RunUO Ultima Online Emulator Goes Opensource

Retalin writes "It looks like RunUO, the largest Ultima Online Emulator around has decided to opensource their project. It's caused quite a stir in their 40,000+ userbase." From the announcement post: "The RunUO team has collectively decided that we will be open sourcing RunUO's core to the public. At this point for the most part, the core is done and the only things remaining are game layer features. We have totally rewritten the networking piece of RunUO and Factions are pretty stable. We have completed a lot of the Ninja additions to UO and are ready to release the core code to the world."

Comments

From the FA

[byolinux]

RunUO is a Microsoft .NET based Ultima Online game server package. The software will allow you to run your own Ultima Online server, with limitless possibilites!

Open source?

[Destoo]

I was under the impression it already was sort of "open source", being that you could customize most of the stuff and recompile it yourself with tools provided.

I received a few messages from the boards around july, asking people what the advantages were of moving a project to an open source model.

anyway.. here are the sourceforge details..

>>
RunUO is a Microsoft .NET based Ultima Online game server package. The software will allow you to run your own Ultima Online server, with limitless possibilites!

Gaming Foundry, Distributed Computing Foundry

* Development Status: 6 - Mature
* Intended Audience: Advanced End Users, End Users/Desktop, System Administrators
* Operating System: All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP)
* Programming Language: C#
* Topic: Role-Playing
* User Interface: Console/Terminal

Project UNIX name: runuo
Registered: 2003-07-07 23:11

Re:Where can I download runuo?

[Ryan McAdams]

http://www.runuo.com/downloads/index.php

RunUO, the new age of Ultima Online.

[Ryan McAdams]

The RunUO Team has been working on RunUO for about two years, you can see the success of our work in one of our game servers over at UO Gamers.com which is free to play and you can even download the EA Games client for free legally from

RunUO itself is available to anyone via the download section and is very easy to install and has a great community to get support from. The main website is located at RunUO.com and the support community forum can be found here. We hope that the users of Slashdot enjoy RunUO if you give it a try and if you need anything please feel free to let myself or any of the developers or community members know on our forum.

Thanks again, and enjoy!

Re:RunUO, the new age of Ultima Online.

[Ralman]

There is no link to the client, since that is software owned and copyrighted by EA. RunUO is not about warez, you still need to supply your own copy of the client.

If this means you need to go purchase a boxed item, so be it. There are some third party clients out there (mostly in alpha and beta phases). However, I think some of them need copies of the original art and music files that are installed by the UO client to work.

Re:Why hasn't EA killed this?

[prisonernumber7]

I'm an avid UO server software developer (not RunUO) myself and I can explain a little as to why: Years ago, Richard Garriot who held the rights to Ultima Online at that time sent out an open letter where he declared that he was fine with people developing uo server software and running free servers (freeshards) as long as they did not turn a profit from them.

Re:How about the client?

[Kethinov]

The real client does indeed work with WINE.

But you can't use UOGateway or Razor, which are necessary third party tools to connect to free servers, such as ones running on the RunUO server software.

I imagine some manual hacking could be done using one of the many programs which breaks the client encryption, but without Razor, playing from Linux is pointless as it's necessary for PVP and many non PVP functions.

The day Razor is ported to Linux is the day UO becomes a viable option on x86 Linux.