[HN Gopher] Database "sharding" came from Ultima Online? (2009)
___________________________________________________________________
Database "sharding" came from Ultima Online? (2009)
Author : mpweiher
Score : 126 points
Date : 2020-06-06 11:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raphkoster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raphkoster.com)
| artemonster wrote:
| queue in "stones theme" of the login screen and nostalgic
| goosebumps... The article is quite old though - maybe someone
| from HN can provide clues for this interesting coincedence ^^
| outworlder wrote:
| I've made people go back to UO just by playing Stones. I'm not
| sure what's up with that song.
| staycoolboy wrote:
| Garriot talks about this in the documentary "Get Lamp!", which is
| about the history adventure games. He talks about the challenges
| of maintaining a huge MMO, especially how they were broadsided by
| the challenges of managing an economy because everyone was so
| greedy. He mentions how the admins came to work one day to find
| that players had killed every living thing on the planet and
| could no longer generate income. Kinda like a miniature "dark
| forest" theory.
| imtringued wrote:
| Meanwhile in Ragnarok Online special items like "cards" had a
| 0.01% drop chance. Without a large player base that kills
| monsters over and over again, those items would never drop.
| pradn wrote:
| Computer games work best with numbers, so RPGs end up being
| about numbers. So, naturally, people try to min-max because 1)
| it's something to do 2) you progress that way 3) you can show
| off to others. Maybe a child would be hesitant to kill a video
| game creature, but it seems like, since pretty much every video
| game lets you do violent things, that taboo against violence is
| erased very quickly. So, all these combine to, what looks like
| to people who don't play games, a propensity to kill en masse.
|
| It's a shadow of the same situation one encounters in an
| abbatoir. Maybe killing the first few animals makes you feel
| terrible, but you get out of it quickly. The human ability to
| adapt to any circumstance has this disturbing side to it, too.
| imtringued wrote:
| In Cataclysm DDA you can kill zombie children and it will
| decrease your sanity. That might sound like an interesting
| mechanic until you see a run down school and are flooded with
| zombie children. Your best option is to just burn the whole
| place down so that you don't have to see the children die
| again.
| staycoolboy wrote:
| Which is ironic given the nature of U4 and it's moral system.
| That game REALLY floored me the summer I spent playing it
| (literally the entire summer, it was before I was old enough
| to get a job).
|
| > RPGs end up being about numbers.
|
| For me, this was the final, sad conclusion to computer-based
| RPGs after nearly 40 years playing them.
|
| In tabletop D&D, a +1 sword is a rarity, and +2 is super
| special; magic users focused more on creativity because the
| cost to the caster for Lvl9 spells (if you ever got there,
| which was never in real games) was prohibitive to use them on
| a regular basis (memorization, physical aging). In fact, the
| level tables in AD&D stopped around 10 or 12 I think because
| that much XP simply didn't happen. Computer RPGs turned it
| all into numbers games, as you can see in WoW where the top
| tier armor today has stats like +30,000 attribute, when in
| the first release, top T3 geat from C'thon was like, +50 key
| attribute per piece.
|
| Am I ranting? I'm ranting.
| [deleted]
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? I
| stopped playing those types of games when I got into high school,
| so I don't really have any concept of if EVE and WoW and the like
| were actually definitively better, or just different and more
| successful do to being easier for beginners.
|
| I haven't played any of the Larian games (e.g. Divinity: Original
| Sin II), but noticed that only recently with these sorts of
| graphics do these new 3D isometric games actually have the same
| kind of feeling that UO had at the time when it came out, if that
| makes any sense.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I've heard Legends of Aria has many things that UO veterans
| enjoyed about UO. I personally can't tell you how successful it
| is, given I didn't play UO.
|
| EVE and WoW cater to very different play styles (even and
| especially between each other), so "better MMO" is a loaded
| question with a diverse number of answers depending on your
| intended play style and what about an MMO you are looking for.
| root_axis wrote:
| Absolutely. EVE today is a _much_ better MMO than UO ever was.
| Of course, the space setting is a hard sell for those who are
| looking for a game with the all the Tolkien trappings of old
| school RPGs, but as an MMO it is the most sophisticated game
| available today and is unparalleled in terms of how player
| driven behavior impacts the game world. Most notably Eve has
| managed to succeed in keeping veteran players satisfied while
| also providing a path for new players to have a meaningful
| impact on the game world. This is a major problem WoW was never
| able to overcome despite its commercial success and has instead
| relied on periodic invalidation of veteran player progress
| every 8 to 16 months to keep things fresh (a well-worn strategy
| for most blizzard games).
|
| edit: tough crowd, I'd be interested in the details of the
| dissenting opinions
| debug-desperado wrote:
| Cool. What sort of "path for new players to have a meaningful
| impact on the game world" does EVE provide?
| outworlder wrote:
| I can only think of joining alliances. Alliances with
| thousands of players and immense military power have been
| brought down by single individuals before(or crippled by
| spies).
| root_axis wrote:
| Almost all MMOs gate content in the form of linear "levels"
| which essentially function like a several-dozen hour
| tutorial until the player grinds to the point of "max
| level" so that they can then begin to participate in "end
| game" content. In EVE, player progress isn't so narrowly
| constrained or defined in terms of an aggregate statistic,
| rather, player skills can be trained automatically over
| time without grinding and, similar to the golden era of UO,
| player skills function in the game with respect to their
| individual utility rather than as a function of player
| level. This means new players can target specific skills
| based on how they want to play the game rather than picking
| the skills that facilitate the most efficient grind to max
| level, after which they reset all their skills and
| reallocate them with respect to the "real" game. Thus new
| players begin to experience the "real game" early on
| without having to grind through 30 hours of cookie-cutter
| content before the "real game" begins.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Ugh. Lots of nostalgic views here made fonder through absence I
| think.
|
| UO sucked was amazing but it sucked. I can't recall how many
| empty dungeons we walked through, only to get to the treasure
| room filled with gold? No. Filled with other players. All just
| camping out, waiting for loot to drop. In fact it would be true
| to say I can _only_ recall such dungeons. And then the Lich
| would respawn and all the n00bs would shit themselves while
| someone else killed it, and then everyone frantically trashed
| the place looking for loot like an FBI raid at the drug dealer
| 's girlfriend's place.
|
| Honestly it was so utterly pointless to try to "play the game"
| that my friend and I actually indulged (I am ashamed to say) in
| some naked griefing. Which is to say, the only fun we had was
| in trying to figure out the games state machines, i.e. to goad
| people into killing us such that we could get the guards to
| kill them. How it works: stand outside a town. Be offensive.
