SphereCommunity

I've used Sphere forever, my first server was back in the 51a days when Sphere was the dominate server emulator, of course, over the years we have lost steam to RunUO.

Personally, I think it's because RunUO is a "full server out of the box", while Sphere is a functional server, but not a full and ready to go one. We require a lot more pre-setup to make an OSI-style shard.

But, I don't think that matters. My perception of Sphere now is that Sphere is an "Engine emulator", allowing us to make a Ultima Online style game. Be it OSI's version of UO or our own.

A lot of people know about my work trying to remake my own MMO with UO's engine, and I feel it could not of done this as easily with RunUO. When I started Aetharia, I sought out SphereServer to see if it was still around and also looked into other emulators like RunUO. What I found was Sphere was still in my eyes, the best for the task of creating a world. RunUO may be written in C#, and technically may be just as customizable as Sphere, but I find Sphere a much easier platform to "Develop" on.

Sphere's system is both deep and complicated, yet simple at the same time. Where as RunUO is a huge cluster of "WTF am I looking at!!?" trying to make heads or tails of even simple things. Of course my old 51a background made it a lot easier to pickup 56b, but I actually know C# programmer (amateur level), and RunUO is still a mess to look at.

The main thing that made me stick with Sphere, was reading the RunUO forums. You'll see people talk about adding custom scripts, new content, etc, but a lot of these posts more talk about it as "Some extra thing to do ON TOP of their pre-designed OSI style shard". Sphere on the other hand seems to be full of people who want to either make their own custom servers, or take the default OSI style server and improve upon it. While RunUO feels like people just wanted to "mod" their OSI shards with minor features.

So all in all, I think Sphere is a better platform for people who want to "Create" a world, where as RunUO is a better platform for people who just want to run a vanilla like-everyone-else server.

Also; This community is a lot nicer. The RunUO community has that "Arrogant programmer" feel written all over it.

I hope Sphere cam come back up on top, or at least on par with RunUO's popularity. It's a shame, because I personally think Sphere is the superior product. It's just getting ignored.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Sphere is simply more flexible. It however doesn't have a good basic set up.

To get Sphere's populairity up we need good Sphere shards running with large amounts of players. We need to catch up to EA in terms of stuff. I'm all for a working clone out of the box and having those systems scripted gives people a basis for custom work. I'm honestly not sure we'll ever supplant RunUO because clones are going to be a large portion of shard regardless. We can however show that Sphere is still a viable, even superior, alternative for non-clone shards.

One of Sphere's biggest weakness has traditionally been the inability to access the hardcode. In early versions the scripts weren't robust enough to handle full work-arounds. That's changed. We still can't hit the hardcode but the tools to do total workarounds are in place. Once a system has been rewritten as script it's much easier to adapt that script to a shard than to try and work from scratch to re-do a system.

Also having lots of Devs active doesn't translate to more players. Most of the players who play RunUO shards don't have any particular loyalty to RunUO, just the shards. They won't have significant barriers to trying an interesting shard just because it's Sphere. It's not a factor to most of them as long as the shard is good.

I do enjoy that the latest version of sphere can work around almost all the hardcoded issues we previously had to just deal with.

Really the only hardcoded issues we're "stuck" with is the client's abilities to translate the information Sphere sends it. But even some of that can be manipulated with sendpacket.

Really the one and only roadblock I'm hitting is the client's abilities. I plan on using the 2D Classic Client, but some things are very annoying and we have no real options but to deal with them. Like the gameplay window size, for example. I can patch the CC to force a higher window size, and then use Sphere's .visualrange tool to get rid of the "Gray/Unloaded" areas that would normally be slightly out of range, but the totally unloaded, solid black areas of the terrain that popup in the distance I can't do much about. If I could get past that one small problem, I'd have a 1024x768 gameplay window (or even 1200x800).

All in all, Sphere is much more fun to script on too, it's in an easy to understand, but vastly deep language.

I have big plans for my shard, including some advertising (in the $500~ range) that I'm going to dump day 1 to get my community skyrocketing and get everything going. I also plan to advertise Sphere on my site, so players will know what's under the hood. Like you said, players really aren't loyal or "care" about what emulator is running the shard but if it gets enough attention, the RunUO server admins might take note of some of the amazing things we CAN do, if my shard gets large enough to hit the top of google.

I agree 100% with rayvolution especially with My perception of Sphere now is that Sphere is an "Engine emulator", and i think that this should be the direction to follow for "resurrecting" ultima's unofficial shards

I have feeling tat Sphere PVP is much more skillbased. Ofcourse some shards have copied it but still those shards had something weird so they didnt addict me.
I also like RP side of UO or lets say crafting and PVM, but usually those RunUO shards were only either PVP or hardcore RP. I wanted sphere PVP with good crafting and PVM features.

I think the best thing with RunUO is that they are using C#. Basicly if you learn C# you have more possibilities actually use it in "real life" getting jobs etc.
Someone might have other opinion for that.

Thing with RunUO is that they made so many 3rd party programs which players actually found easy way to start playing Free UO shards. Also RunUO's own shards still are and were very high playerbase. If player didn't like those OSI clones they easier find another RunUO shard than sphere shards.

Sphere bright future.
Just believe in it!

I completely hate c# but runuo is way more better than sphereserver. Sphereserver is not customizable at ALL while you can customize your "out of box" runuo completely by either changing sources or scripts. c# has garbage collector while c++ doesn't which is an advantage for smaller groups that can't handle memory management. sphereserver is c++ which is a complete advantage but it is not a safe language and needs a wide, large development staff. one mistake would cause memory leaks or another mistake would cause deadlocks between threads which you can't easily debug. but stubbornness of "someone" corrupts sphereserver. they don't accept "development" or "help" which annoys me as hell. this is not a simple c++ hello world program which i think devs and damian don't want to understand. so sphereserver isn't preferred because you have to wait for bugs to be fixed for years lol.

(10-03-2012 07:14 PM)xantier Wrote: [ -> ]...sphereserver isn't preferred because you have to wait for bugs to be fixed for years lol.

+1

I disagree! I prefer sphere because I do everything I want, point.

Xantier, I'm gonna be clear, don't treat Sphere or us (the developers) like that just because you didn't get the application. The new developers are working fine and they're doing a great effort, they're capable and pretty well minded. Anyway, in my opinion, I always get "bonded" to a Sphere Shard. On the other hand, I don't get "bonded" to a RunUO Shard, they're pretty much the same in crafting and combat, with some details or small changes.

(10-04-2012 01:12 AM)ShiryuX Wrote: [ -> ]Xantier, I'm gonna be clear, don't treat Sphere or us (the developers) like that just because you didn't get the application. The new developers are working fine and they're doing a great effort, they're capable and pretty well minded. Anyway, in my opinion, I always get "bonded" to a Sphere Shard. On the other hand, I don't get "bonded" to a RunUO Shard, they're pretty much the same in crafting and combat, with some details or small changes.

Xantier says a true... he didn't do something wrong... The lack of programmers in sphere do this: Run UO > Sphere.
But NOT IS A PROBLEM of the new programmers or something else. It's because the project stops and never get fix again.

I'm very thankfull to the new programmers of sphere, but i guess, there's many errors to fix and NO ARE THEY PROBLEMS! the problem is that, the 1st programmers has left the project and let sphere in the clouds... like "no one ever cares".

Now we have programmers, we can! but they need a motivation to fix all the previous bug's that never clear the original staff of sphere. MINOR bug's. Yeah the minor bug's are important too.

This community is wonderful, we need stick together. For new users, old users, for all the world.


Lazarus.