Ultima Online's Classic Client - Save Us, Mr. Vorontsov!

[FiftyTifty]

Seeing as how all the games coming out in recent times are, err, less than enjoyable, I figured I'd go and give Ultima Online another whirl. The best part about the game, is that there are many open source server packages, allowing for some pretty hardcore modding if you know C#.

By default, the game is pretty much the best damn sandbox around. Housing isn't instanced, you'll lose all your stuff if you die and don't get back to your corpse in time, huge number of skills, large maps (Trammel is >7k by 6k tiles), world wide PvP, forming "squads" out of NPC companions, etc.


But, dear god, the Classic Client is utterly horrible on the eyes. Not in regards to the sprites, tiles, animations and whatnot, but the actual rendering:

It uses GDI+ to render when windowed. In the latest versions, it uses either DirectDraw or Direct2D in fullscreen.

It's hard-capped at 20fps. Why yes, it does hurt the eyes.

The game's max resolution in fullscreen is 1024x768. In windowed, the rendered part of the game is stuck at either 800x600 or 640x480, with the rest of the window being used to organize the UI windows.

The mouse flickers when run in a separate thread (it's an on/off option in the game's settings). When run in the main thread, the mouse also renders @ 20 fps, and it feels bad. Like, really. It's bad.


There are a couple different clients kicking around, but they're either unfinished (Iris3D, Sallos) or completely unsupported (Enhanced Client) by the open source server packages.

There's only one package actively in development, ServUO, that supports the latest Classic Client, but hardly any of the modding tools (such as CentrEd+ for small map edits, Dragon Map Maker for creating completely new landmasses) support it.

There's also RunUO that's no longer in development, with the latest version being 2.6. Pretty much all the modding tools support the clients used by this package (all versions up to, and including, 7.23.0.1). If you want to take a look, ya can get it here: https://github.com/runuo/runuo/releases


Whew. Pretty much an encyclopedia there, eh?

But aye, Boris ol' buddy ol' pal, have you looked inside the game before, to see if it's possible to work around the eye-bleeding nature of the Classic Client? The game's utterly brilliant, but the client...Egh. Needs a bit of work.

[ENBSeries]

Sorry, but such games can't be modified by graphic effects.

[FiftyTifty]

Sorry, but such games can't be modified by graphic effects.

Argh. Was worth a shot, I suppose.

Is it due to how "closed" the old APIs are, whereas with Direct3D you have actual data to intercept before it is sent to the GPU?

[ENBSeries]

It's because game is 2d.