| Wait till someone attacks you. Run into town. Yell "Guards!
| Guards!". Guard appears and kills aggressor. Take all his
| stuff. There were various iterations of this that Raph Koster
| actually wrote up [1], and it was fun. For us. Neither my
| friend nor I are actually assholes, and only resorted to this
| because it was literally the only "game" present in the entire
| system. We'd paid for a game, we rationalized, and by golly we
| were going to find one. Ok, we probably were just entitled
| assholes. Perhaps it got better later, but we'd gone by then.
| [Naked griefing, because every now and again we'd grief a
| wizard and they'd freeze us in place and then kill us. But we
| were naked. Didn't even lose a shoe.]
|
| There was also "The Great Unused!" which we had "fun" with for
| a while. This was an item that was called "Unused", and its
| icon was a photoshop lens flare. It also weighed 255, the max
| amount. So you couldn't move if you were carrying it. So my
| friend and I spent _hours_ standing next to it, picking it up,
| and then dropping it on the other side, moving it two squares
| at a time, leapfrogging each other. We could put it on a boat
| (much to our relief, as we 'd been lugging it for an hour by
| that point) and managed to bring it from a far island back to
| "town". Where upon, we tried to start a cult to worship "The
| Great Unused!" People tried to steal it, by picking it up, and
| we would laugh as they ran in place for an unreasonably long
| time (some people are just so determined), but eventually they
| would drop it. It didn't catch on.
|
| Now Raph's first go at Star Wars Galaxies I really enjoyed. I
| couldn't play very often, and yet I could still be useful, even
| as my friends leveled far ahead of me. I played a medic, and
| sometimes my heal would be the thing that saved someone from
| death and a long walk back. Most MMOs (that I played), once
| your friends are four levels ahead of you, you don't get any
| experience points at all if you join their party.
|
| So UO was a great starting point, and very smart, very
| passionate people have made significantly better games,
| learning every time.
|
| [1]
| https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A...
| cpeterso wrote:
| Richard Garriott discusses a similar problem with UO's
| virtual ecology in the Ars Technica "War Stories" interview.
| UO had a virtual ecology system that tried to balance
| carnivores, herbivores, and plants. When the game opened, to
| the designers' surprise, players slaughtered all animal life
| across the land.
|
| https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Ok, first, the answer is really no, but there have been two
| main attempts, in Darkfall and Mortal Online. I jumped on the
| Mortal Online bandwagon in beta and stuck with it for a long
| time, being part of one of the best guilds in game.
|
| The bad: Unfortunately, while it had a ton of potential, there
| were lots of issues and eventually it just stopped being as
| fun. For me dealing with a red was easy, but for new players
| the learning curve was so steep what ended up happening was
| roving gangs of reds and gank guilds griefing new players into
| literally quitting forever. A world that was too open, so
| didn't feel living, despite the player impact and control. Much
| later players could build walls on game vital paths and
| completely block off areas of the world. Basically the freedom
| of working towards a UO system has a lot of potential
| weaknesses and the devs at StarVault learned all this the hard
| way.
|
| The good: some amazing emergent gameplay I have yet to
| experience anywhere else. A crafting system that should be an
| inspiration to every game that has crafting. Hidden things,
| with not everything in a database you can just look up, guilds
| and people that horded info, and political intrigue and
| subterfuge. Really fun combat for it's time if you had a good
| connection. Full loot pvp. A large world that was very fun
| exploring (there is no in game map, I was one of the people who
| literally participated in a guild mapping of the continent that
| is still used at https://www.mortalonlinemap.info/ A large
| single persistent instance (no sharding).
|
| The devs, recognizing many of the issues stemmed from
| complications of using UE3, are now working on Mortal Online II
| in the UE4 engine. I hope it goes well for them but haven't
| tried it yet. https://www.mortalonline2.com/
| andrepd wrote:
| I'm of the honest opinion that _no game_ ever made truly lives
| up to the potential of the MMORPG. Of a _virtual, persistent,
| shared world_. It 's quite sad. UO and Star Wars Galaxies
| probably came the closest.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's really hard to strike the balance between giving players
| ultimate freedom to make a permanent mark on the world and
| providing a fun experience for new players, especially if you
| are trying to avoid pushing new players way out into the
| wilderness where they will never see anybody.
|
| Ultimately players want to interact with other friendly
| players, but that's impossible because some players will be
| assholes and will try their hardest to make life miserable
| for your new players. If your have wide open PvP you have
| roving gank squads.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| What is "better"
| runawaybottle wrote:
| The current trend in MMO-like games are basically sandbox games
| like UO.
|
| The thing about MMOs is that your first great experience is
| going to be tough to top. Even if I tell you there are 20+
| sandbox MMOs that do what UO did, it will never live up to UO
| for you.
| theincredulousk wrote:
| I've played a bunch of them a bit, and nothing comes close.
| Some of it probably has to do with timing - a true sandbox game
| when there was a cultural match with the desire for that
| environment.
|
| Nowadays if you had a game with glitches that allowed people to
| steal your items outside of intended game mechanics, there
| would be an uproar on Twitter and punishing 1-star steam
| reviews. Back then it was infuriating, but part of the
| atmosphere. The night was dark and full of terrors, so to
| speak. Also the actual concept of real-estate, with a real
| house and your own vendors, was really next-level stuff for
| immersion. Exploits like duping that ruined the economy weren't
| beneficial to the atmosphere though, and actually broke
| immersion.
|
| Nostalgia holds up a lot of it though I'm sure. Just like
| anything else, playing it again now probably wouldn't bring
| back the same experience.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| To be fair UO had pretty horrible reviews at the time also,
| which is part of why it never became as popular as EverQuest.
| knicholes wrote:
| Richard Garriott made Shroud of the Avatar, but the devs didn't
| hit their timelines on the Kickstarter. It never really took
| off. But they made it free. I played it and loved the story,
| but it didn't feel to have the staying power like UO did.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Honestly, no. At least not that you can play right now. Star
| Wars Galaxies was something of a spiritual successor, but is
| defunct. There have been a few attempts at more free-form open
| world type games since then, but IMO, nothing really comes
| close to UO. I've had to give up on MMO's because it all just
| feels like an experience on rails that is a time sink for some
| virtual items rather than the kind of free form world modifying
| choose your own adventure that UO was.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Hmm well hopefully in 30 years or whenever I'm retired,
| computers hardware will have improved enough that someone
| will have tried to make a better version.
