Ryandor.com

Last months we spent lot of time to translate most of in-game and web texts to english (quests, in-game help.....). So Endor is now officialy opened for foreign (english speaking) players. We invite you all to enrich our czech Endor comunity (200+ players at daily peak).

web:
http://www.endor.cz/

http://www.endor.cz/beginning
forum:
http://forum.endor.cz/

and our presentaion with trailer:

http://screens.endor.cz/gallery/

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

Endor web site and presentation updated:

http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

Hey, I just wanted to say I really enjoy the work you guys have done on your shard. The quality is evident in everything you do. I look at your shard as one of the ones to emulate.

Keep up the good work!

_________________
-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com

Thanks. I always wanted to have international community on the shard, but we had only limited succes in that. Even if web site and all quests in game can be switched to english.

I really dont know what to do to establish international shard. We have great connectivity, even people from USA have great ping. I honestly believe, that Endor is one of the best shards in the world, with one of the best maps, unique monster graphic and probably unmatched ruleset. We are only shard in the world, who developed tools for flawless graphic import from infinity games, which can be seen here:

http://screens.endor.cz/krtecek/kuku2.bmp
http://screens.endor.cz/krtecek/kuku3.bmp
http://screens.endor.cz/krtecek/kuku4.bmp
http://screens.endor.cz/krtecek/kuku5.bmp


http://screens.endor.cz/krtecek/kuku11.bmp
http://screens.endor.cz/krtecek/kuku9.bmp


Nobody else was able to get these things in the the game with such quality and quanity. We are even using special system to load all important client data to memory, so game is significantly more fluent, if you have at least 512MB of memory. No body else in the world have this and i doubt, that they will.



All foreign people we had there vere awed, but after some times theese groups disappeard, probably because they had problems to find more english speaking players. So we have only little bit foreign people on our shard, it never went over "critical" level, on which it would mean only growth.

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

You have done a great job with both the web site and the shard. It is truely an amazing piece of work.

However having said that... your comments of "protecting your work so nobody else can use it" violates what this site was designed for and stands for. We are a community of people who work to share, teach and enlighten all of us equally. RunUO, Ryandor, orbsydia... whatever site you wanna name its the same thing... SHARING to increase the quality lvl of all these projects to keep UO alive and well. I have seen soooooo many european shards, esp Russian and Chez unfortunately... that will snagg data from others dirstributed files, tweak it then call it there own.

Now you guys come along an take stuff from professional games, ripp it out an import it to your server then have the guts to lock it up an tell eveyrbody else "nah nah, see what we got --- you can't have it""

Why??? What makes you so special that you can get data and info from these sites and these people, then turn around and refuse to share your work with the sites and people that help you in the first place ?

BTw... I'm Seattle USA, on Fiber Optic w/only 1 hub to the national "backbone" and my "ping" to your server SUCKS. I'd never attempt to play on a server that didnt follow the international language of the internet anyway. I'd love to try, once you get the rest of the data converted, but until then i'll wait.

I'd LOVE to do a version housed in the US of your server. Hell I personaly would pay cash money for some of the animations and graphics you've imported. But... this "mine mine mine" attitude is troubling to me in this sharing community.

Mine mine mine? Why would i invest tens of hours to find sollution how to use such graphic and then hundreds hours of work to actualy rip it and then just some guy come and takes the data and builds shard on it? On the begginnig you are saying, that this is bad and at the end you want our data?

Would you invest many thousand hours of developing a map and then offer it everybody who wants it? I never seen such case. From time to time some shards releases part of their work for "free", but the best they are keeping for themself. And this is OK.

Or do you think, that is ok, that i decide to make a shard, so i take map from one, graphic from other and i will demand scipts from third one? And they will of course give me it, because we must share

We have to learn how to build map almost ourselves, i remember i consulted only few things with Ryandor. We have to learn how to modify data ourselves. A we have to do that work. We have to develop varoius ripping processes by ourselves. NOBODY cared to reply us even simple questions in that. Now we have results and exactly those people starting to demand our data.


This forum is about sharing knowledge, not work. And knowledge i will share, in spite of that nobody did that for us.

