eHllo oWrld
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:59 pm
I first played Ultima Online in T2A in 1998; still have the manual and, presumably somewhere, the original CD. I played it on a Pentium 166 with 8mb RAM on an AOL dial-up connection. I loved the Ultima series since Ultima 4 (which I sortof beat, although when it got tedious I just hacked my save game using Microsoft Works 3.0 so I could just skip past my penance for stealing gold from all the world's treasure chests). I was around in the early-ish days of RunUO's development where I butted heads with Retalin, and ran my own shard three or four times, coming up with bigger ideas than I and my devs were cut out to script, managing player bases and so on. This was mostly in the early 2000's, so it's been awhile.
In the years since then I became an Industrial Automation Enginerd. This is a multi-faceted discipline which has sent me around the world implementing solutions for fortune 50 companies, helping them manufacture products more efficiently and manage their data to make smart business decisions. It has me involved with the local water/sewer municipality in a project where we're currently preventing over a billion gallons of runoff from the sewers during rainfalls from getting into our local waterways each year. I do a lot of virtualization stuff for a number of customers, from simple virtual hosted platforms to complicated high-availability and multi-clustered environments. My employer is a software distributor for one of the major industrial controls software packages, and in supporting and improving the product I've managed to become a decent VB programmer despite my best efforts to not be a programmer. Not too long ago I started writing my own actual C#; my first app was/is a file-sorting Windows service running on a virtual machine on my home network, which renames photos by their timestamp and sorts them into folders by datestamp, and does so with Dropbox to sync all changes to my (and my wife's) phones, so any pics we take are synchronized and backed up to redundant hard drives, all at the same time. I enjoy a fair amount of problem solving. Primarily I consider myself a visualization specialist: my job revolves around designing interfaces not to simply look nice, but to expedite the transfer of data into an operator's head so they can make decisions based on the data.
So that's all the patting on the back my arm can take. Since I got my first Android phone I have wanted to create a mobile UO client, and maybe to host my own public RunUO shard (again) to support it. I've finally made some time to learn Unity, and through this process I discovered UOFiddler (the last time I messed with this stuff InsideUO was the only option!). I'm currently working through importing the source into my Unity app, because I just want to be able to read the muls into Unity rather than manually exporting frame-by-frame graphics to manually import. It's too early to say whether I'll get anywhere, but that's where I am with it. I'm aware this software was last updated in 2013, but I'd like to think I'll also offer to help improve some things as I learn the structure.
In the years since then I became an Industrial Automation Enginerd. This is a multi-faceted discipline which has sent me around the world implementing solutions for fortune 50 companies, helping them manufacture products more efficiently and manage their data to make smart business decisions. It has me involved with the local water/sewer municipality in a project where we're currently preventing over a billion gallons of runoff from the sewers during rainfalls from getting into our local waterways each year. I do a lot of virtualization stuff for a number of customers, from simple virtual hosted platforms to complicated high-availability and multi-clustered environments. My employer is a software distributor for one of the major industrial controls software packages, and in supporting and improving the product I've managed to become a decent VB programmer despite my best efforts to not be a programmer. Not too long ago I started writing my own actual C#; my first app was/is a file-sorting Windows service running on a virtual machine on my home network, which renames photos by their timestamp and sorts them into folders by datestamp, and does so with Dropbox to sync all changes to my (and my wife's) phones, so any pics we take are synchronized and backed up to redundant hard drives, all at the same time. I enjoy a fair amount of problem solving. Primarily I consider myself a visualization specialist: my job revolves around designing interfaces not to simply look nice, but to expedite the transfer of data into an operator's head so they can make decisions based on the data.
So that's all the patting on the back my arm can take. Since I got my first Android phone I have wanted to create a mobile UO client, and maybe to host my own public RunUO shard (again) to support it. I've finally made some time to learn Unity, and through this process I discovered UOFiddler (the last time I messed with this stuff InsideUO was the only option!). I'm currently working through importing the source into my Unity app, because I just want to be able to read the muls into Unity rather than manually exporting frame-by-frame graphics to manually import. It's too early to say whether I'll get anywhere, but that's where I am with it. I'm aware this software was last updated in 2013, but I'd like to think I'll also offer to help improve some things as I learn the structure.