I am typing from a phone so my replies might look wonky... Anyway here it is:
Agreeably I am very pessimistic about the path the community took. There were only a handful of successful Server Owners and nearly ALL of them withholding content that could have greatly benefitted this community; all the while earning real cash off the backs of the many who coded the RunUO server emulator to begin with.
Meaning nearly half, if not more of their projects, were coded by others and given to them freely. Yet very few of these self-proclaimed legends in the community ever gave back anything other than a headache and half-arsed script snippets with zero explanation on how to use them.
Well that's awfully pesimistic... I mean you're not wrong about some of your points, but there's definitely been a bit of a resurgence in free code/ shard development over the past few years. There was a lot of stagnation towards the end of RunUO. RunUO had about zero post stygian abyss content, and what it did have was completely broken. Even a lot of it's pre-stygian abyss stuff was broken/inaccurate. We don't have a huge surge of third party content being made like we did in the runuo glory days, but there's certainly been a resurgence of free shard development.
Well that's awfully pesimistic... I mean you're not wrong about some of your points, but there's definitely been a bit of a resurgence in free code/ shard development over the past few years. There was a lot of stagnation towards the end of RunUO. RunUO had about zero post stygian abyss content, and what it did have was completely broken. Even a lot of it's pre-stygian abyss stuff was broken/inaccurate. We don't have a huge surge of third party content being made like we did in the runuo glory days, but there's certainly been a resurgence of free shard development.
[doublepost=1551079808][/doublepost]Now the issue here is that when approaching these guys for any help, many were met with the pay to play mentality or a holier than thou attitude with the underlying message being that the little guys in the community shouldn’t be running shards if they couldn’t code them.
[doublepost=1551079947][/doublepost]None of them gave credit where it was due and in fact took credit that wasn’t theirs to take.
[doublepost=1551080048][/doublepost]My final stand on this matter, I quietly left the community because there was no point in having a server if people aren’t consistently releasing content. However I have an answer for this too.
[doublepost=1551080262][/doublepost]I am retired, have been for over 20 years. I have lots and lots of money. With that money I am going to fund a different “game” using Ultima Online as my game model.
This means that the graphics will be similar; more like a cross between UO and Diablo III.
[doublepost=1551080443][/doublepost]Like Bethesda I will have editing tools created and they will be freely accessible. However you will only get a blank game environment on download.
In order to add content: worlds, objects, NPC, Creatures, Monsters etc... you will need to purchase a development subscription which will entitle you to game pack themes which you can tweak to make your game as original as you want.