If anybody will have some problem, i will try to help him. But i will not give anybody results of 7 years of my work and other people from our team. If you want to have good shard, you have to do some work on it. Not just wait like scavanger what will be aviable without moving a finger.

BTW, ripping of infinity games is thing, what UO comminuty tryes for MANY years, more or less succesfully. There were some results and some are publicly available. We are only the most succesful ones. With best technique and best quality and quantity.

No body gave a fuck, that we tried that too, no one helped at all, of course they were keeping most of interesing files and tools for themselves. So we work hard and came with result. Interesting is, that nobody asked for knowledge, or help in intelectual matter. They only asked for finished data. Of course, this is the simple way.

And i think this phorum is not about scavanging work of others. But about exchanging knowledge HOW to do things and thus help other to build their own and UNIQUE shard.

When i started to make Endor, i asked some other shards if i can use their map and graphic. They of course laghted me out loud. Some of them were willing do some exchange. Good map for good map for example. After some years of work i came to understand why.

If you are ripping data from infinity, write me PM and i can help you. I will not write you 20 pages of detailed manual and scripts step by step, but i can help you through some problems if you find any. If you have some questions of map building ask them. If you have some questions about making shard, ask them. If you want join our team, we can talk about that, you can help us to develop more US friendly enviroment and drag US players. It is nonsense to try to develop second similar shard. You will be never able to catch up with cca 7 years of development. Btw, so far 90% of game texts are now translated to english, so game is ready for them. According to our experience, most of US and other foreign players will have good ping.

Btw: I think you are pinging our webserver, not our gameserver. It is different machine and different provider. We have 2x SMT16 (2x 2666 Mbps) to AORTA.

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

We ALL go thru the same head aches an pit falls in developing our shards.

BUT... I also have several GIG's worth of free data that has been freely an opening distributed thru all the these sites over the past 11 years. An Ive learn a crapload about scripts, graphics, etc etc by SHARING, asking and responding to posts.

We all have our little break thru's in developing, an the vast majority share it for the asking. I've given away more of my own maps then I can count, that Ive spent hundreds of my own hours working on.. WHY??? To keep UO and the freeshard going strong.

Hell... look at the RunUO script database... THOUSANDS of scripts that hundreds of people have done all FREE for people to use, learn from, expand on....

I'm not saying you have to just say "heres my stuff copy it" What i am saying is you should put some stuff out there for people (as Ive said) to learn and expand on.

an BTW, you SHOULD write that 20 page instruction on how to get infinty stuff. WHY??? Because one or 2 of the guys on here may just be able to expand and build off what you've done. Resulting in the NEXT break thru.

re-engineering and reverse engineering has resulted in some of the largest breakthru inventions. Look at your own work, prime example.

This community was BASED on guys that spent thousands of hours developing software hacks, graphics, etc etc.... How many hrs did it take to develope POL? Did YOU develope it? I doubt it, yet your using it. Did you pay for it? no.... How many hrs did it take to Dev UO itself, yet we all use it.

So your already doing yourself, what you WONT let others do to you.

Did you ever think that the reason people didnt answer some of your posts was because the people that were around at the time just didnt know ? Well, you made a discovery.... just like countlesss guys in theses sites did befor you... They passed it on for people like you to make the next discovery... It's shamefull that people like you feel that don't have to pass on what was passed to them first. All you did was add the next lvl that won't be built upon and pidgeon holed in a language market that won't appeal to the world masses.

I cant count how many open source utilities, emulators etc etc there are out there. Where would we all be if THEY had the same attitude then as you do right now.

an so what if some kidd comes along an gets one of my maps, some of your aniamtions an some of RunUo's scripts an makes a shard. BIGG DEAL.

Those types of shards are what we call "30 day shards" they get built an vanish in 30 days. WHY? because they don't learn how to use what they got, They dont think about expanding on others works. an people see it when they loggin, same stuff, GM's that dont know how to do shit, etc etc.

there may be thousands of people in these shard sites, but its the hand full of good ones, like ryandor, khaybel, hell razor, iluvatar, radstar, punt, imprint, jeff, mr fix it, etc etc... That actually take the freely giving stuff, add to it, build on it, improve and invent new an exciting things for people like you to expand an etc etc etc. Then what? "its protected" pffftttt... please.

