>> List of Current UO Developers
>> List of Past UO Developers

aka: Speedman
Name: Joshua Kriegshauser
Years Working on UO: 2004 - 2005
Position(s): Programmer/Engineer, Server Programmer
Worked On:
- Ultima Online: Samurai Empire - Programmer/Engineer/Server Programmer
- Ultima Online: Mondain’s Legacy - Programmer/Engineer/Server Programmer

Interviews/Comments on UO

Where Are They Now?
EverQuest II: Kingdom of Sky (2006 - Sony Online Entertainment Inc.) - Programmer

What Else Did They Do?
- EverQuest II: Desert of Flames (2005 - Sony Online Entertainment Inc.) - Programmer

Other/External Sites:

Notable Quotes:
- Stratics Post - July, 2006

In all seriousness, the client controls very little. It’s very dumb and has only enough rule checking to check very simple things. The server is designed to check everything the client is trying to do and prevent what the client shouldn’t be doing. In the case of movement, this includes timing how often someone is trying to move and where they can move. That gets even more complicated when you start talking about inherent delays in communicating across the internet, tcp sliding windows, etc.

The original developers for UO hadn’t yet realized this because it was the first of a kind. Thus, the original game was very exploitable. It’s far more solid now, though in my day, I quashed a good number of exploits, both discovered and not.

I’ll grant you that it should be relatively easy for the client to prevent you from moving (instead of rubber-banding) without making the system exploitable while casting a spell.

In MMOs, movement tends to be one of the most complicated “basic” systems, and no game yet has a perfect solution. As such, it tends to be a point of contention regarding exploitability and server processing resources.
….

Most ‘modern’ games don’t have the same issues to overcome that UO does. Modern FPS games don’t have a server on the order of UO’s server and what it’s trying to accomplish. And many full 3D MMOs push the task of movement fully onto the client, often with little or no (!) validation. Obviously, this leads to a massive potential for exploitability. Movement in 3D spaces is a very tricky thing and takes a large amount of processing power, especially for how many players a server could be handling.
……
Something that doesn’t make it any easier for UO is that it was originally architected to be a single-player game with networking. The original code for the game was never expected to support as many players as UO has or run for as long as it is. Unfortunately, you can’t write a new MMO server in a week, especially one that could seemlessly take over for the current UO server. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ and script code that make up the UO server and it’s all running live. The UO team is working with what they have and everyone on the UO team wants quality. They’re making it better. They’re good guys… i used to work with them

Notes: