Well, might be offtopic, but when i first started playing on DAoC emulated servers DOL wasn't even out yet... there was another project called COAD (or something) which was the first DAoC Emulator, where i logged for my very first time... and there was nothing but players at lvl 1 walking around Cotswold (the old one lol) and the admins that were random changing people shapes/models to give them some fun fooling around! (nothing was implemented, and i mean nothing... neither stats/spells/items etc... just few commands like the /speed maybe)

Then after some time DOL came out, and few servers started their growth, and among them there was one called "Odins Gate" which have been the most advanced at the time because.... it had the SKILL BONUSES from RR/Items working!!!1111one
Saddly it got shutdown and died..

After it, i discovered Promise Shard, which was another advanced shard (a lot more than uthgard at that time, actually they already had bonedancer pets and necro pets working quite well ), which had all skills/spell/abilities and even the NF Keeps + Guards! (a rarity at that time...lol)
They had like 200-300 players online even without DAoC Portal support, but was almost entirely an Italian freeshard (with 2 great coders, Nydirac and LightBringer if anyone ever heard about), till the Alpha9 version (yes.. 9 wipes!) which became international and listed on the daoc portal for some months (then closed because the admin decided to shut it down because had no more time to handle it -_-)

And... after that i went on WoW, till the day i got bored and decided to log on this strange server with 400-500 players online to see how it was... and it was called Uthgard

Bump.

Anyone want to share some other Uth Old Time Stories/Adventures/Experiences while we continue to wait? All history is welcome, don't be shy!

LLU2.0,

Alpha

Good times were, when GM's actually hosted events and showed interest in the communitys thoughts and ideas. I have to say there was almost never a time when personally i thought there was a GM that had a great deal of knowledge about the game but atleast they still tried to explain their twisted believes back then and sometimes it actually made sense. This times have long gone.

Uploaded some images here: http://imgur.com/a/UIAKJ


This one is a special memory from my starting times as a wizard. This was not the first and not the last rejection Cheers at Shorsha who is now part of my guild

Can't read german

That pic's chat log pretty much sums it up. People rejecting other players from their groups because they aren't playing one of the select few classes the leader likes or deems "Worthy". If you want to see why the communities of these free servers dwindle and fail, it's because of people like that. Don't be an elitist asshole, support the community, even those people playing classes/specs that you personally feel suck. People aren't going to play on a server where they can't play what they want because they get shunned and ridiculed by the elitist know-it-alls.

ACrispyTaco wrote:That pic's chat log pretty much sums it up. People rejecting other players from their groups because they aren't playing one of the select few classes the leader likes or deems "Worthy". If you want to see why the communities of these free servers dwindle and fail, it's because of people like that. Don't be an elitist asshole, support the community, even those people playing classes/specs that you personally feel suck. People aren't going to play on a server where they can't play what they want because they get shunned and ridiculed by the elitist know-it-alls.

That's honorable, but i guess that as for casual people like to play casual, i guess elite people like to play in the elite-competitive way..

I guess what most of time is missing, are group leaders that play casual making pugs on each realm (not only on one)
But i also guess that competitive groups ("elitists") make them quit/pve/change after losing too many times..

Disclaimer: I am reposting this entry from Krok here from another thread to preserve this very informative posting on the backstory of Tajendi and its creation/implementation on Uthgard 1.0....


"Postby TheKrokodil » Tue Jan 05, 2016 10:33 am

pweet wrote:
What about getting ppl involved that actually have time and will to spend? If it is like last priority of ppl no wonder you never finish


You're always welcome to reach out to us and apply. The early testers have been doing that, and their feedback has been incredibly valuable. Finding good developers that also have a lot of free time is usually a difficult and lengthy process though.

Alphaone wrote:
On a related note, it'd be great to hear the story of how Taj was designed and built, paticularly the quest lines and such.