Also, btw... You didn't ask me or any of the 5 others ive talked to today on this subject. I have 4 full shards in the can i would have shared. But to be honest, the east european rep. is probably what killed any previous attempts.

I think it takes a lot more than custom graphics (which we are all taking from mostly the same places anyway) to make a good shard. Sure, custom graphics are nice, but they aren't the most important thing. The cool graphics will make everyone say "wow" for awhile, but eventually that novelty wears off, and then you need other things to keep people playing.

I can understand taking pride in your shard and your work. But at the same time, I wouldn't get too concerned about people "stealing" maps and graphics, as there is no real way to totally prevent it. If someone really wants your stuff, there are ways for them to get it. We all "stole" it from somewhere anyway, whether you are using UO's graphics, or graphics imported from some other game. Unless of course you totally replace ALL the graphics, but no one has done that yet that I am aware of.

Keep in mind also that the harder you make it for someone to easily join your shard, the fewer players you will have. Most people don't want to download a bunch of third party things to get up and running, which is a problem that custom shards have to begin with. People are generally lazy and don't want to go through a lot of bother to try a shard out.



To say that no one should start a shard because they will never be better than Endor or catch up to Endor's level of development is pretty arrogant and is not really true, and I'll tell you why:

- What is "better" is all in the eyes of the beholder, and there are different shards that are "better" for different audiences.

- Just because a shard isn't public yet doesn't mean that there has been no development on it, some shards have been in development for many years already. My own shard is one of those, I know Tragena is another one. I'm sure there are quite a few more.

- A good team of talented coders and world builders who know what they are doing can develop a pretty awesome shard fairly quickly. And they will probably have ideas that are different than yours, and maybe even better than yours.

- There are a lot of different things that go into making a successul shard too. Most important of all is a sense of community, which no developer can write code for and no artist can draw. A lot of shards do the custom graphics thing great, but totally lack any "soul" or sense of immersion. A lot of shards have terrible staff members who drive people away. Some shards totally lack any background lore, others have no events and quests. So there is a lot that goes into a good shard besides coding and art.

On your questions about how to increase your international community:

I think that putting up an English version of your site is a great start.

I would keep in mind that the UO emulation community is shrinking, not growing. And within that community, the number of people who want to play on custom shards is probably smaller than the number of people who just want to play on a UO clone server. So our audience is pretty small to begin with.

I would add some native English speaking staff members who can help with building the English speaking community and maybe even tailor some events specifically towards them.

But you may never totally become international because people will generally migrate towards places and cultures where they are most comfortable. If most people on the shard don't speak English, a lot of English speakers won't feel at home there. And there's not much you can do about that. It's just human nature.

All of this goes back to my point about how graphics alone don't make a shard. To me, the graphics are icing on the cake, but its a big cake with a lot of ingredients in it. And not all people like the same flavor of cake, so even if you have the best shard in the world, it may not be the best shard for everyone.

Also, "success" means different things to different people. For some, a successful shard is one with hundreds of players. Others might prefer a smaller more intimate shard tailored to specific interests. I know for myself it's not the number of players I am concerned about, it is the quality of the players, and keeping those quality players interested in coming back that is important to me.

On a side note, I'd be interested in hearing how your technique of extracting infinity engine graphics is different or better than others? Can you give us some info on that?

_________________
-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com

2Pallando: If you want to learn doing animations by reverse engeneering, download mulpatcher, extract any of UO animations and check structure. This is first step. There is no diffence between our animation and original, only diffent pictures.


