Post: #4

The scriptpack overhaul was not great and is being redone for months now on my end. SCP started after Pyromapes and I replicated the entire UO:R. UO:LBR, and UO:AoS combat systems in under a week. It sort of lit a fire in the community and we saw a huge amount of interest in sphere again. ShiryuX and I soon took over Development as Thomas slowly etched his way out and Nazghull disappeared. With both of us with a personal life, college, work, et cetera; we hired on a few people and had our lives take over for a bit. Ben has been handling it for a few years. I came back, but the new staff and I couldn't get along. I tried forming a new team, but just like any developer team, no one seems to have time to put into the monster 24/7 without getting a paycheck from it. After the arguments of OpenSource and non-opensource, it just became petty bickering between Ben and I. Eventually I just moved on again just to not cause another rift in the community and I am not sure what happened to the team I tried hiring in. I think Avatar stuck around, Xun sort of played Neutral. It is all in the past though.

Back on point, the combat system is what started the SCP project mainly. Problem with SCP is the same problem I see with sphere base packs. Too many hands in it. SCP got out of control. RanXerox was the one in there as well and it started to just become a mess with too much stuff leaned towards how his private server was built (stuff I am still ripping out of base packs on my end). Which seems to be a problem when too many people get into one script pack.

Sphere has had a lot of changes and has had developers coming and going. Since Torfo, Mr SugarCube (Thomas), and Nazghul left, it has sort of been promiscuous and slept with many developers. High Seas was a hangup for a bit there, but I think Matex finally handled that when I left the second time.

Not really much else has been going on with it. I have been here for a long time on and off, never really giving up. Always trying to contribute here and there to light a new fire in the community once in awhile. Honestly, if I am not getting paid I just sort of release whatever I feel like grabbing from my personal repositories and handing it to the public. Skul was another one who did the same and would release a lot of quality code whenever he had an itch. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good scripters, but contributions are minimal at best in comparison to where sphere started up till Kell and SephDragoon disappeared after R series.

Really, the history can be summarized as: It was once great with tons of bugs. Now it is super efficient but crap because everyone sort of left or has been hiding behind guest status and not involved as much now. Sphere used to be something more for supporting all aspects of UO and promoted customization. Now it has become more EA and can support heavy customization, but doesn't advertise it as much now as in comparison to when you and I came around.

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@DarkSun84, hard code doesn't completely reflect what that combat code Pyro and I did. Not even close. It has some of the formulas, but there has always been issues with the pvp aspects with the hard coding and casting, fight swings, et cetera, and how it all worked. Unless you all seriously rip apart our code and implement every little thing, it is not up to par, nor does it mimic anything more than the formulas we used. SCP doesn't even have the full combat code if I remember right anyhow. I read the revisions, it is getting there for UO:R handling, but not quite. I can release the code again if needed. It is sitting on my external. My combat code has just become way more advanced than anything that was done when we did that, otherwise I'd have just stuck with what we did. It is accurate to this day minus the changes EA did with special abilities, spells, and minor skill edits (which we didn't add regretfully).