Memorable Moments from Anthony Castoro

[UO Herald]

Originally posted 28 Sep 2012 13:21:38 EST by Kai Schober on the UO Herald:

Another Memorable Moment comes from Anthony Castoro, Producer for Ultima Online from 2002 to 2005.


"So, I thought a lot about different stories I could tell about UO, the people, the players, the game itself. I've decided to stick with this one story.

The first time I worked on UO, I became co-lead designer with Todd "MadToad" Bailey. We encountered a problem on several of the servers where the forests had become completely barren. For some reason, not enough creatures and monsters were spawning, but we couldn't figure out an obvious cause. We tweaked the spawner settings on the live server, trying to see if there was a tuning problem. We eventually did an index of every creature type and discovered something really odd. There were a lot of birds. I mean A LOT of birds. More birds than any other creature in the game, by a significant factor. But where the heck were all these birds? Well, as it turns out, because some of the "dynamic ecology" code was never fully removed, we had this strange problem where birds would fly into an area of the map where they couldn't get out and there were no predators to kill them. So every time some creature died in the game, there was a chance that the game would spawn a bird. And every once in a while, that bird would get stuck. This went on for YEARS until some servers (maybe Lake Superior?) had no deer, no wolves and no rabbits. Just a TON of birds that no one could see or hear. Unfortunately, soon after this was discovered, if you played UO that day, you may have heard a great many birds cry out all at once. A little while later, you may have noticed the forest got a lot more interesting. That's the kind of thing that makes UO so interesting and so challenging all at the same time.

- Anthony Castoro

Thank you, Anthony.

Have you read the previous stories from Bonnie Armstrong and Richard Garriot? So many memories...