|
| Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was
| extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have
| benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was
| extremely fun regardless.
| andrepd wrote:
| >Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was
| extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have
| benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was
| extremely fun regardless.
|
| I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the engine would
| make a great MMO :p
| dlhavema wrote:
| I loved galaxies back in the day. I was online when the first
| Jedi was unlocked that was a momentous occasion.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's definitively not the same genre but Shores of Hazeron was
| an empire building MMO where you start as a simple caveman on a
| random planet in a fully procedurally generated universe and
| you are supposed to create a city from scratch and figure out
| space travel. Colonize other planets or moons in your solar
| system to create a FTL drive and then fight other empires. It
| looks awful and the developer made some questionable decisions
| but hey it was just a one man show. Nowadays the closest
| spiritual successor is No Mans Sky. Huge procedurally generated
| universe. Check. Randomly generated animals. Check. Spacecraft
| with combat and seamless transition from planet to space.
| Check. The ability to create your own spacecraft designs? Nope.
| The ability to actually do interesting things with the planets
| like build a colony on them? Nope. Massive multiplayer? Hell
| no.
|
| No mans sky is just eye candy. Imagine the benefits of reaching
| the center of the galaxy and thereby being teleported to a
| completely different one if you could colonize that new galaxy!
| You'd have a massive edge over the other empires. The reality
| is that all universes and planets in no mans sky are
| functionally the same. You can stop playing as soon as you see
| your first planet and nobody could claim that you didn't see
| everything the game had to offer.
| chongli wrote:
| _has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet?_
|
| Nope. UO was one of a kind. What made it special is the way it
| brought together people with many different play styles and
| allowed them to form their own communities which were self-
| policed.
|
| Every multiplayer game since UO has tried to learn lessons from
| it by policing the players centrally, through the limitation of
| player interaction. The result is that all of the different
| play styles have gone their separate ways to games which cater
| specifically to them.
|
| This phenomenon mirrors the filter bubble phenomenon that
| resulted from search engines and social media recommendation
| engines giving people more of what they want.
|
| _Edit: for examples of the games that cater to the play styles
| I'm referring to, look at Fortnite, League of Legends,
| Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Diablo 3... When I look at this list
| it's rather shocking to me that one game could house all these
| diverse play styles. The magic of it was that it worked, for a
| time, until more specialized games came along and started
| drawing away the player base. Then EA brought in Trammel and
| split the player base which was the beginning of the end._
| jandrese wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "better". WoW certainly
| eclipsed UO in popularity/playerbase. Eve has a more
| sophisticated metagame. UO is definitely the best Ultima
| Online game ever created.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| The interesting thing also was that most of these play styles
| were forced to work together also. E.g. you couldn't be a
| fighter without blacksmiths to make armor and weapons, and
| you couldn't be a blacksmith without miners who were
| gathering ore. Because leveling up in one skill caused your
| other skills to atrophy at a high level, it prevented players
| from being able to become isolated from each other.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Nope. UO was one of a kind. What made it special is the
| way it brought together people with many different play
| styles and allowed them to form their own communities which
| were self-policed._
|
| Disclaimer: I don't play massively multiplayer online games,
| only read about them. But isn't this precisely the selling
| point of EVE Online? Self-policed, no rules, no backstory,
| the entire universe, its rules and the emergent behavior that
| results is 100% in the hands of players?
| egfx wrote:
| >if that makes any sense.
|
| Makes perfect sense. I was an Elder in UO (a player character
| with special powers that advanced the storyline) Or basically;
| as I realize today, an unpaid intern at Origin. And afterwards
| QA lead on WOW and I can definitively say UO wasn't a game. It
| was an alternate universe. It was transcendent unlike any game
| and blizzard games included.
|
| It wasn't the first as there was "Meridian59" which came out
| before and people were basically divided into 2 camps. After
| "City of Heroes" and "Dark Age of Camelot" came out, then it
| (mmo) became a genre.
| virtue3 wrote:
| I think you mean when Everquest hit, suddenly MMO was a
| thing.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Neverwinter Nights on AOL predates Meridian59 when it comes
| to these sorts of games. Of course for the non-graphical
| variety there were MUDs before then. I don't really know when
| a game goes from "lots of players" to "massively", wikipedia
| says Neverwinter Nights on AOL was an "MORPG" not an
| "MMORPG". So it kinda depends upon how you count these things
| I guess.
|
| FWIW, Raph Koster ran a MUD before he worked on Ultima
| Online. The original creators of Everquest played MUDs too -
| Sojourn in particular.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Nice. I was a counselor in UO, but got fired after they
| realized I was 13.
| egfx wrote:
| Haha so you were a customer support intern. What shard?
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Catskills. IMHO the game went downhill with the T2A
| release in 1998, and then was completely ruined by the
| time Renaissance came out in 2000 (although I had already
| quit well before then).
|
| It's a shame because I feel like the gameplay was kind of
| already destroyed by the time the servers were relatively
| stable and bug free, so it feels like it never really
| lived up to its potential. But during the few hours a day
| when it actually worked properly, damn.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It depends entirely upon how you define "better" and what
| you're looking for in an MMO. I've also never heard anyone
| accuse EVE Online of being easy for beginners.
| moksly wrote:
| Albion Online is a lot like UO.
| tatar wrote:
| I've played it a bit. The core mechanics was spot on but it
| ended up a soulless copy of what UO was. Procedurally
| generated levels and instances just took away any resemblance
| of a story for me.
| abhijitr wrote:
| > Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet?
|
| Piggybacking on this, has anyone made an open world single
| player RPG better than Ultima 7 yet?
| xsmasher wrote:
| Divinity: Original Sins was that game for me; everything I
| loved about U7, minus the annoying bits (collecting arrows,
| eating food every x minutes, time-of-day changes for NPCs).
| haolez wrote:
| UO is/was pretty unique. It had poverty. Some players were so
| poor that they had to beg for food! Funny and depressing at the
| same time :)
|
| Overpowered players were really rare (in the golden age, at
| least). And they were usually very famous, like celebrities. It
| was very very hard to improve your character's skills. The game
| wasn't tailored to boost your ego with custom looks and mean-
| looking armors and weapons - it was what it was, and that
| usually meant frustration.
|
| At least for me, it was fun and unique. I don't see anything
| like that in the current generation of blockbuster MMO games.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I think part of it is that when UO came out it was this visual
| imaginary world that allowed us to do what we wanted rather
| than drive us in a particular direction. And even if there was
| a UO clone with updated graphics. It just wouldn't be the same
| as that first experience we had.
|
| I miss UO. It's what got me into programming to begin with. I
| ran a shard with 250 people on at peak times called Sacred. And
| was GM on Alphanine, and for a short time before it died, Novus
| Opiate. I got into programming to make my own UO game but ended
| up just making software.
| coding123 wrote:
| Of course they are better. Better mechanics, graphics,
| economies that work.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Have any MMOs actually put their economies on the blockchain
| yet though? I know people have been talking about this for
| years, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it actually
| happening yet.
| greiskul wrote:
| Why would anyone do that? I don't see neither a gameplay
| advantage for doing that, nor a technological one. Is there
| any applications that could take advantage of that which I
| am missing?
