Ultima Online v1.25: The Original CD

[MatronDeWinter]

It stands to reason that a customized client could be put together using what we have learned from the old clients, god client, etc, as well as the stripping down of modern client resources (such as, for example, Champion monster animations) in order to produce a compact client containing only the resources used up to Dec31/99

Remember the chest opening animation?

Bicchus Dicchus

The actual client is pretty small. A majority of the physical memory occupied by the client is located in the anim, sound, map0, art, and gumpart .mul files respectively. Together they account for 1/2 of a gigabyte unpacked/zipped. It would likely be more efficient to just run through the mul files and remove the unwanted data by writing blank. I don't really think the UO client has any issue running on just about any machine though lol. If anything it would be nostalgic to have a chest login screen, but the only thing this would really accomplish would be a smaller download size for the uosecondage.com server, and even then, it would not be significantly reduced to warrant the effort.

Besides, then you would have to go through the trouble of knowing what data the players have and do not have. Suppose Derrick runs a shard-wide invasion event and uses new artwork. Some in-game rares currently use post T2A artwork. I have seen samurai empire styled trophies even.

[Bicchus Dicchus]

Shenanigans!

Well, to even impliment the chest-style login screen, we'd have to find the actual assembly subroutines that pertain to it, most likely by IDA Pro'ing an old client such as 1.25, and we'd have to see if the code is still existant within a modern client, say 5.0.8.3.
If it does, we would as well need to fully understand and document how the current login screen functions, once again by reverse engineering the client.
Finally we'd have to take the chest-style code, modify it to output modern login authentication packets, and slap it into the client, while changing subroutine calls for the uo init startup routine to call the chest-style login instead of the current login.

Anyone who has disassembled the client.exe will most likely agree with the following clip as an decent description of the assembly code of Ultima Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFCM6TZgTMI

I reckon in time, and through great collaborative effort, the majority of the code of a given client version will be documented by The People.

Comments in my previous post were intended merely as discussion of the possibilities of developing for UO, not as calls for action in regards to these areas of development. All comments made by Bicchus Dicchus do not neccessarily reflect the values or opinions of Bicchus Dicchus, though the public is urged to interpret them as recieved wisdom. All rights reserved, including yours.

Bicchus Dicchus, Hero to the People