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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.
As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read
Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across
We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bug leading to people being trivially able to print money — this led to runway inflation in some servers.
UO economies themselves being matter of study, for a Really interesting article, see [2]
[1]: https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs
[2]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7...
I would strongly strongly suggest investigating MUDs if that's your bag. They're non-graphical so they can be built and maintained by small numbers of people with low programming skills and they tend to be almost entirely about community experiences. I'll just leave http://www.middle-earth.us/ here because it's where I met my now SO and it's an absolutely wonderful community - but there are hundreds of them out there. They do take a serious time commitment though, since they're all about building up that interesting social world.
> 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/
ModernUO is the most advanced implementation of RunUO/ServUO, worth checking out if you're starting a new project that isn't based on the newest UO content.
https://github.com/modernuo/ModernUO
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=anticheat
The first post shown, and the first couple pages of results, will help you catch up on the discussions around these methods. I don’t have anything new to say that isn’t already hashed out extensively therein. Good luck with the reading, and welcome to HN.