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Without items being registered on the blockchain, there
| is no way to know how rare or common something actually
| is, so there is no way to accurately price it. So
| everything from weapons and armor to gold, ore, reagents,
| crafting supplies, furniture, housing, etc. Without items
| being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have
| gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're
| never going to have university endowments and state
| pension funds allocating some of their investments into
| virtual items.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Without items being registered on the blockchain, there
| is no way to know how rare or common something actually
| is, so there is no way to accurately price it.
|
| What? You price them the same way you price them in the
| real world: domain knowledge and data.
|
| EVE in particular has charts that tell you historical
| transaction amounts and volume.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure
| you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and
| there, but you're never going to have university
| endowments and state pension funds allocating some of
| their investments into virtual items.
|
| It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and
| trolling.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any
| different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine
| in real life? The only difference is that in real life
| there is a predetermined (albeit not entirely knowable)
| difficulty function, whereas in WoW the company that
| makes the game can just decide to mint however many they
| want overnight. But if you can use technology to preclude
| the latter from happening, the suddenly there is zero
| difference.
|
| Sure a better game could come out and the value of items
| could come down, but that isn't really any different than
| if people in real life decided they just liked garnets
| instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as
| Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the
| front runner position for longer.
|
| From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just
| finding something that a small number of people love
| passionately and then hoping that as more people learn
| about that thing, the value of everything connected to
| the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any
| different than investing in a social network like
| Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already
| do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds
| into VC, although sometimes directly).
| jerf wrote:
| "How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any
| different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine
| in real life?"
|
| Volatility.
|
| Since I can see it coming, the fact that real-world
| assets have a non-zero volatility does not mean that the
| level of volatility in virtual assets isn't a difference
| in quality and not merely quantity.
|
| What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the
| next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the
| latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and
| armor can only be bought with those? Again, the fact that
| this _occasionally_ happens in the real world still has
| nothing with the routine nature of this sort of thing in
| the virtual.
|
| Only an idiot would invest in Wow diamonds. Put your
| money into buying stock in the company running WoW
| instead.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the
| next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the
| latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and
| armor can only be bought with those?
|
| Well that's the beauty of the blockchain. You just have a
| contract in place saying that weapons and armor can only
| get X% more powerful each year, so that way there is a
| fixed amount of inflation.
| fwip wrote:
| You're advocating buying shitty imaginary beanie babies
| as an retirement strategy.
|
| You're too deep, there isn't any way we can convince you
| of the foolishness you're spouting.
| imtringued wrote:
| Even if what you said is real the game itself wouldn't
| actually run on the blockchain as a smart contract.
|
| Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the
| blockchain is as a platform for complicated games. The
| fact that possessing a hash representing the genome of a
| cat is enough to qualify as a game is laughable. I've
| played lots of highly simplified games that involved
| breeding animals and optimizing for specific traits and
| what cryptokitties offered was just one mechanic in an
| entire system consisting of dozens of interacting
| mechanics and MMOs like WOW go way beyond a dozen
| mechanics.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The workforce for WoW is entirely optional, and applying
| real world economic forces to it would be a great way to
| kill it. How would these items be generated in game? If
| it's CPU power, you're describing bitcoin, it's not
| player interaction, there's no in game mining required,
| and if there is, now you're wasting someone's time and
| CPU for something that's going to quickly stop being fun.
| dmurray wrote:
| You could still tie it to player interaction, so some
| loose combination of player skill and time spent in game.
| Don't these games already try really hard to prevent
| botting?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| They do, though it's a constant arms race.
|
| Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An
| artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super
| untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You
| can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the
| effort from the gameplay.
| dmurray wrote:
| Yeah, I don't really think this is a hot idea but just
| playing devil's advocate. You could make versions of the
| same argument for de Beers and diamonds, but I suppose
| pension funds don't invest in diamonds.
| twalla wrote:
| Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where
| the loot tables are determined by what return they give
| to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard
| of the game.
|
| Currently the incentive structure is to make a gaming
| offering compelling (addicting?) enough to justify a
| monthly subscription. If you create a two way value
| transfer for money/virtual items with legitimate
| institutions you're going to completely fuck the
| incentive structure. Imagine what happened with the
| Diablo real money auction house except now the scalpers
| are pension and hedge fund managers.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where
| the loot tables are determined by what return they give
| to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard
| of the game.
|
| How is that any different than, say, these people looking
| for diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park? I'm
| linking to this specific guy because he describes it
| well: "It's a lottery ticket with exercise."
|
| https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650
|
| Similarly, Facebook decides what content to show you
| based on what's profitable for investors. But for
| whatever problems Facebook has, it's still much more
| widely used than any competitors run by non-profits or
| whatever.
| kingkawn wrote:
| who in the whole world wants their state pension funds to
| be stored in WoW items?
| tossmeout wrote:
| This is very classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem
| thinking. Its prevalence in the cryptocurrency and
| blockchain communities is why I'm extremely bearish on
| both.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other
| people want to get paid to play games, but they can't.
| How exactly is that not a real problem?
| virtue3 wrote:
| You can easily go invest in Eve. Godspeed.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Is it easy to convert the money back into cash? I
| remember PLEX (and WoW now has a similar token among many
| others), but I swear it was a one way conversion, though
| there was monetary value in playing for free.
| setr wrote:
| I haven't really noticed any game with working economies
| beyond EVE -- at least in the sense that they actually
| integrate with the rest of the game universe, and aren't
| simply an ad-hoc bartering system driven by drop-rates
| conducted purely between players, because the intentional
| economy (eg driven by gold/currency) has entirely fallen
| apart as a result of developers never quite understanding
| that infinite gold generation infinitely inflates to the
| point that $currency is entirely worthless.
