GateCentral: Ultima: NewsBody

index	language
Even Reset		2010-02-01	L
UBB 7th Anniversary Smith Fest		2010-02-01	L
Publish 27 Schedule		2010-02-01	L
Client Patch 4.0.4a info		2010-02-01	L
Certain Services Temporarily Unavailable in April		2010-02-01	L
Sunsword from the UO-Newsletter		2010-02-01	L
A Few Words about GM Halona		2010-02-01	L
Brandon Williams Comments on the Evolution of UO		2010-02-01	L
Ancient Knowledge		2010-02-01	L
IanStorm UO StormChat Tonight, October 23rd		2010-02-01	L

Even Reset

Even Reset

Liebe UO Community,
nach über 5 Jahren Entwicklung am Freeshard Even haben wir wieder einmal einen der großen Momente unserer Servergeschichte erreicht.
Der Ultima Online Freeshard Even befindet sich seit einigen Tagen im Warmode, es wird nicht mehr gespeichert und die Systeme werden fleißig verbessert. Wir lassen unsere mit den Jahren gesammelte Erfahrung auf RunUO komplett in die neuen Systeme einfließen und haben Veränderungen vorgenommen, die zum Teil grundlegend sind und einen Server Reset mit sich ziehen werden [Alle Items, Häuser und Accounts werden gelöscht].
Der Schockmoment bei der Community war groß, doch musste er schnell einer Euphorie weichen. Even, der Freeshard der bereits zu Sphere Zeiten als der größte deutsche OOC Freeshards galt, den Umstieg auf RunUO gewagt hat und jetzt versucht die Fehler, die den Spielern der heutigen UO Community so sehr missfallen haben auszubügeln?

DA MUSS ICH DABEI SEIN!

Unsere Community testet derzeit jedes integrierte Feature live auf dem Hauptserver und kann Stellung in Form von Kritik oder Lob im Forum äußern. Wir haben versucht jede sinnvolle Idee aufzunehmen und arbeiten derzeit nur noch an einem neuen, verbesserten Auto-Accountsystem und etwaigen Dungeons.

Einen kleinen Vorgeschmack der Veränderungen gefällig?

-Der Skillgain von TemplateCapSkills wurde erhöht.
-Jeder Spieler startet mit vollen Statpunkten (225).
-Unser einzigartiges PvP-System wurde verbessert (Pots, Petals...)
-Das Eventbelohnungsmenü wurde zeitgemäß überarbeitet.
-Ein völlig neues Enchantmentsystem wurde integriert.
-Even hat das Rewardmenü abgespeckt. Wir belohnen die Spieler lieber für das Spielen, als für das Idlen.
-Unser Zuchtsystem wurde komplett überarbeitet.
-Eine neue AI wurde integriert, der Medic! Er bietet eine völlig neue Herausforderung.
-Jeder Dungeon wird von uns komplett überarbeitet und mit einzigartigen Monstern, Quests und Rätselelementen ausgestattet.
-Wir haben ein neues Pksystem entwickelt mit Belohnungen und Strafen.
-Häuser auf Even decayen jetzt und sind immer betretbar.
-Wir haben Reperaturkosten eingeführt um Inflation entgegen zu wirken.
-Neues Forum- und Webpagelayout.
-Und vieles vieles mehr...!

Der Reset wird diese Woche über die Bühne gehen. Ein Ereignis, dass sich kein deutscher Freeshard Spieler entgehen lassen sollte. Es ist die Chance mit zahlreichen anderen Spielern neu zu beginnen und einen völlig neuen Eindruck von Ultima Online zu gewinnen. Ein Moment in den man die Evengeschichte neu schreiben kann, denn nicht der Staff, sondern die Spieler sind es die den Shard zur Legende machen.

Der Even Staff
http://www.uo-even.de

Editor: Wessisau

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2010-02-01

UBB 7th Anniversary Smith Fest

UBB 7th Anniversary Smith Fest

Hear ya, hear ya smiths of Britannia!

The United Blacksmiths of Britannia of Drachenfels are having their 7th anniversary. This calls for a celebration. We are going to host a few events the whole weekend from Friday, October 22, 2004 up to Sunday, October 24, 2004. Each day there is a different event in a different location.

