Hello!

After a very long wait, I've finally decided to see what I can do about dabbling in my first mmo, UO, once again. I was wanting to make something small, something that I and a handful of friends could enjoy on our own, however the more research I do into this, the more I realize that I am way out of my depth. On top of that, I'm seeing that UO itself has gone far beyond when I last played. The more I read, the more I have come to accept that I need some help, and I've turned to this community for hopefully some answers and some guidance to get me to where I can get going on this pipe dream of mine. So I apologize for the barrage of questions, some of which are certainly painful in their naive stupidity, but I don't want to assume anything of my own knowledge, so I'd rather just be dumb. :p

First of all, but where does one get the UO software now to actually play the game? I'm finding emulation things here, are those the same? If not, where should I (and hopefully my players) go to actually be able to play?

Second, when I'm building this private shard, is it possible to set things in a certain patch? I left UO right before the Feluca/Trammel split (so right before 2.0 in April 2000), and while I wouldn't mind more features from the future, I assuredly do not want that split. Also, I don't want that weird, 3d art style from 3rd Dawn. So I can't go beyond that point...unless I can?

Third, is it possible to have a server running that is close to the original UO in terms of monster spawns. On the same token, how much can I do with the spawning tools?

Fourth, once I have something of a recognizable world from my memory, with the normal wandering monsters, dungeons and treasure spawns (I was an addict of SOS bottles), what can I do with the tools here to make new areas or quests?

Fifth, what do you use for hosting your servers?

I apologize again for taking everyone's time on what are most certainly basic questions, but I appreciate any help nonetheless.
 
1- I dont know what you mean by Uo Software, an emulator? or you mean Game files + client?


2- Go to CurrentExpansion.cs there you can set the expansion to whatever u want, None, Aos.. etc

Expansion.SE;
Expansion.None;
Expansion.LBR etc

3- Yes of course, you can do anything actually, there are spawners that will spawn the whole world, i dont know how accurate they are thought,

Where did you play back in 2000? OSI servers?

To make new areas, i recommend you to use Centred+ (a mapping tool) also you can mix it with PandoraBox or even Uo Architech to add new houses if you want.

To add quest you can use Xmlspawner, use search function there are some tutorials

4- It depends... if you want the server in Europe or Na.

Ovh hosting have some good reviews and they are not expensive


If you played in sphere emulators back in 2000 i can help you since im building a server that recreate that gameplay.

Dont apologize for asking questions! (Trust me, im very annoynig and ask for help very often)

Bye!
 
(Lots of helpful stuff!)

First off, thank you for the feedback and advice. Now that I'm putting more and more thought into this, my imagination is starting to run wild. Which is both really exciting, but it can also lead me away from what I actually need to do. But rants about quest design aside, let me focus...

1 - Well, both actually. I imagine the server management and emulation is here, but is that what I also need to use and send players to to get in order to play on the server?

2 - Ah good. That's just what I was hoping for. Now, if I wanted all the features from Renaissance without Feluca/Trammel, could I set things like that?

3 - I played until about Renaissance on Pacific back in the day. During that time, I dinked about on a friend's private shard a couple of times, but that was mostly just logging on, using admin powers to put demon spawners in his castle and logging out before he could do anything about it 8P .

My big focus is on getting a monster spawning setup that emulates what was there, with hopefully a minimal amount of fuss on my end. Like if there was a pre-arranged setup that handles that, without me having to travel the world placing spawns, that would be the best.

4 - NA for sure.


Right now, I'm kinda doing my homework. I want to make sure that I can do this and get this set up for myself, and once I know that, I can get very into the more creative side. I want to design quests and storylines for players, though at the same time, I have ideas of using the shard and Discord servers to build more of a community questing mindset. Rather than "go get this and kill 32 Orcs", or other really clearly signed out quest hooks, I want players having conversations like:

"So I managed to get down to the bottom of Despise and I found this old key, no idea what it is for"
"Really? In this book, I saw something about that, we need to take it to..."

And so on, so forth.
 
1-

https://www.servuo.com/tutorials/information-so-others-can-connect-to-my-server.26/

and

https://www.servuo.com/tutorials/servuo-setup-server-router-information.24/

2- Yes, i think you need to change the currentexpansion.cs file to AOS (if im not wrong) , then you can just disable the facet trammel, probably the fastest way would be to remove it from public moongates

3- Theres an emulator called Runuo im not sure how accurate the respawns are but you can download plug & play fully spawned server to check it out

4- Hope someone can tell you about NA hosting, i have no clue

You can make Hardcore Roleplaying Chain quests :D and do things like you said, setup secrets quests, places, door switches, quests that only trigger when player is carrying X item, etc (Xmlspawner is one of the best tools out there to do all this stuff without any script knowledge at all)

You can setup the NPC dialogs... etc.

Sorry for my english it just get worse and worse
 
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And I'd assume then that I'd need my players to get their own copies of the UO game to play? Since I'm looking to play such a relatively old version, would that work? Or am I missing out on some very obvious source (entirely possible)?

And cool, this will be great. I'll check out that runuo to see what the spawning looks like. I'm also very impressed and inspired by what you're telling me you can do with quests. That makes it even better for me!
 
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