Roadmap part 1

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Zeratul
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by Zeratul »

Will volume 4 come out today?
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Wil
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by Wil »

qbf wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 7:48 am
Lol, obviously never been to Australia, mate. Copper wire all the way!
Wouldn't help you anyway. You're 200ms over the the undersea fiber cables from most of the rest of the English-speaking world (or at least to the UOEX server). More than half of that is the speed of light in glass. The rest is the myriad routers and repeaters connected to that glass. No improvement in your last mile will change it.

200ms is ICMP ping. Ping in the UO client would be more like 300ms-350ms. If you're experiencing worse than that, THEN you can blame your ISP. ;)
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Re: Roadmap part 1

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Will volume 4 come out today? It’s now a day late
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+Colibri
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Re: Roadmap part 1

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Just posted vol 4 with "Creativity vs stability".
Btw, @Silent, all three of your points are good and important, I am aware of them, and thank you for the reminder. I'll write a bit more in reply, but today has been a long day.
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Alamiester
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by Alamiester »

great roadmap, and feedback from players. i just want to mention updates, and when they happen and what is being updated. if no one knows what was updated you will not get as much feedback for bug reports or glitchy code if they do not know what to test. speaking from experience with the new menus a few years ago on some of the crafting menus, i had a lot of issues with it. but it was new and it was foretold that it was coming....
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by DonQuixote »

I love the idea here. You could basically have premade dungeon layouts (maps) and have players that can create quests and/or events within them. That said if the item creator you are talking about works, players could create quests line with a reward st the end without having to manage said dungeons. The items would just be added to loot charts then have to be turned in to the Player who created for the reward. Of course all would have to be approved by staff before hand. And the player would have to maintain responsibility for said quest. But this alone would expand the world and be a huge stepping stone toward you goal. Adding these quests give the players something to do beyond the same that are already there. One of the things I have found in my short time being here is the extra thing you have added to this server makes it more enjoyable, (belt quest etc.). Now imagine a continuous in flux of new material. See the problem I have ran into on most servers is new players have tons of stuff to do, older players usually have thing to keep them entertained for a while. But the point between Mistvale/Champs when you are to weak to do endgame (All the relayers and such) or have already finish your new player stuff (Mistvale, etc) and the part where you have done basically all of it. At that point it gets repetitive. I have haven't hit any of that on the server yet, because you have a fair amount of extra content. But I can see it in some of the older players here. Just my thoughts though.
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Wil
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by Wil »

+Colibri wrote:
Sun Aug 07, 2022 4:45 pm
None of these extremes are good, and they also don’t mix well.
Actually... that depends on how you architect your software.

Suppose you have a core process whose only job is to manage the object store. It maintains the positions and characteristics of everything in the game, communicates them to all the other processes and also streams them to disk. You want that process to be super reliable. If it crashes, the game is down. If it corrupts the data, here comes a revert.

Then you have a player process, one for each player. It communicates with the object core to figure out what to show the player and tells the object core what happens to objects the player manipulates. And of course when it finds out another player process is nearby from the object process, it negotiates any direct interactions with the other player process too. You want that process to be reliable but if it crashes, the only thing that happens is the player is disconnected and has to reconnect spawning a new player process. The game continues on and the players who didn't trigger that particular bug aren't affected.

Then you have a quest process. The quest process manages the NPCs and objects associated with one quest, telling the object core where things move and how they change. You can hack stuff together with the quest process and not worry so much about reliability. If the quest process crashes, the quest freezes and players can't continue with it, but the rest of game hums on along and doesn't care.

This is called a microservices architecture. Think of it like designing a road network. The super highways have to be thoroughly engineered but the gravel roads don't. Cars drive them both.

RunUO isn't built this way of course. RunUO is a monolith. If any part of it crashes, the whole thing goes down in flames.

Now, just because you start with a monolith doesn't mean you can't implement new capability with microservices. Just start building the hooks so the monolith is capable of functioning as the object core, and implementing new features against those hooks instead of inside the monolith and, over time, remove code from the monolith that has been implemented out in the microservices reducing it to that object core.
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+Colibri
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Re: Roadmap part 1

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(I'm away for the weekend so I'll post and reply on monday)
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Re: Roadmap part 1

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Hope you have a good weekend Colibri. Excited to see what happens up the road. :D
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arrow
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by arrow »

*pokes C+ with a very pointy stick*
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ButteryBiscuits
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by ButteryBiscuits »

So... not trashing anybody specifically here but oh my word..... can we cut the guy some slack? There is an old saying about "riding a horse hard and putting them away wet" that my dad used to say. I will leave you to the interpretation in this scenario but why are we continuing to kick here? Enjoy the shard to the best of your abilities and let +C breathe for pete's sake. :dance
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Alamiester
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by Alamiester »

breathing is good, lol. information is good too. just a lot of probing and dreaming goin on, lol. i dont expect anything from this post any time soon, its just all info in +c's mind, what you make of it is in your mind.
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+Colibri
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Re: Roadmap part 1

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Just posted the 6th volume, about "Responsibility and how do we ditch it". That's the 5th and last of the points of me trying to explain something that's basically nothing to do with any Damage Increases or how much storage your house has. But very important in what to keep in mind to keep the shard going well, and everyone who's here as well, to have a good fun time without unnecessary frustration.