The UBB Smith Contest will be the first of those events.

This event will be held on Friday, October 22, 2004 at 19:00 Central European Time (13:00 Eastern Time). The location of this event will be Britain’s Blacksmith Guildhouse on Trammel facette. The guildhouse is located south-west of the city of Britain just before the Gung Farmer’s Bridge near the First Bank of Britain.

The UBB Enhance & Repair Service will be the second event in row.

On Saturday, October 23, 2004 at 18:00 Central European Time (12:00 Eastern Time) the UBB offers its services. The location will be the UBB Guildhouse in Yew on the Trammel facette. You can find the UBB Guildhouse right behind Empath Abbey.

The third and last event will be the Elemental Dig Up.

We will meet on Sunday, October 24, 2004 at 16:00 Central European Time (10:00 Eastern Time) at the UBB Shop next to the Yew moongate on the Trammel facette. We will head towards Spirituality shrine in Ilshenar first and start digging up some ore elementals.

The whole UBB 7th Anniversary Smith Fest is an open celebration so everyone is welcome regardless if you are blacksmith or not and regardless if you are novice or legendary smith. Keep those dates in mind, spread this news and check for detailed information coming very soon.

Thorkel Tankredsson
UBB Drachenfels Shardmaster

Editor: Visitor

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2010-02-01

Publish 27 Schedule

The Publish 27 rollout begins today, 13 September 2004.

13 September 1:30 PM PDT - publish to Great Lakes
14 September 10:00 AM PDT - publish Chesapeake, Atlantic, Catskills, Siege Perilous, Legends, Great Lakes (refresh), Lake Superior
14 September 11:00 AM PDT- publish Lake Austin, Baja, Napa Valley, Sonoma, Pacific
14 September 2:00 PM PDT - publish Oceania
14 September 4:00 PM PDT - publish Yamato, Izumo, Wakoku, Hokuto, Asuka, Mizuho, Mugen, Sakura
14 September 5:00 PM PDT - publish Arirang, Balhae, Formosa
14 September 9:00 PM PDT - publish Europa, Drachenfels

FYI @ UO.COM

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

Client Patch 4.0.4a info

We are planning to release a client patch today, September 1st, at approximately 3:00PM PST (10:00PM GMT), which will include support for Publish 27 and the following.

Both Clients:
Localization updates
6th Character Slot issues addressed
DVD drive detection
If patched correctly, your current version will display 4.0.4a for both clients. If you have any difficulty receiving this patch, please check the following:

Check the "Patch" directory within your Ultima Online directory (the default location is C:Program FilesUltima OnlinePatch). This directory should be empty. Any files in this directory should be deleted. If you are unable to connect to the patch server at all, and are using an original (Non-T2A) version of Ultima Online, you may need to update your verinfo file. For details on updating this file, please see the information posted at http://support.uo.com/tech_6.html. Run a virus scan on your computer. Undetected viruses may cause conflicts with patching Ultima Online. For information on up-to-date virus detection software, please visit http://www.mcafee.com/myapps/vso/default.asp.

If after trying the above, you are still experiencing difficulty patching the Ultima Online client, please visit this web page.

FYI @ UO.COM

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

Certain Services Temporarily Unavailable in April
Starting on Friday, April 2nd, the Advanced Character, Name Change, and Account Access Transfer services will be temporarily unavailable. These services will resume at 8:00 am PST (10:00 am CST, 11 am EST) on Tuesday, April 13th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience. FYI @ UO.COM

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

Sunsword from the UO-Newsletter

SunSword On the OSI Move, UO and UXO

As you probably know, the Origin studio is moving to EA headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA. I know that there has been much concern about how this will affect UO and UXO, so I want to clear a few things up and answer some questions you might have.
First off, I am completely committed to Ultima Online and its citizens. The moment I heard about this change, I knew I would make the move to the San Francisco area to continue the important work of improving and growing UO.

In addition, I am pleased to announce that we have been able to keep almost every key UO team member and they are busy getting ready to move game operations (and their homes and families) to Redwood City. This team will eventually become the largest UO development team since the original game shipped. Moving to Silicon Valley will help tremendously in recruiting the talent we need to take UO into the future.