|
| EVE is the only current MMO I can think of which realizes
| that _destroying_ value is also important having a functional
| economy, and creating those interesting economically-based
| dynamics
| NathanKP wrote:
| Elder Scrolls Online has also done one of the best jobs at
| keeping the economy running well out of any MMORPG I've
| played. They have a pretty ingenious way of destroying gold
| to keep the economy from inflating. Basically the only
| viable way to sell things in the game is to get a guild
| trader. There are a limited number of them in the game, and
| not all are equal. Guild traders in main cities for example
| get 100x the player traffic as traders in the middle of
| nowhere.
|
| So there is a lot of competition to get a good guild
| trader, and guilds all bid large sums of gold to try to get
| a good trader. The winning bid for a trader gets the trader
| for 1 week, and the gold spent on the winning bid is
| destroyed. So it turns into a self balancing system,
| because if there is too much gold in the economy then the
| guild trader bids go up really high and take lots of gold
| out of the economy every week. If there is not enough gold
| in the economy then it isn't viable to make such a large
| bid on the guild trader, as you won't have any chance of
| making enough money back to justify the large bid, so bids
| go down and more money stays in the economy.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| My only gripe about the ESO method is it locks all non-
| guild players out of placing things on the auction house,
| but otherwise you're dead on.
| imtringued wrote:
| There are some MMOs that only allow players to trade with
| premium currency. It's a pretty neat idea because it means
| everyone can get access to cash shop items. It also avoids
| currency inflation problems because the currency isn't
| created out of thin air by killing monsters, selling items to
| NPCs or completing quests.
| xwdv wrote:
| It is unlikely there will ever be an MMO better than what UO
| was at its peak in the old days.
|
| Those were savage days, where simply being killed and having
| your body cut up and looted dry was considered acceptable for
| an MMO. At one point even having someone steal your house key
| meant they could enter your entire house and loot it dry.
|
| Another thing is the graphics. Yea everyone thinks 3D graphics
| are cool but 2D graphics allow for imagination to fill in the
| blanks more. The graphics are less literal, the less detail is
| shown the more your mind fills in the blanks. Your mind begins
| to imagine what these characters would look and sound like if
| they were real people.
|
| Also consider that even the GUI in UO was often in-character,
| you open a bag it looks like a bag, open a backpack and it
| looks like a backpack. And items could be dragged anywhere and
| positioned however you wanted, sometimes causing a mess.
| Organizing your backpack was like a little mini-game within a
| game.
|
| Most games these days abandon those kinds of details in favor
| of grids where you can neatly place items into discrete slots.
| Convenient, but a lost opportunity for emergent game play.
|
| Also, text appearing above peoples heads when they speak
| instead of a chat window meant you always kept your focus on
| the world in front of you and conversations felt natural, it
| feels more like reading a comic book, as opposed to some
| instant messenger.
| staycoolboy wrote:
| As an apple gamer from the early 80's who played all of the
| ultimas (and bards tales, and wizardries...).
|
| WoW was the game I had always wanted. I found it better than UO
| because it had the interactivity and sophistication I had
| dreamed about.
|
| That came with a downside. I like to describe WoW in these
| terms:
|
| "So you like ice cream right? Here: go eat this truck full. Go
| on. You said you liked ice cream, go do it. /points gun at my
| head/ ... EAT."
| mrits wrote:
| I like finding other Bard's Tale players in the wild. It was
| easier to learn how to use a hex editor to hack the game than
| to actually play the game...so that's what I did.
| moron4hire wrote:
| THIS is the best description of WoW I've ever heard. Truly
| wonderful. I thank you.
| btrask wrote:
| As someone who never played WoW, I'm curious. What exactly
| was the ice cream, and what was the gun?
| outworlder wrote:
| > Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet
|
| No.
|
| EVE comes close. In particular, it actually surpasses UO in
| many ways, like a complete player-based economy. Almost
| anything you could ever need or want is crafted by players.
| There are 'loot drops', but ones that are actually better than
| what players can craft are rare. And are sold in the market.
|
| Similarly to UO, death has consequences. You lose your ship,
| everything on it, all cargo. There's 'insurance', but it will
| only pay for the 'market price' of the ship. You yourself may
| have paid more (but usually not less, otherwise people would
| build and destroy ships to claim insurance).
|
| EVE also has skills, much like UO. Unlike UO, those are
| 'trained' over time, not by usage. But there are no 'levels'
| and for the most part there aren't any ships which are 'better'
| for any role. An unprepared battleship can be destroyed by a
| couple of fast moving frigates that cost a tiny fraction of
| resources and skills to pilot. One that's fitted against small
| fighters will suck against other battleships, and so on.
|
| Like Ultima Online, movement is very important in combat. In
| EVE, even more so, due to gun tracking(and how missile
| explosions work). This is the main reason why the battleship
| scenario above works.
|
| EVE also has forms of 'housing', as in player made starbases,
| corporation offices and apparently stations now.
|
| EVE has consumables. Other than laser-based weaponry (mostly
| Amarr), you have to buy ammo. Like casting spells in UO
| requires reagents. WoW has very little consumables, and you
| certainly can cast spells all day long.
|
| It also has a very 'lawless' world. Some systems have no
| security response at all, others will have delayed response
| depending on the security rating. Just like UO, if someone
| really wants to kill you they can, although there may be
| consequences.
|
| Unlike UO, there are no 'shards'. Everyone is on the same
| server (or more specific, cluster). Even 'instancing' (used for
| NPC missions) is part of the universe, you can join the
| instance if you have the location(or can scan).
|
| So, EVE has very deep and detailed systems, to the point that
| people used to call it 'spreadsheets in space'. But I can't
| directly compare it with Ultima Online - mostly because they
| are quite different games, thematically. One is a fantasy world
| full with dragons and spells. The other is a very futuristic
| and highly advanced space game.
|
| WoW... is entertaining. Has amazing and detailed lore (although
| EVE's is good, it's not even in the same league). Locations can
| be such an eye candy. Even boring 'collect item' quests can be
| very entertaining.
|
| Have I mentioned how quests can be entertaining? Because there
| are some incredible ones.
|
| World of Warcraft also has 'classes'. Which is again a
| completely different philosophy from either UO or even EVE.
