I'm still alive. Took a brief hiatus from all things UO. Plus my work's new site filter is blocking my access to all the UO related sites.
I think things are slowly declining as is natural for a program that is over 10 years old.
But I'll tell you something. Recently I have been considering the option of building my shard using a more up-to-date game engine. But there are very few alternatives, and the ones that are out there are nowhere near as powerful as the UO emulators that are available (so far as flexibility to build a game server with such things as player housing, huge game world, full crafting, etc.)
The closest thing that I found that would even be close to allowing me to build a UO-style world in a modern engine is Neverwinter Nights 2. And there are a lot of limitations with that one, especially regarding player housing and the size of the game world.
Everything else I found either has crappy graphics and/or isn't powerful enough to allow me to do all the things I want to do; or are only frameworks that would force me to program the entire game from scratch.
So - looks like I am sticking with the old (but powerful!) UO.
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-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com