I'm also excited by what the UXO team is working on. Seeing that game in action, and knowing what we have planned for UO, makes me confident that the Ultima legacy of online adventure will continue to grow for years to come.

Please keep watching the website for the latest news and updates. There are some amazing announcements on the horizon. Meanwhile, see you Britannia!

Anthony "SunSword" Castoro
Producer, Ultima Online

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

A Few Words about GM Halona

Who is GM Halona?

I guess I should start at the beginning—yes, that is always a good place to start. In January of 1998, I heard about a game that would forever change my life. For the next six months, I shared an account with a friend of mine and in June decided that one account was not big enough for the two of us to share, so I purchased a copy of my own and opened my own account. Since then, I have met and married my husband of four years and purchased four additional accounts. As you can see, Ultima Online became a huge part of my life.

In September of 2000, my husband and I decided to apply to become counselors. I submitted my application (My husband canceled his.) and was accepted a few days later. That is when I became Counselor Sparrow Hawk of Lake Superior. After all the buzz about the first ever Ultima Online World Faire, I just had to attend. I sent in a request to help host the fan event and, since I already lived in Austin, was accepted quickly. I met several of the Game Masters at the time, as well as several of the "higher-ups" of the company. That day, I went home and sent in my résumé for the position of Game Master. In December of 2000, I left the counselor program to become GM Lady Halona. And after being with EA/OSI for a year and a half, I was promoted to Senior Game Master.

This was beyond all I could fathom from the time I signed up to play this wonderful game six years ago! I opened an account with the idea that I would play this game for a few weeks, like most other games, and that would be it. I never dreamed how much this game could alter my life in so many ways.

As a Game Master, I will do my best to defend the game and the rights of the players. If there is something we can do, I will do it; but if there is nothing we can do, I ask that the players understand that too. Just because we have the ability to do something does not mean that we have the power to do it due to policy constraints. We are not really all that harsh and all that mean. I work with a wonderful group of honest and hardworking Ultima Online gamers. For me, my job as a GM is more than a job; it is a major part of my life. I can only hope that UO brings as much joy to others as it has brought to me.

Lady Halona
Player Relations
Ultima Online

UO.COM

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

Brandon Williams Comments on the Evolution of UO

My name is Brandon Williams. I am a Sr. Unix Administrator for Electronic Arts/OSI. I am considered somewhat of an old timer around here in the OSI office, as I have been directly involved with building and supporting Ultima Online production and OSI development environments for the majority of the past seven years. I have seen UO go from a "proof of concept game," that was hopefully capable of lasting a few months, to a staggering alternate universe successfully capturing the interest of millions of avid players for over six years now. The evolution of UO is truly a remarkable story. If you have a moment, and an inkling of interest, please feel free to read on as this relatively dry Sys Admin tries to spin a tale.

1996 was a time of change, both for me and for a relatively small project in development at OSI code named "Multima." It was around this time when public beta for the project was getting ready to start. I was not yet a member of Operations, partially because there was no Operations team in place at that time. I was working part-time at OSI and majoring in computer science at school. As an avid gamer and office peon desperately looking for ways to get closer to game development, I volunteered to manage the influx of beta tester applications for Ultima Online. Little did I know, this would mean I would be opening thirty thousand letters, removing the two dollar shipping fee that applicants were sending to cover the cost of shipping their beta CD, and manually entering return shipping addresses into a simple flat database! The public's interest in UO's open beta program was overwhelming at times, but also extremely exciting. Around this time, a member of OSI's local IT staff, Mark Rizzo, broke out of his everyday duties to focus on the infrastructure that was to support UO.

The initial plan was to run the entire service on a cluster of "powerful" dual processor Pentium Pro 200Mhz servers with 128MB of RAM--all from the "high tech" converted office/server room in our development studio! (Please excuse my facetiousness. It's just that looking back now; it's funny to think what we initially thought it would take to run the UO service.) With public beta ramping up, and a vast amount of work needing to be accomplished, Rizzo was able to justify the need for a junior-level sys admin position to help with the launch and support of UO. In hind site, I realize I am very fortunate to have jumped into this role full-time when I did. Rizzo was an exceptional mentor. I learned many aspects of sys admin work by working with him. Together we were discovering the trials and tribulations of launching and running an online service. Things were very different at that time. There was not an abundance of hardware venders in the market providing a state of the art X86 server platform. Instead, we were faced with building customized full tower case servers from scratch. ISPs were in an infant state. What is typically expected in a co-location center now was in the process of being defined when UO was getting ready to launch. Luckily for UO, big brass from the EA ranks were aware of the mammoth interest that was building for UO and had the foresight to open wide the checkbook and support the project as needed for an appropriate launch.

