gridia VS UOX3

I've been working on this sort of game for awhile now. Never too seriously, though that will change in 2023. Hardly worth sharing at this point, but I will anyway.

https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/

I need to seriously think about what I want out of this game (more of a mmo game engine), but "UO-like" is definitely top of mind.

When making the netcode for my web game, I highly valued TypeScript support so to get it by default, I defined the message types in TypeScript so they could be used directly[1]. I see that this framework defines its messages in .yml and converts it to types (stored in a folder kept out of source control).

I'm not sure which way is best, but it is very nice to have the feature support of `.d.ts` files when creating complex message types, as opposed to needing to learn a new thing. Clearly if this is going to be a cross-platform (not just web) framework then using TypeScript as the source-of-truth makes far less sense.

Anyway, very impressed with the binary format/delta encoding feature! That's been something that I know I _should_ do but am putting off until I see signs of sending raw JSON being problematic.

[1] https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia/blob/master/src/proto...

- All my Preact code is in this folder: https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia-2019-wip/blob/master/src/client/ui/ - Most complex one: https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia-2019-wip/blob/master/src/client/ui/admin-window.tsx - CSS: https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia-2019-wip/blob/master/src/client/styles/main.css

> As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read

Ultima Online emulators were what took small interest for me and blew it up into a career. But for me, it was pre-RunUO: SphereServer (aka GrayServer, I think) and UOX3. C++, with its own scripting engine built in. It wasn't exactly closed or open source. It also got me into Linux: while some emulation servers were run on home PCs, others were run on hosted machines. Debugging often meant the server administrators would give you root access to debug their running server. New Ultima Online releases meant being late for school to try and debug the client code changes to be able to quickly update the server, otherwise no one could log in.

It was incredibly buggy and never, to my knowledge, reached feature parity with the full game. The workarounds individual servers made through the rudimentary scripting language was impressive (many of these hacks were then copied into the core emulation scripts).

For trips down memory lane, these sites are still live -- and being updated? Wow.

https://www.sphereserver.com/

https://www.uox3.org/

If you're interested in trying out an Ultima Online emulator with soul, or if you're looking for a project where you can still make your mark as a contributor of code or scripts, check out the Ultima Offline eXperiment 3 at www.uox3.org, visit our GitHub pages or come hang out with us on Discord!