Hello all,
my Nick is OWHorus, this comes from my GM-Name Horus and from our UO-Freeshard 'The Old World'.
I started playing UO around 2000, on the Freeshard The Old World, the first German language Freeshard. After a year or so I was invited to work as a Seer, which I accepted. So 'Horus' came into existence...
The Freeshard had decided earlier, that we wanted to change our emulator, we were running with TUS at this time. We had selected POL as our new emulator, and several scripts were ready already - but our admin and only scripter at this time had more than enough to do. So I offered to start scripting - and started to script for POL. Needless to say, that my time as a Seer was done - it was impossible to do both.
Two years and many scripts later we were able to import our old TUS Shard into POL, with all characters and their possessions and with the entire world, all NPCs and all buildings (including player housing). From 2004 on we use POL until this day...
I continued to script, and did a little help as a Seer from time to time. My profession (I am a professional electronic developer and project manager) left me enough time to do this, most of the time...
2008 our admin left the shard, to find new challenges as we say - he had lost part of his motivation. The only candidate for the new admin was me - I could manage the server, the web page and so on. Small wonder the election went to me :-)
So since 2009 I manage our Freeshard with a 12 year tradition. I am still responsible for most of the scripts and for the web page which was remade completely in 2010, an new experience for me.
POL scripting is quite easy, but managing a script base with around 1100 scripts, and several 100 config files is not. So most of the time I am the only scripter, but sometimes people help. The web design, and several scripts/features on our web page were done by other people in our staff.
It is quite hard to cater to the needs of gamers today, especially if you have a Freeshard dedicated to role playing. Many people do not even know what role playing is - considering the 'New Games' from WOW to Skyrim to the original UO by EA. All these games call themselves 'Role Playing Games', but they are not, or at least not really. So we had to change several rules and several in game mechanics to keep the new players satisfied - but without sacrificing our main objective: To role play characters in our world.
Also an important thing is the client - this is the front end and it should install and run cleanly on every Windows system. At this time we use 5.0.6a, an older UO-ML client. We are looking to upgrade - time will tell...
So - here I am, and I hope to learn something new here, and maybe I can help with something. I conclude my introduction and start to explore the site ...
Thank you
OWHorus
The Old World (
www.theow.de)
