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.

That sounds like potentially good news Vampire337!

We would welcome any improvements to UOFiddler you can offer. I might PM you with some simple little things that bother me in the way UOFiddler works, nothing major, just some functionality improvements.

It's too bad Turley, who is still a POL Core developer has moved on from Fiddler. I think he does most of his POL Core work on his smartphone via SSH into a server I am not joking. Rumor has it he is a faithful member of GUIA (Graphical User Interface Annonymous)

Welcome Vampire337,

Most of us here share the same story.. old pc, dial up, restless nights of UO.
If you are coming back to UO right now you will need to relearn a lot of stuff, you may have noticed that InsideUO is a dead tool, UOfiddler does the job now with much more options.
UOfiddler is great but still need some love, it cant read new UOP files.
Try reading about .UOP and .MUL files

Take a look at UO Orion:
https://github.com/fungos/OrionUO
http://www.orionuo.com/

You may want to join some discordapp channels to keep yourself updated.

Yukiko wrote: ↑Sun Jan 20, 2019 5:58 pm I might PM you with some simple little things that bother me in the way UOFiddler works, nothing major, just some functionality improvements.

Having specific tasks to complete will be helpful as I'm learning the code, so feel free to tell me what you think needs doing. I will admit that my primary experience is in non-compiled applications, so I'll be looking for direction on the 'rules' for deploying updates to git or wherever.

Yukiko wrote: ↑Sun Jan 20, 2019 5:58 pm I think he does most of his POL Core work on his smartphone via SSH into a server I am not joking. Rumor has it he is a faithful member of GUIA (Graphical User Interface Annonymous)

Years ago I played an MMO with a group of Polish Linux users who liked to teasingly refer to me as a "mouse user". I hadn't realized before that you can be looked down upon for preferring GUIs. My day job centers around developing and improving user interfaces, so I'm good at disagreeing with everyone's philosophy. That said, I frequently RDP to my home VM from an app on my phone. The only problem I see here is I hate to code on anything smaller than 17" and my smartphone screen is much smaller.

Pumpkins wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 1:16 am If you are coming back to UO right now you will need to relearn a lot of stuff

I forgot to note that I'm familiar with up to the Samurai Empire expansion. Definitely some room to catch up, but I have over the years hopped on Demise to scratch the itch, so I might be not quite as out-of-touch as I may have implied.

Pumpkins wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 1:16 am you may have noticed that InsideUO is a dead tool, UOfiddler does the job now with much more options.
UOfiddler is great but still need some love, it cant read new UOP files.
Try reading about .UOP and .MUL files

I realized after posting here that the Hello World forum isn't specific to just UOFiddler, but UOFiddler is what brought me here. My primary goal is/was to grab the code UOFiddler uses to read mul files so I can export all the graphical data into something Unity can use, but I hate to take without giving back. I'm expecting to learn how to read/understand MUL/UOP files, but I think my best path is to read through the code that reads MULs and see what I can learn.

Pumpkins wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 1:16 am Take a look at UO Orion

I worked with the Iris2 client source for a short while, and am not surprised people are still trying to build a good cross-platform open-source client to play UO free shards on (like the XNA C# client). Although I want to be able to import the UO client data into a usable format, I'm not looking to simply create another clone UO client, because I think most of UO's potential is already realized: RunUO gives the player base the opportunity to recreate the 'good old days' shards, EA has now made a free version of UO so freeloaders can play legit UO, and Orion looks like a solid version for Linux and Mac users to get their UO fix. I'm still looking for what it is I'm building, but I know there isn't much value in trying to reinvent the wheel. As I figure out what it is I have time to accomplish, I'll hang out here a bit and maybe help out.

Pumpkins wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 1:16 am You may want to join some discordapp channels to keep yourself updated.

I don't *want* to. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to being involved, but I do have a lot on my plate. I have two full-time jobs, a house to maintain, 7 & 11 year old children and a wife that I actually do want to spend time with, a Steam collection of 1100 games, as well as a bunch of crazy side projects like woodworking and playing the drums and collecting swords and writing and growing herbs and photography and... Well, for now I'm trying to start out slow and hopefully not over-commit myself and burn out. We'll see if I'm capable of this.

If you want to spend time with your wife and children you are in the wrong profession/hobby

I will get together with my son and give you 3 or 4 little things to "fix" in Fiddler. Most are simple such as being able to right-click and bring up an "edit context menu", in places where it makes sense, with Copy, Paste... You know.