Tajendi part I was developed as a "test zone" for the zone editor, and did not have any content plant originally. Schaf and I literally just drew a concept-map in ms paint of what we kind of wanted it to look like ("river here, valley there"), and created that. At some point Sethor came along and decided that there was more potential behind this, so we took the initial design, and just added so much more details to everything, and also added a small story to it.
For Tajendi I all of the story is hard-coded in the game-server. There is literally one GameNPC class for every single named NPC in Tajendi I, and most of it looks similar to this. It's definitely not pretty, and really ineffective. The story texts were all written by Sethor. He had this huge word document outlining every single line in the whole Quest, and I just copy and pasted them into something code-ish later on.

I guess the most interesting aspect is how you could see all of this evolve. I wish I had screenshots to show (but they're stored in a computer far, far, far away), but *a lot* has happened from day 0 to Tajend II/III. Tajendi II was actually "done" a year before it was released, but in a very different way. The global features of the map (river, dessert, jungle, volcano) were there, but the zone was much flatter (no oracle hill, the volcano was very flat, and featured a long series of platforms on which you had to jump. They also had timed flames coming out of them, which made it incredibly hard to finish if you had the tiniest amount of lag). There was a swamp with a sunk temple, and instead of the "blast ferns" that explode, there were those flowers that would capture you if you walked too closely to them, and would teleport you back to the beginning.

Even though pretty much all of the zone work was done at this point, we weren't really happy with what we had, and so we invested more time in figuring out what was possible. Tajendi I only used premade DAoC models and classic textures. I spent a lot of time on working with NIFs at this time, and started created our own NIFs (i.e. the temple in Tajend II, or the interior of the mines and the oracle), and figuring out "more advanced features" we previously did not want to touch (ladders, doors, animations, ToA textures). As we realized what was possible at this point, we decided to delete everything in Tajendi II, and re-do it. So while the original layout of "what is where" kind of remained the same, all the individual features got much more attention to detail. Sethor spent hours trying to get the mountains to look nice, and started planting more than 2000 trees in the jungle, and he really liked them and wanted more and more of those. At some point the DAoC client started running slowly on my machine, so I ended up adding a hard-coded check for "bwillow1.nif" (the tree you see everywhere in the jungle) that would spam 1 message box for each tree above 1200 trees in the zone when saving the zone. So if you had 2000 trees, you had to click away 800 message boxes to get rid of them . After that we only had a reasonable amount of trees to go from.
After that we realized that we actually wanted to pack way more content into this one zone than we physically could. The zone was just too small, and we reached the 20000 per-zone object limit that the DAoC client has. So we physically split Tajendi into two different zones. Even though both zones share the same minimap, they're two seperate zones in the client. The Jungle and snow part of Tajendi II is in zone B, while Tajendi I, the volcano, and the temple is in zone A. If you closely watch the minimap all the time, you'll occasionally notice some overlap where the terrain actually extends further than it could (according to the map). You're just seemlessly transported between the zones. The temple is even more fun, since part of it is in zone A (stacked in multiple layers, high up in the sky) whereas the underwater part is in zone B.

Anyway, at this point the zone design was pretty much done. We had a rough idea of what we wanted to do (factions, the volcano, gathering the elements for the tear), but no story line yet, so Sethor wrote all of this again. It was a bit of back and forth; we both wanted to definitely have *some* elements in this story line (i.e. Sethor was really big on having an underwater tunnel leading from the temple to the jungle, and asked me about 200 times to build it; I liked having certain puzzles and death-traps in the game).

As Uthgard evolved, Implementation of Tajendi II became much easier. We had powerful ingame-scripting tools available, and could thus implement the whole story without touching a single line of code. It was pretty awesome, since you could immediately see the impact and actually discuss & work on the quest at the same time. We were even able to balance out the quest at runtime when Tajendi II was released. While the first group was there, I was pretty much constantly re-adjusting Sortrom so that it wasn't too easy, but not completely impossible.