| Take a Mage. Maybe it will be specialized as a 'frost' mage. No
| matter, two frost mages at the same level will have the exact
| same skills and spells. Equipment may change, but it is not
| like they will have a bow, they will just have different stats.
|
| But WoW suffers from a very simplistic gameplay. You have
| 'levels' - which will immediately set it apart from Ultima
| Online. You have also lots of skills. Using them effectively
| and timing them is important, but in the end it's just about
| selecting a target and pressing a few function keys(this is
| actually something that it has in common with EVE, except for
| the role of movement and position in EVE).
|
| Death is essentially meaningless in WoW. You don't lose any
| items. You may have to pay repair, but that's it. Compare to
| UO: you drop everything you are carrying - you can try to get
| it back, but someone (or something) may get to your corpse
| before then. Or EVE, you lose your ship, items, equipment and
| even skills if you can't GTFO with your pod and forgot to
| update your clone. PVP in either UO or EVE is much more of an
| experience than WoW. And in either game you won't necessarily
| have a level 100 one-shotting a level 10 character.
|
| Ok, this is already too long, but I could contrast even
| further. But WoW is more popular for a reason: one can log in,
| start a queue for a dungeon, go complete some quests and have
| _guaranteed progression_. While on EVE, there were a few days
| where I logged in and got incredibly lucky, but in other days I
| wished I didn't login, as things went very badly. Similarly on
| Ultima Online. On both, you learn a few rules: trust noone,
| don't carry(or fly) what you can't afford to lose, etc.
|
| I'm keeping an eye on the likes of Ark, they might be onto
| something. I still think that good MMORPG games will have to
| develop a mostly player-based economy if they want to stay
| relevant long term.
| gavman wrote:
| This was discussed by one of the game's creators in the Ultima
| Online episode of Ars Techica's War Stories (around the 5:10
| mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| This comes up from time to time. Here is a Twitter thread with
| some more links about the various usages of "shard" in the
| context of early internet and gaming services, including Ultima
| Online (UO), other early MMORPGs, and even MUDs.
|
| https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/615116231092371456?s=...
| efitz wrote:
| I hadn't ever heard of the term "sharding", but the team I was on
| was "partitioning" databases in the early 2000's (effectively
| sharding at the table level so that we could drop table instead
| of deleting rows).
| mywittyname wrote:
| So my understanding is that there is are practical differences
| between a partition and a shard. They both are ways to stored
| separately, based on the partition key. But a partitioned table
| has one table, while a shard uses multiple tables which share
| the same schema.
|
| For example, with a partitioned database, you might have a
| single `transaction` table, partitioned by date, but with a
| shard database, you'd have multiple `transaction_${date}`
| tables which needed to be queried from, but they'd share a
| common schema.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Last time I did partitioning by date in postgres (on postgres
| 9.?), multiple transaction_${date} tables is exactly what I
| got.
|
| They are exposed as a single 'transaction' table but they
| were really different physical tables.
|
| My understanding is that partitioning is a more general term.
| Partitioning can be on one or multiple servers. Sharding is a
| type of partitioning that is always across multiple servers.
| dws wrote:
| Google mentions sharding in a 2005 patent.
| https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2007011957A2
|
| http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/sharding-for-st...
| notes the term in use within Google by 2003.
| gojomo wrote:
| This 2009 reminiscence discusses the term's use in the UO
| context in 1996, so 2003-2005 mentions don't affect the
| author's conjecture at all.
|
| (I'd guess there are uses of 'sharding'/'shards' in this sense
| from much earlier, perhaps decades earlier, database/caching
| work, but I could be wrong.)
| theincredulousk wrote:
| Probably some UO players at Google then - UO was old by 2003.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I worked at Google 2001-2006 and we definitely talked about
| "database shards", particularly for the AdWords MySQL database.
| (this architecture has long, long since changed). At least from
| 2002, and the database was partitioned far before that. I
| remember at the time thinking the term "shard" was odd but
| perhaps Ultima Online inspired.
|
| I'm curious now about the history of database partitioning. So
| much of the early work was about trying to hide the partitions,
| to pretend it was all one big reliable system. It took awhile
| for folks to realize that was foolish.
| eordano wrote:
| It seems that SHARD is a term used already in 1988, meaning
| "System for Highly Available Replicated Data"
|
| Source:
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14914487445955020...
| teraflop wrote:
| As I pointed out a while back
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22974882), the "SHARD"
| system described in that paper didn't actually have anything to
| do with "sharding" as the term is currently used. It was
| designed to replicate data, but it didn't do any kind of
| partitioning; each replica stored a copy of the entire dataset.
|
| For that reason (in addition to the low number of citations), I
| think it's very likely that the name is a total coincidence.
| Pretty much any word you can think of has been used by somebody
| as an acronym for some project.
| scott_s wrote:
| I'm the person you replied to in that thread, and in support
| of your point: after that discussion, I spent some time
| crawling through the proceedings of Very Large Databases
| (VLDB) and the ACM Digital Library, and I could find no
| instances of "shard" used to mean the partitioning of a
| database prior to 2001. (That paper is "Minerva: An automated
| resource provisioning tool for large-scale storage systems"
| in Transactions on Computer Systems, free-to-read at
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/502912.502915.)
|
| _Other the other hand_ , I found many papers citing the
| SHARD paper - more than the official count. That's a
| difficulty with citation counts of old papers: a lot of the
| papers citing it are also old papers, and we're not
| consistent at tracking the citations of old papers.
| Personally, I don't have a conclusion. The SHARD paper is
| decently cited, and its usage is close to the modern one. On
| the other hand, I can't find any smoking gun pre-1997 usage
| of "shard" in the modern meaning.
| teraflop wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for putting a lot more effort into
| answering this question than I did!
| chongli wrote:
| While interesting I don't think this old paper led to the
| popularization of the term. It only has 12 citations!
| gojomo wrote:
| Looking at a single academic paper's citation count won't
| reveal much about a term's historical currency.
|
| For example, there are also papers in Google Scholar
| (findable via query [database shard], through 1987)
| mentioning this same SHARD system in 1986 and 1987, with 33
| and 97 citations respectively. And further, there's a 1986
| MIT technical note that mentions a commercially-in-
| development version of this SHARD system, but refers back to
| a 1985 paper, "System architecture for partition-tolerant
| distributed databases", as an authoritative source about
| SHARD - though that 1985 paper doesn't declare the name
| SHARD.
|
| That's suggestive that SHARD was adopted as a catchy name for
| that particular work around 1985-1986, then becoming more
| widespread in the 1986-1988 timeframe.
