I know lately there has been a lot of questions and worries floating around about the status of UOG and it's rules. There is also another alternative out there now called ConnectUO. So far only RunUO supports it.

Tekproxy will be looking into supporting it in Distro. It's not something that will require a Core Modification I think. If it does, we will look into it on the Core team. The packethook will also be released outside Distro for people to use if the packethook is all that is needed. I have not looked into it yet myself, but may get time in the near future if tek hasn't been able to yet. More to come about this helpful update

Some people in a Sphere forum said they asked the RunUO guys about ConnectUO and the protocol for it but they never got a reply. They had the impression that they wanted RunUO to be bound tightly to ConnectUO. I hope this is the case because that would serve as excellent motivation to get this thing up.

From what I gather (and this comes from the RunUO forum), the protocol is simple, and ConnectUO can only handle what is called "RunUO + UOG" requests. I'll have to investigate this more later... It looks like this:


RunUO responds with:


I'll replace RunUO with POL, throw in an item, mobile and online count and the memory could be configurable, unless the POL core started keeping track of physical memory, or computer stats in general (processor speed, hard drive size, available space, number of processors, operating system, etc...).

I think there's already a stastics script for the webserver (if there isn't, there used to be!). I could put all the computer specs into a config file so other scripts could use the info.

Still trying to dig around and learn more about UO Gateway protocol...

Ignore them. Contact Jeff at ConnectUO. He would be the one to tell you what is needed for this. I can contact him myself if you want instead.

Now that I thought about it, he probably didn't reply because they private message/e-mailed him. He might be more keen if I posed the question via their forums. I'll post and, failing that, e-mail him when their website comes back up.

This seems like a simple thing to code, and it would be really useful. I wonder what other simple/super useful ideas I've missed. Maybe if the Distro Development forum had something like "Please post (good) suggestions here." in the description.

Oh, and by digging around the RunUO code, the exact response packet should look like this:


Where {x} is the value.

Name = Server name
Age = Uptime in hours
Clients = Number of connected players
Items = Item count
Chars = Mobile count
Memory = Physical memory in kilobytes (1024 bytes)

One side note here is that UOG doesn't run in Vista and according to what I understand UOG has no plans for Vista support. Have not verified that last but definitely would be nice to have an alternative solution to UOG and Vista issues.

UOG is dead. 1266 is the last version of it period. They're trying to kill it off I think. I mean consider this:

You can not have a link to download anything with client.exe in your UOG shard pack, on your website, or on any pages directly linked to your website. So basically, this means you can only use the client they're patched to which could likely be 5.x nowadays.

UOG doesn't support breaking the new encryption. So the newest 5.x clients can't be run on UOG without Razor as the mods suggest.

The newest version of Razor doesn't support UOG.

*nods*
What with the size of hard drives these days it's just as easy to just copy your UO installation to a new folder and configure it to the shard of your choice. One person I know says she has three copies of UO on her PC. One for EA/OSI and two for the POL shards she plays on.

But that having been said I certainly would like to see some tool that would allow folks to be able to switch easily if they don't want to do copy their UO install.

Tek, will send you a beta of 097 to continue working on the Distro packet hook for this.