Wanted to find a time to post the new section and also reply,
@Silent, @DonQuixote, @Wil,
I will re-read and reply. I was under the weather for a couple of days , sorry for the delay.

Thanks @ButteryBiscuits :) caught something on Monday and for 2 days I couldn't do anything (futurama and podcasts got me back on my feet) and I'm up and about today.

arrow wrote:
Wed Aug 17, 2022 10:30 pm
*pokes C+ with a very pointy stick*
*you were successful in awaking the beast*


@Alamiester yeah it's all theory. I hear a lot about what I should do, and how I should do it... so here's me sharing why and approx what and how, is what I'll be doing. So I can refer back to these things later on, and also as I go into coding mode, this mindset will kinda turn to mist, so I need to write down. And while I have it written down, it's posted here for those who are interested. This describes the part that's not going to be very well seen (or at least, will be eventually seen and used by those who are interested). But the things like, faster ships, destash, new kinds of area attacks, traps, or whatever else that's "actual game stuff", that's something you'll see without me writing poetry about it :lol:
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Alamiester
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Re: Roadmap part 1

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+Colibri wrote:
Thu Aug 18, 2022 10:03 pm

@Alamiester yeah it's all theory. I hear a lot about what I should do, and how I should do it... so here's me sharing why and approx what and how, is what I'll be doing. So I can refer back to these things later on, and also as I go into coding mode, this mindset will kinda turn to mist, so I need to write down. And while I have it written down, it's posted here for those who are interested. This describes the part that's not going to be very well seen (or at least, will be eventually seen and used by those who are interested). But the things like, faster ships, destash, new kinds of area attacks, traps, or whatever else that's "actual game stuff", that's something you'll see without me writing poetry about it :lol:
new ways to play is a bonus. either way i just enjoy playing the way it is. seems i am still finding things i never knew about before.
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+Colibri
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Re: Roadmap part 1

Post by +Colibri »

Two nights ago I posted the final volume of this post, with milestones and what I'm working on first. Just kinda getting warmed up today, I'm a bit rusty.

@Silent, thanks for posting how you see things and what should get priority.
On the first point, I think the wiki updates and and possibly mentor team refresh should be near the top of priority. However about there being a team of counselors prioritizing things (or categorizing bugs), it's something I'd like to avoid because any word documents, even online collaborative things, just become outdated and crammed with random stuff that eventually is unreadable by anyone, except for the person who wrote it. We tried something like that, and I don't want to go thru the same headache again. It all has to be in one place, so that we're not dealing with outdated versions. Also, well you wrote your post before I posted the "Responsibility" portion, but the way I see it, being able to either bury or prioritize things is a very important part, and I'd like to keep that as direct to the players as possible (by direct voting on issues, without proxies that filter out things that they personally don't think would be a priority).

On the second point, yeah that's what I'm going to expand on. The trivia is kind of a "self-sustained system" so basically anyone with access to the gamemaster-portion of it, could select questions or add new ones, and run the trivia event. I'm going to expand this to actual "game" as we know it, the running around and killing monsters. So that a GM who wants to run an event, gets just enough access to be able to do it. For this to be possible, we need some upgrades to the command system, and what I call "scoped permits", so that things can remain under control.

On the third point: yes, that's true, and thank you for the reminder. I'm aware of this issue. It'd say it's related to perfectionism (which Melkor once mentioned I might be a victim of). Yeah, it's quite easy to fall into this kind of trap, where one rather goes into scope-creep, or "let's make it even bigger and better" thinking, instead of releasing something that might be criticized. So the idea is to keep project at max 3 weeks (ok maybe every now and then something needs to take a bit longer) but overall, release early and often even if it's half done. And actually, this framework that I'm building, is intended to be so that half-assed prototypes can be put to use after just an afternoon of fun coding, without having to be brushed to a certain level of quality before passing the bar for what I'd normally put into the Monolith server. (Wil's observation, to which I'll reply another day).

Really useful post, thank you!
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