|
| But perhaps more interesting: that original 1985 paper
| mentions in its acknowledgements Hector Garcia-Molina - a
| definite 'hub' person in databases/indexing/networked-
| information for decades, among many other things Google
| cofounder Sergey Brin's advisor at Stanford from 1993-1997.
| (See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-
| Molina...)
|
| So it's likely safe to assume that from the late 80s into the
| 90s, top CS students/researchers around the world discussing
| partitioned distributed databases would often have this
| particular sense of SHARD mentioned to them, or appear in
| their readings.
|
| Notably, that 1985 SHARD involved a system where each replica
| contained the entire database - so did _not_ capture the
| modern connotations of 'shard', as _horizontal_ partitions.
| But that vivid & apropos analogy was "in the air" around
| partitioned/distributed databases.
|
| Thus I'd strongly suspect uses in the modern, non-overlapping
| sense in that same era, likely predating Ultima Online's
| 1996ish use. (I'd especially look around precursor work to
| the 1997 'Consistent Hashing' paper, & other caching-centric
| work - because there the idea of partition-by-key was
| central.)
|
| So UO _might_ have devised, but I 'd guess more likely
| _popularized_ , our modern sense of 'sharding'.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| I always assumed MMO shards came from database literature. My
| mind is blown if it's the other way around. Though not the first
| time gamedev is at the edge.
| mfontani wrote:
| In the year 2000, my (telnet + MCP & MCCP & other acronyms-
| supporting) C-based MUD boasted a _web_ interface.
|
| With colors, buttons to move, and even _images_.
|
| A web request is just a TCP socket, and browsers were gracious
| enough to start displaying stuff as soon as it came in (so long
| as tags were properly closed). So long as you sent stuff fairly
| routinely, the connection wouldn't be closed.
|
| Frames helped... well, "frame" the interface: main frame would be
| the mud's output; another frame for user input - both using a
| shared "key" to ensure output and input were linked to the same
| user.
|
| Users' input could therefore easily just be sent on another web
| request, checked for key correspondance, and the command ran as
| if the user input the same command via telnet: action ->
| response.
|
| A sprinkle of that new-fangled JavaScript helped ensure the
| screen would scroll properly as soon as new output came by.
|
| Having previously abstracted all color-related stuff (to ensure
| strings like "&WFoo&GBar&X" would send ANSI colours to users
| opting-in to them, and nothing to users opting out of them) meant
| that it was "easy" to send "<span color='white'>Foo</span><span
| color='green'>Bar</span>" to the HTML interface instead.
|
| Websockets? We don't need no stinkin' websockets! _really long_
| polling suffices ;)
| fcatalan wrote:
| I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for
| coming up by yourself with things that are now considered
| "obvious" or just the way things are done. Things happened fast:
| by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a
| vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an
| "experienced" web developer. We had websites, but we didn't have
| good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard
| way.
|
| The biggest thing I remember to have "invented" by myself in
| early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database
| driven website: I was tasked with creating a "virtual campus"
| kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades,
| news... and the sparse examples and models I had found for all
| those functionalities used plain text files as storage.
|
| After completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with
| those files and suddenly thought: "hey, dumping all this crap on
| a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!"
| It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that
| databases were for internal "databasey" things: Accounting,
| addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of
| stuff. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing
| website felt almost like a revolutionary concept.
|
| By the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL
| and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs/ the Active
| Record stuff from Rails. So I sort of "invented" that too.
|
| Another thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C
| through CGI. The database was mysql. I tried to run it a couple
| years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern
| Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the
| makefile, 20 years after the fact. My current projects seem to
| rot every time I take a short vacation.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| When I was a teen and couldn't afford the latest magazines,so I
| came up with an idea of buying them up, scanning and putting
| online for a small fee. I neither had skill to build nor a clue
| how would I go about dealing with publishers though..
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Turns out only one of those was necessary!
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I "invented" navigation meshes in 1995, along with, I'm sure
| fifty other people. Then I read about them in Game Programming
| Gems in 2000. So five years before someone thought "Hey, I
| should publish this!" (wish I had!) But it was apparently
| invented in the 1980s for robots.
|
| For games, the catalyst was 3D games consoles.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I "invented" javascript-based challenge-response authentication
| so that the user's password didn't have to go over the wire. I
| later found out that Yahoo and a few others were doing the same
| thing.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Is that widespread now? I mostly stay out of web dev and this
| is the first I'm hearing of it
| pugworthy wrote:
| Ah yes, in 1991 I "invented" networked pub/sub for real time
| data sharing from sensors and other systems on a research ship.
| You could easily just plunk a new networked client on the
| ship's net and have it start publishing data. Visualizations
| systems would immediately see and give access to any data
| available.
| agentultra wrote:
| I had the same experience pulling together personal home pages
| in chronological descending order from a database of text
| files.
|
| A bunch of folks online had their own scripts as well.
| Eventually a few people would release their scripts and it
| would become known as a "weblog" and eventually a "blog" and
| many people profited from that.
|
| Wild times.
| gota wrote:
| Not in that time, but in the vein of the other stories under
| this -
|
| I saw a group of people in a web community (comics sharing
| group in a small town) self-organize to collectively fund a
| couple of them (one artist, one writer) for printing a short
| story that they'd done and never got payed for. Each person
| that contributed got a signed copy!
|
| I thought, hey, this could generalize to all sorts of stuff if
| there was a platform to help organize it! Mused around with it
| for maybe a couple of hours, became a bit disheartened by the
| legal aspects of it, and put it on a 'TO-DO' list.
|
| Six months later I heard the first things about Kickstarter and
| realized I missed the boat
| alasdair_ wrote:
| It's kind of cool seeing all these stories of many people
| coming up with the same ideas at the same time and realizing
| that the old startup mantra "Ideas are easy - implementation
| is what matters" continues to be true.
| ericol wrote:
| To that vein... I invented AJAX :P
|
| I remember it being around 2001 - 2002 and seeing the first
| implementations of Microsoft for Javascript requests and at the
| same time the DOM was started to be a thing you could actually
| manipulate and I started experimenting on doing programmatic
| page updates for a system I was developing for the office I was
| working for (I worked for a state office back then).
|
| Then the big crisis of 2002 hit (I live in Argentina), I lost 2
| of the 3 jobs I had at the time (And the one that I kept was
| the one bringing in the less amount of money) and I ended up
| moving to Spain for a few years.
