I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent, emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed there for the next few years.
I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes, busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a "socialiser" player.
Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I started doing more complicated things like recreate Triple Triad from FFVIII [3], and useful things like remake the guild system.
These UO people were my friends, we hung out on IRC every day, and even did a couple of international Secret Santa gift exchanges.
I got bored again around 16 or 17 and forgot about UO, but it had a lasting impact on me:
At 18, I began studying computer science. I realized that the code I wrote to sort a list back in the UO days (not knowing any better) was actually the standard sorting algorithm, bubblesort.
(actually relevant to the link -->) At 19, I started to learn about economics and related it back in a very real way to my days playing UO. I was tempted to go back and try to design a method of distributing wealth that reduced inflation.
And by 20 I realized I was a very good programmer. (I'm now 26.) I still attribute UO at the Italians I've never met in person for that.
I wrote a good deal of code for a two of the popular emulators; starting with SphereServer, and then RunUO, primarily just on the server side and less so on the actual shard side.
Shards (emulators) let the server owner script and customize the game a lot, such that it rarely resembled the real game. A lot of shards were really shitty, in that the minute you created your character you instantly got full skills, tons of gold, free armor, etc. Thus, there was no pride or value in anything.
SphereServer scripting was very clumsy, written in its own quasi-object language. It had a LOT of flaws, but was leaps and bounds above UOX, the first major emulator.
The RunUO came around, written in C#, and was much faster than SphereServer. It scaled to thousands++ of online users. Scripting was all done in C# as well, meaning things were compiled rather than interpreted at runtime as in SphereServer (some things in Sphere were cached, but not many). Most of the active emulator shards today use RunUO.
I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent, emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed there for the next few years.
I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes, busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a "socialiser" player.
Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I started doing more complicated things like recreate Triple Triad from FFVIII [3], and useful things like remake the guild system.
These UO people were my friends, we hung out on IRC every day, and even did a couple of international Secret Santa gift exchanges.
I got bored again around 16 or 17 and forgot about UO, but it had a lasting impact on me:
At 18, I began studying computer science. I realized that the code I wrote to sort a list back in the UO days (not knowing any better) was actually the standard sorting algorithm, bubblesort.
(actually relevant to the link -->) At 19, I started to learn about economics and related it back in a very real way to my days playing UO. I was tempted to go back and try to design a method of distributing wealth that reduced inflation.
And by 20 I realized I was a very good programmer. (I'm now 26.) I still attribute UO at the Italians I've never met in person for that.
[1] http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
[2] http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=4lvl - can't believe I found this / someone documented this
[3] http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=cards