[curioussquirrel]

My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard. I wrote some really terrible PHP and HTML, but it worked for 20+ years afterwards. Great memories!

I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO!

In any case, this is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

[piva00]

Similar experience, I helped to build the website, manage the forum installation, and overtime the people running the shard invited me to also code for the emulator they were running.

I was 12-13 at the time (late 90s/early 2000s), I can't remember the emulator anymore, very likely it was POL, and the concept behind the shard was to be as close as possible to the official servers before UO:Renaissance so we worked quite a lot to make it look and feel as T2A. I learnt a lot, later when RunUO came out and became a bit stable (circa 2003) I helped to migrate what we had done within POL to C# code for RunUO, had to learn a lot more to keep up.

The other people working on this shard were all in university studying CS, or already had jobs as programmers, I was the kid who could write some scripts, I believe having this experience was pivotal for me to later become a professional. My first job in a real tech company even came from a recommendation one of these guys made when an internship position opened.

In a way I probably only have my career because of UO and private shards.

[mentos]

Same, when I got into UO emulation I used Sphere for a month then this new C# emulator called RunUO was announced haha and I moved over (~ Aug 2001). There's still a forum post from 26 years ago of me remarking about all the brackets { } involved in writing C# code ha. But I remember that spark when I made a change in a sword file and saw it reflected in game. Been chasing and riding that high ever since. Led to a career in software development but more importantly unlocked some of the greatest joy in life I'm sure everyone here can attest to.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Similar here. I did not get any job through UO but I learned programming by coding on the Sphere emulator, which was awfully documented.

It was a great experience when I was 14. Also caused my high school career to plummet, all I wanted to do was to keep coding for my UO server.

On the upside, I have a great job now and it's all because I followed that passion.

[penetrarthur]

Mine was automating mining ore via an assist tool called UOInject. I think the language there was Visual Basic. I started programming purely out of necessity.

[giancarlostoro]

> I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO!

If it was an MMO, or online, there's private server communities for it endlessly.

I forget the name of the game, maybe it was City of Heroes? It was shutdown for years, and then boop, someone popped up a Private Server years later.

Heck, and I've mentioned it before, the Shockwave Online games of old have some niche communities rebuilding the servers, building Shockwave runtimes and decompilers, and they overlap between games since they find themselves trying to solve similar problems. ;)

[000000000001]

Yes! Can confirm am in a Discord server for Farmville, called Farmville Replowed. A community member has also forked it and added updates, though he changed the database schema so it has been pr'd, and released a Electron client with Flash bundled, Windows, Linux, and Mac are supported.

[arthens]

> My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard

Mine too! My second one was changing the map (remove static items, add new islands and buildings, etc), and my third one was changing verdata.mul to add new animations and item graphics.

Playing Ultima Online on an unofficial POL server literally got me into IT. I was studying to be an accountant before that.

[gedge]

Me three! Made my own POL shard, and invited some friends to it. Wasn't a big thing, but I was proud :)

I can't remember all the things I did, but a couple of things I do remember:

1. Added 50-ish new spells. 2. Created an arena, where you could fight monsters of increasing difficulty and win prizes. There was another option where you could pick a specific monster and fight them in waves of increasing difficulty.

I actually have an archive with all of the scripts too. I'm a hoarder for my source code haha

[devin]

My first website was for my guild on Chesapeake, and I hacked together scripts for macroing various skills as my first "actual programming" project. It is also what led me to join IRC for the first time, which then later led me to freenode.

[arscan]

I had a similar experience. Back then gamers were an outsized part of the online community, so if you wanted to build a site that got some actual use and engagement, building to that audience was a good strategy. And of course, it helps when you are part of that audience.