|
| When I finally managed to land a job coding (2007) AJAX already
| had its own name and dynamic pages were taking the world by
| storm (And to hell, via callbacks).
|
| P.S.: That "I invented AJAX" was obviously tongue in cheek. I'm
| pretty certain that there was a lot of people doing the same
| thing all around the globe, and very likely that was the idea
| that got that implemented on the MS side of things in the first
| place.
| fatnoah wrote:
| I was also doing a similar thing at the same time. It was an
| account management tool that would load child nodes of the
| hierarchy as you expanded them. It was pretty slick and even,
| though some hackery, supported rearranging things via drag-
| and-drop.
| ericol wrote:
| He, I remember what a pain in the ass D&D was when it
| started being a thing.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I remember using iframes to load data in the background using
| javascript. Certain actions would have a flag passed via url
| parameter which would render the content, but none of the
| page elements (heading, sidebar, footer), and the content was
| then copied into a div on the visible webpage.
|
| This was like 2004ish.
| ericol wrote:
| I think one of the best indicators of "coding on the edge"
| is when you have to hack things together to make them do
| the things you want them to do.
| EGreg wrote:
| I remember "DHTML" with JS
|
| I invented a lot of things for myself... AJAX was one of them
| but also I used a lot of animated GIFs for transitions
|
| I made dailytutor.com back in 2003 or so!
|
| The domain name expired so I saved the site at
| http://thetutorbase.com Sadly the hostgator or whatever
| hosting it made php errors now for sessions But some of it
| still works Check it out :)
| ericol wrote:
| Cheers, I'm checking that out now :)
| ksherlock wrote:
| Before AJAX, it was DHTML (D for Dynamic). Checking O'Reilly
| Safari, that term started gaining use in published matter in
| 1999.
| icebraining wrote:
| Dynamicdrive.com is from 1998, and it's still online! I
| learned a lot from that site.
| gtsteve wrote:
| I started PC programming in about 1997 before I had an internet
| connection at home. I had to either research at school and make
| notes or get books from the library.
|
| The fun result of that was for a few weeks I thought that I was
| going to get rich from having invented unit testing.
|
| What we have today is far more efficient, I don't miss it but I
| definitely look back on those days with nostalgia.
| alharith wrote:
| Efficient for what? What are we solving for? Rushing out
| buggy, complex, unmaintainable, undocumented software? Sure.
| We are certainly more efficient at that. Hardly anyone takes
| the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and
| detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything
| anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels
| like all surface-level stuff.
|
| It's a pity that this point will be lost to downvotes.
|
| There is a common problem when the work of people that put
| the time in to really understand, test, improve and
| document the things we rely upon is undervalued and when
| that which is rewarded is superficial understanding and
| gluing together things that barely work is prioritized.
|
| Yes, iterating quickly is important. Yes, it's also
| important not to waste time making something more robust
| than it needs to be. I'm not disputing that, what I AM
| saying is that as things scale up and hundreds of users
| turn into hundreds of millions of users, it's extremely
| important to have a culture of rewarding the people that
| take the time to make these systems robust and continue to
| ensure they perform well.
|
| As a small anecdote, this was really driven home by a one-
| on-one meeting I had with an old manager: I'd started
| working at a small startup which almost completely lacked
| any kind of documentation and almost everything needed to
| be figured out by trial and error or (equally common) by
| pestering the couple of people who had things like
| passwords and keys and admin access to do things necessary
| to let a new developer begin development work.
|
| Realizing this was going to be a giant pain in the ass as
| we scaled, I took the time to write a ton of documentation,
| checklists, scripts and onboarding docs so that new
| developers could get up to speed quickly. I then trained
| the new devs as they came onboard to ensure they got up and
| running as fast as possible.
|
| Back to the one-on-one: I ended up getting told that my
| performance was a concern because, unlike myself, the new
| developers had managed to get up to speed and become
| productive very quickly and it reflected poorly on me that
| I had taken so long.
|
| Since then, I've taken a lot more care to assess the
| culture of a company before doing what I consider to be
| "the right thing" and do deeper-level work.
| sixo wrote:
| Now we can just:
|
| `import <a career's worth of work>`
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Between the operating system, development tools,
| compiler, and libraries, a 'Hello world!' web server is
| several careers worth of work.
| baq wrote:
| Dozens if you aren't using localhost to test that it
| works.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _We are certainly more efficient at that. Hardly anyone
| takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly,
| and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level
| stuff_
|
| I sometimes feel like every project is either learning a
| new thing as you go (for no other reason than that it's new
| and cool) or maintaining some written be someone who was
| learning as they went (because now that bug ridden pile of
| crap is running in production).
| gtsteve wrote:
| I meant in terms of documentation, i.e. stack overflow,
| youtube, etc. Universities are putting their course
| materials online for free, that sort of thing.
|
| It's easy to be cynical about modern software, but remember
| it can still be sold and the economic benefit of being able
| to quickly throw together something that looks like a
| finished product to test an idea is hard to quantify.
|
| I developed a product like what you described and started a
| company using nothing but my laptop and an AWS account. To
| make the same product in 1997 would be difficult if not
| impossible without very deep pockets.
| alharith wrote:
| > To make the same product in 1997 would be difficult if
| not impossible without very deep pockets.
|
| And likely 10-100x the quality and reliability, and
| without needing to sell every bit of your personal
| information. Has anyone stopped to ask, maybe we just
| don't need all of this software?
| icebraining wrote:
| Eheh, I don't remember the software in 1997 being all
| that good and reliable. And when it crashed, it crashed
| hard, all the way to BSOD.
|
| The selling of personal data is a good point, though. We
| surely could use less of that.
| twic wrote:
| I remember doing an internship for a big science magazine
| around that timeframe. They wanted to launch a sort of online
| encyclopedia for science. They were puzzling over how they were
| going to get the content to fill the site. "What if", i
| suggested, "you let the users write the articles?".
|
| They didn't think that would work.
| twic wrote:
| Oh, and one of the first things i did on the web was help a
| friend build a fan website for a band. I was writing the
| pages in a text editor, and it got a bit repetitive updating
| the links in the footer on each page when we added a new
| page. So i wrote a little program that read a general
| template for the pages, written in HTML with some special
| markup for where the variable bits should go, and then a file
| full of the content for each page (in something like a key-
| value format, i think), and wrote out the HTML for it all. It
| didn't run on the server, because we didn't have the ability
| to do that. It just generated a static site.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-08 23:00 UTC)