Working on Tajendi was always with ups and downs. It's hard to keep motivation going for a long time. We did *a lot* of work in the first few weeks, and then the motivation started plummeting down, and it got quieter. At some point we realized we wanted to get everything done, so there was this huge bump in motivation again, and the same story follows. Interestingy I'd say that most of the work for it got done in the last two weeks before the launch, where we were working non-stop to make sure it was a pleasant experience. It was also at this point that we realized that the whole quest was just too long (we never played it continuously in one piece until this point), soo....we only last minute decided to split up the temple into a separate bit, and to give players the "tear" as physical save token so that players could resume the quest later on.

All the side quests were implemented by different GMs at the time; everyone could chime in if they wanted to.

Anyway, it was a fun learning experience, although I wouldn't do it again. If you want to play an (easier) version of Tajendi, you can always do so on Niflheim. The mob levels are lowered dynamically depending on how many people you have in your group, so you might even be able to solo it. No rewards or anything except for "fun maybe".

[tl;dr: tajendi stuff]
Tajendi on Niflheim"



Alpha

I thought I'd bump this thread back up for people who hadn't read before...during the great GREAT down time of Uth (i.e. not the 3 or 4 month long episode that happened in 2008ish?) a lot of really awesome stories about the history of Uthgard were shared by veterans who may or may not still be with Uthgard. Regardless, if you want some awesome history, read this thread, and please also post your own piece of Uth history as well.

This server is an amazing testament to how unique and beloved DAOC is, and I am personally very thankful to everyone who has donated their time and effort to keep it alive, in spite of adversity and differing opinions on what is best for the longevity of the server. Who would have thought we'd still all be grinding fins and running emain in 2017??? Such a fantastic connection with our MMO pasts. =)

Long live Uth 2.0, and thank you again to Blue and Co. for everything you do.

Alpha

Caemma wrote:

Alphaone wrote:Awesome post, thank you for sharing Necator. I had no idea about any of these issues...I would love to have seen the tent stacking!

Oldtimers, or newertimers with good stories to share...this is your place! All is welcome.

Alpha

You are welcome!


Anyway, i can say that was nice to sometimes slip into enemy realms... but used it just to hook up girls of course!

does deadlyshadow still play anmore? I always forced him to do the tenttrick

45m 58s

LET US NEVER FORGET THE LAG JUMP OF THE CENTURY.


Gnome Edit: Proper use of the Youtube Tag.

Code: Select all

[youtube]DXMCKuwCS3A[/youtube]

Liah wrote:

Caemma wrote:

Alphaone wrote:Awesome post, thank you for sharing Necator. I had no idea about any of these issues...I would love to have seen the tent stacking!

Oldtimers, or newertimers with good stories to share...this is your place! All is welcome.

Alpha

You are welcome!


Anyway, i can say that was nice to sometimes slip into enemy realms... but used it just to hook up girls of course!

does deadlyshadow still play anmore? I always forced him to do the tenttrick

And the best is the quote there from Fendimelo while he was going up: "Slap god for me"

@Deadly: Not that i know about!

Something else that I forgot about was the exploit to get into the housing zone of the enemy realm. It is no longer possible, but it was discovered that you could actually transfer buff barrels across realms. If people remember on Uthgard 1, you had to apply the Uthgard patch. It basically placed the border keeps at the right location and the guards as well. Take a stealth class, go /anon, get as close as you could, then quit. Delete the Uthgard patch, log in, and the keep would then be behind you. Sneak your way past (remain stealthed at all times!) and walk to housing. Find your personal house, and steal your buff barrel! Voila! You now transferred from one realm to the other! Thankfully this is no longer possible since Uthgard has its own launcher, but there was some hilarity in watching realm enemies exp. I don't think I have a SS, but you could actually suicide and leave a grave in the enemy realm. I never did see about using /bind, because that would be sure to result in a ban huhu!

In honor of Uthgard's 15 year birthday celebration...bump for peoples viewing pleasure, and anyone that wants to add to the history thread please do so!

LLU2.0,

Alpha

Definitely *bumb*

Show me all your old Screenshots,- mine are lost over the years

same, most of them are lost.



remember when AMG was like this ?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fElNCpaZFBU