In the very late stages of development, it became painfully apparent that the X86 platform was not going to efficiently support the game, and that we were not going to be able to support all of UO's customers in one single instance of the online world. This is when the idea of "a shard" was created. Fiction was put together to support this need, and hence, we now know of "Mondain the wizard" and the gem that shattered creating hundreds of like instances of the Britannia universe. Within the first few frenzied months of UO's launch, the Pacific, Baja, Napa Valley, and Sonoma shards were opened on the US West Coast; Great Lakes and Lake Superior were centrally located in Chicago; and the Chesapeake, Atlantic, and Catskills shards were located on the East Coast. All of these shards were running on more powerful (yet more expensive) Sun Sparc servers.

With UO growing by leaps and bounds, EA and the UO support staff had to adapt quickly. It was not long before the Operations team began to hire on some of the industries best talent. Pretty soon, our operations team had software engineers specializing in login and billing systems, network architects specializing in Internet routing, web administrators mastering one of the most impressive dynamic web sites around, and, of course, more Unix administrators to support the growing platform needed by Ultima Online.

Soon, EA began to tap foreign markets as well. Interest in UO from Japan, Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia was and still is staggering. To this day, our non-USA customer base makes up about half of our active players. Throughout the life of the service, Operations has added many shards, in several regions around the world. UO has benefited from several milestones and improvements in its life. Many champions have done great things for this game, whether it was a programmer developing distributed backups, significantly reducing backup times, or an architect sponsoring major hardware upgrades at various stages of this game's life. It is truly amazing how many developers and support staff UO has had over the years making the service what it is today.

Looking forward, Operations knows there are many improvements to be made still yet on the infrastructure that supports UO. The day when shard crashes are a thing of the past is a goal of ours. Reworking the in game backup system to make reverts significantly rarer--and no longer than a few seconds when there's no way to stop them from occurring--is on the radar. Improving the server platform and our Internet connectivity to make latency a forgotten word is a utopia that our Operations team is working hard to achieve. Operations can not achieve all of these goals alone. Many other teams within the UO support structure and the Internet as a whole have a large say in these goals as well. They are common goals though, and they will be achieved.

So that is my tale. (At least that is all I have time to tell right now.) Thank you for your interest and, more importantly, thank you so much for your continued dedication to the amazing world of Ultima Online! EA, OSI, and everyone here who directly supports UO know we're lucky to have such a dedicated and truly creative player base, and that you are a major factor in the continued success of this online universe. For that, my colleagues and I are extremely grateful to you. Keep having fun, and keep driving your high expectations. Hopefully together we can one day enjoy UO's 20th anniversary and beyond.

Brandon Williams
Sr. Unix Administrator
Origin Systems

Team Comments @ UO.COM

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

Ancient Knowledge
Lord British recently tasked the Royal Britannian Guard with a quest, to brave the dangers of Ilshenar and seek out a being of immense wisdom, knowledge, and power. Their mission: seek out an ancient wisp and gather details regarding the whereabouts of any wayward shard pieces. Read about their adventure into the wilds of Ilshenar at the Britannia News Network! Source: FYI on uo.com

Editor: Jimmie

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2010-02-01

IanStorm UO StormChat Tonight, October 23rd

Ianstorm.com will be holding a UO Developer Chat tonight, October 23rd, at 7pm CST. The topic for the chat will be General Discussion.

The chat will be available on the #UOSC channel and on the following IanStorm IRC server:

- irc1.ianstorm.com
- irc2.ianstorm.com

If you don't have a regular IRC client, you can use the IanStorm java client located here. From there, type /join #uosc to enter the chat.

Remember that this is a development chat, and as such only questions about the topic will be answered. Open discussion before, during, and after the event will be available in the #Ultima-Online channel.

Site News @ UO.COM

Editor: Spawn

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2010-02-01

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