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How come UO is "out there"?

DreadLord Lestat

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The servers were reengineered. It is not the actual Ultima Online code. Many games like Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes have emulators as well. As far as UO, anyone can start and run their own basic shard but it is tougher and you need to be good at coding to do more custom stuff.
 

Draza

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i believe originally the "server" software was released with the disc. as long as a fee was not accepted to play, copyrites were not enforced. but alot of this was in the early days of mmos, and it kinda set precident
 

Deimos

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Can someone explain to me how it's possible all these emu/free shards even exist? How did the code get out?
Yea there's no actual stolen server code as far as I know, the official server code is written in C++? (Vaguely recall a developer saying that), but the code for RunUO/ServUO) is written in C#
So it doesn't contain anything stolen.
I think the only time free servers/shards get in trouble, whether it's UO or other MMO's, is when they charge for access.
I think larger shards ask for donations for ingame items, to kinda get around any potential legal issues.
 

Cork

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Yea there's no actual stolen server code as far as I know, the official server code is written in C++? (Vaguely recall a developer saying that), but the code for RunUO/ServUO) is written in C#
So it doesn't contain anything stolen.
I think the only time free servers/shards get in trouble, whether it's UO or other MMO's, is when they charge for access.
I think larger shards ask for donations for ingame items, to kinda get around any potential legal issues.
There is no getting around the legal issues. Legally EA could have enforced it's rights and shut down all these free shards if they wanted to. But they just don't care about UO anymore. Just the fact that it's clearly an Ultima Online clone and they are calling it Ultima Online is IP infringement. But again EA doesn't give a crap about UO so they have let this happen.
 

DreadLord Lestat

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It's a gray area and for the most part ignored by all gaming companies unless the server gets too large and makes too much money. There are emulators for most large games, some active, most gone. There are a lot of World of Warcraft emulators and I am even seeing one of the advertised on YouTube now. It is most likely not worth the cost of the legal fees and publicity to shut them down unless they are actively charging people to play. The last free server I know of that was closed by a gaming company was the classic wow server that lead them to start their own vanilla server. I think they may have even hired the guys that ran it onto helping them make the vanilla wow server. There are emulators for Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, Archlord, & Earth and Beyond just to name a few.
 

petemage

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Yea there's no actual stolen server code as far as I know, the official server code is written in C++? (Vaguely recall a developer saying that), but the code for RunUO/ServUO) is written in C#
They put a compiled version of the server software on a demo CD (uo demo 98) and released that into the public. Not quite the full thing but all kinds of server assets (scripts..) included.
 

Cork

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Yea there's no actual stolen server code as far as I know, the official server code is written in C++? (Vaguely recall a developer saying that), but the code for RunUO/ServUO) is written in C#
So it doesn't contain anything stolen.
It doesn't matter what language it's written in. It's not terribly difficult to take code written in one language and rewrite in to a different one. Not saying they "stole" any code just that the programming language used doesn't really affect EA's ability to enforce it's IP rights.
 
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