to work as well as sound and visual plug ins. I used the same emulator to work so far with Nes/snes/sega/N64 and GBA i am yet to get my DS to work with it my PSP is flawless when running em. As far as being an ideal client I agree with you it is not what I think an answer to long term is.. but who knows what can be done with it in the future.

For now I will do what I can to add to it and hopefully we get a break through here in the community that can solve the question of (future Uo emulation).

[Alex21]

wth?, can't we have both so every single person is happy?

[Arkryal]

Originally Posted by minion552

I work at IBM and they have been upping my hours more and more from 40 to 48

Not the IBM plant in Pougkipsie is it? Did some time there my self on a mass aquisition they facilitated. The Philips Lab in that building remains to this day the only place where I have ever seen people eat 4 Double Cheese Burgers in a clean room.

[HellRazor]

A 100% completed new custom client would be nice. It's just not very likely to happen.

[minion552]

No I work at IBM in Boulder Colorado IBM Global Solutions. And I work for my own game company me and some friends started Corrupt Image studios.

Yep sounds like IBM they dont care about what they do trust me I know how what your talking about. Shameless almost as shameless as Microsoft Bloatware.

[SiENcE]

Iris is a great alternative (though is still lacking in support at the moment).

I think we give great support. Did you ask anything, anywhere, anytime in our forum ? We always answer bugreports and forum posts.

You should support yourself the Iris2 development, that we can finish it faster :-).

regards

[Arkryal]

It's not a matter of support in regard to people posting answers. I'm talking OS support, for one. I've not had any luck on either of my Vista64 computers. Some luck on XP SP3, but I'll never run that as it only addresses a meager 3GB of RAM. Has anyone got it working on a 64bit OS yet?

[Suil Ban]

Originally Posted by Arkryal

It's not a matter of support in regard to people posting answers. I'm talking OS support, for one. I've not had any luck on either of my Vista64 computers. Some luck on XP SP3, but I'll never run that as it only addresses a meager 3GB of RAM. Has anyone got it working on a 64bit OS yet?

Microsoft Windows XP (32-bit)
...
3.50 GB of RAM

[SiENcE]

Iris2 runs fine on Windows Xp Sp2, Sp3 and Vista 32bit (if you install directx9) also on Linux Ubuntu and Debian 32bit. If you consult our Forum you can ask there. I'm not often here, because its a runuo forum .

We (the devs) dont have a 64bit os. So if you try to compile it, you can support us with informations.

Hey its an open source project and you can contribute if you wanna use it on 64bit. But if you want vista 64bit, you should make it yourself working.

You can also spend us a Vista 64bit edition :-).

You can find support in our forum, here is not the place to explain this in detail.

[minion552]

I got Iris running on Windows XP pro SP2 64x And it runs fine no problems you need to make sure you download C++ Redistro 2005 from Microsoft and are running the .NetFramework 2.0 or higher.

Also I had to update to the newiest drivers for my Video card for it to work right (Am running it on a older 8600Gt) but works fine.

[Arkryal]

Okay, I loaded XP 64 on an old system and it works, so it shouldn't be a compile issue. Upon further examination it appears to be a DirectX fault. Didn't see anything in the forums on it and it seems isolated to Vista64, So i'll dig a little deeper and see if I can lend anything significant to the issue.

Edit:

Vista64 posts a DX version identical to the redistributable package linked on the site (same date, release # etc.) So I thought I was good on that. Turns out you DO need to do the June 08 download, as apparently MS posts identical version tracking info on multiple, different releases. I should've known better, but hey, at least we solved it. Thanks Anti-Basic for reminding me to check that, I'd have overlooked it and wasted hours otherwise.

[Anti-Basic]

make sure dx9 is updated on vista. (might work, might not, it has helped other things that I've seen)

[minion552]

Glad I could be of some help and figured with your tech background you already knew to download the redistro download from Microsoft.

*Note* The 2d client on Vista 64 does work and you can run it on 3d but the unstable version and have to set it to debug mode so needless to say we should use the source code and re compile a version for vista.

its a dx9_33.dll file issue that file is a Vista update file for directx 9. You can find older versions of the file that will work but things like cyrisis/Cod4 and some other directx 10 games wont work on it.

[darkstorm]

The new client has a new encryption on it like the one used in World of Warcraft where it looks for your serial number that is Registered to the cd key in your Reg files.

That's not true.

Take a look at the UODev boards and judge again. The encryption is just as useless as it used to be.

[Arkryal]

Originally Posted by minion552

*Note* The 2d client on Vista 64 does work and you can run it on 3d but the unstable version and have to set it to debug mode so needless to say we should use the source code and re compile a version for vista.

Yeah, I should elaborate so people don't hit the same pitfall I did. I used redist pack that is linked in the XNA extended dev toolkit. It has an identical version number and same release month and year, but it is a different package. The XNA version lacks some of the legacy D3d libraries. I knew I had just updated it 2 weeks ago, so I didn't bother to download again. However Using the link from the Iris website corrected the issue.

[minion552]

Originally Posted by darkstorm

That's not true.

Take a look at the UODev boards and judge again. The encryption is just as useless as it used to be.

I stand corrected I wonder then why they have a Reg reader file in thier client now if it does nothing.. Maybe to scare the Uo emu community i guess

[RavynousHunter]

Originally Posted by minion552

Hence why Blizzard and NCsoft have been shutting down emulators for the past 3 years and SOE has a law suit pending against SWGemu.

Might be a bit old hat, but the NCSoft part isn't entirely true. There's a project out there (currently stalled, main site went down mysteriously) called GWLP to emulate NC's Guild Wars, and they have said, on many occasions, that they had no problems with it so long as they added authentication code that ensured they had bought copies of GW and/or it's expansions. In fact, I still have the source for that project hanging around somewhere.

I, personally, would love to see some form of support for Kingdom Reborn; it looks pretty good from what I've seen. Having more options is almost always a good thing.