Games - UOX

	Games - UOX

UOX, or Ultima Offline eXperiment, is an Ultima Online (UO) emulator that is written in C++ and released under the GPL. Today, the term UOX almost exclusively refers to the third version, UOX3.

Overview

UOX is a software suite that allows a user to manage a customized Ultima Online server to which they or others may connect. UOX is both free and open-source, released under the GPL, allowing anyone to modify and customize it to his or her will.

History

UOX has had a long history, and has seen three major version numbers, often marking change in development leadership.

UOX

Created during the beta testing of Ultima Online in 1996 or 1997, the first version of UOX is commonly regarded as the first Ultima Online emulator. Created by Jaegermeister. This version was closed-source.

UOX2

The second version was by Marcus Rating (aka Cironian), who rewrote UOX . UOX2 was also single-player . This version was also closed-source.

UOX3

UOX has spent the majority of its lifetime in its third version. Originally re-written from UOX2 by Marcus Rating, it has passed through many hands and gone through monumental changes. Some believe that the current rendition of UOX should be dubbed UOX4, as virtually every line of the program has been rewritten. This is the first version to have the source released to the public under the GPL.

Early development

Originally decentralized, early development of UOX3 (circa 1998) was done by many individuals with no version control and little synchronization or quality checks. This led to what is often termed "spaghetti code", stability issues, and bugs. Yet, even so, the original creator, Marcus Rating, was opposed to centralizing development:

: "Anyway, and I should have probably said this earlier: I do not think that centralizing the development of UOX, as it is obviously happening, is a good idea. It was always wonderful to see how a lot of people just added their favorite features to UOX without having to think if someone else was working on the code too. Yes, it does lead to bugs sometimes, but actually UOX is still in a pre-alpha state, where no one should care about stability issues. Also, I do not think a revision control system is really necessary, if people just give a bit of an advance announcement before releasing things and remember to document all changes in the update.txt. (Yes, I have to remember that myself too)"

That choice and the resulting code base has often been one of the primary criticisms of the project (see: criticism). These issues have caused some to choose to create branches of the code (see: branches), and still others to create new emulators entirely.

Recent development

Today, UOX3 would appear as an entirely different program to one who used it at its inception. JavaScript is used to make just about anything in the game world scriptable, and the code is almost entirely object-oriented. Along with this rewrite, UOX3 has seen many enhancements in cleanliness, organization, and better design principles. This new code base, originally created by Matthew Randall (aka EviLDeD) and Daniel Stratton (aka Abaddon/Maarc), is now primarily maintained by Scott Thompson (aka giwo/Zane) and Geir Ove Alnes (aka Xuri/Xoduz) on SourceForge.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for UOX ]

Searches on eBay