 | How Metaplace was bornSeptember 5th, 2008 |
I got asked where the idea for Metaplace came from on our public forums. I wrote this lengthy reply, which turned into a blog post over there, and now a blog post over here.
I came from the world of muds. That means I got my start in virtual worlds in the days when anyone could download a codebase, and assuming they had a server they could get going and dive into running a world of their own.
That went away with the big MMORPGs. But when we did UO: The Second Age, there had already been a movement among players towards having “grey shard” server emulators. Some of the tools users had made to hack the UO datafiles were actually better than the tools we had in-house.
So I informally floated an idea for the expansion that didn’t go anywhere. Why not release the game server as a binary, release documentation for our scripting language (which was fantastic for the time), release our tools client, and let people make their own worlds?
You will have to go over there for the rest. 
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[...] Today, Raph Koster, original Lead Designer of Ultima Online, made a post on his blog called “How Metaplace was born.” [...]