[erichurkman]

I think a fair number of us owe our careers to UO; I'm in a similar boat to you, dabbled with UOX, POL, spent a good deal of time with Sphere (my first foray into 'large' C++ projects and, also my first real Linux exposure sshing into the servers to run `sphere &` when it inevitably crashed), and later with RunUO. It also is what made me learn data structures, in working with tools and programs to read/write (and distribute) changes to UO data files to create your server's own maps, art assets, etc.

(Or, as I used it for, replacing the tree art assets to be smaller, making it easier to see through the 2D isometric trees.)

My favorite tidbit about UO is around the technical term 'shard'. It comes from lore from Ultima I, where the wizard fractures the gem that contains the world into shards, and each shard contains a copy of the world. Ultima Online needed a word to describe multiple servers, they picked a term from the lore.. and now 20 years onward, we talk about database sharding.