Reputation of the East europe? Whats the problem? Americans have feeling, that we are making some communistic orgys there? Maybe they should give more attention to history classes in the school. And in the case of Czech Republic even to geography. CR is eastern europe probably as much as Germany

Do you want to have new infinity creatures? So use google and start trying. You will learn lot and then you can start consult more experienced people. Do not expect, that somebody else will do that and just give you his work.
Go to the Profania and ask them for their scripts and map and dont forget to mention to them, that they are obligated to give it to you, because of sharing.


ad run uo: Yes, there is lots of scripts free and some of them are really interesting. But NO ONE would give there their full shard code. Especially great shard code. Guess why. If i put free my shard code and data, there will be 20 Endors second day, probably no as good as original and it will only steal potential players from me.
Same is the map development. I can give free some map i was playing with and decided not to use it, or few buildings, but again no one would give for free map, which was developed for 7 years with 70 people during that time with more than 10 000 person-hours in it. There is some competition between shards, you know. Please think.

"How many hrs did it take to Dev UO itself, yet we all use it."

Well, i bought original copy of UO and so the majority of our players (some time ago somebody made some shard-action and imported many pieces of collectors edition of this game for czech players, as big thanks to UO dev team). So yes, we are using UO, but we paid for that honestly. And money is exactly the thing, uo dev team wanted



Btw, do you have any succesful shard?


2Hell razor:


Idea is like this:

0) Use google and read every topic available on that theme.

1) Write you own application for extracting pictures from infinity games. Other people were using BAM workshop, but the quality of pictures is bad and there are LOTS problems with color palette. Color palette of UO and infinity is different and infinity pictures have different transparent color and they have shadow inside. So you have to extract this away. Automatically.

2) Try to understand structure of infinity animations frames.

3) Make scripts for necesary conversions. We are speaking about hundreds of pictures, in case of dragons thousands for one creature. Dragons and other big creatures were really problem, because each frame is from up to 9 smaller frames. So we have to figure out how to put them together automatically. AFAIK there is no one else in the world with complete succes with dragons, they were doing it by hand and this make the work instead of many hours to hundreds of hours.

4) Make liste.txt file for positioning frames. Again we have to write down our custom SW, because only avialable program for that was really buggy and was not supporting big frames. This is quite a lot work, each creautre have around 400 hundred frames and you must center it by hand, no automatics is possible. Almost every custom animation availabe have problems with positioning of frames and so the creatures moves like retarded.

5) Put it to the data (one click in mulpatcher).



The quality of shard is dependent on independency of its developers. If they only waiting for instuctions, finished SW/tools and other instead of developing their own or at least trying to develop, they will never develop anything good.

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

Thanks for the info, very interesting! I've been using Infinity Explorer, or getting them from the Infinitum site which has most of the Infinity animations in animated .GIF format. I'm not sure I would want to go through the trouble of writing a custom app, too much other stuff to do yet. Unless of course you'd like to let me use the utility you wrote, in which case I will.

_________________
-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com

That gifs are totally useless, they have totally messed color pallete, so the creatures loses lots of details.

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

2hellrazor: You are really right with one thing. We should get some foreign GMs. But question is WHERE. You cannot make GM of person, you dont know at all. And other problems is, that majority of people only talk and promises, but when it comes to work, they do nothing and only finding excuses why not to do this and that. It is really problematic to find good staff. Where to look for them? Probably best solution would to find some foreign GM team, which have skills and ideas and some players already, but they have troubles with hosting and so on and offer them to join our team. But again, where to find such people?

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

That is a hard one, finding good people is always hard for any shard. There are always people lining up to be staff for shards but the problem is finding people that are good who know what they are doing who you can trust.

I would advertise here (and on Orbsydia and ConnectUO when they come back online), and then if you find some foreign staff members, start them off as counselors and teach them how to be staff, but move them up slowly until you feel comfortable that you can trust them. I would highlight the roleplaying aspects of your shard too (to get more mature people) and put some screenshots in your advertisement to help attract potential staff.

_________________
-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com

Demostenes

I wish you all the best on your fantastic shard that you’ve developed. You have obviously spent a lot of “blood, sweat and tears” over it, I congratulate you.

As far as my own work, I am a MAP/Statics builder, not a scriptor. I’ve been involved in several succesfull shards over the years under different GM names. Middle Earth UO, Grimmworld, UOtopia, etc etc…

It was my time with Iluvatar, an later as owner, of “Middle Earth UO” that gave me the understanding of the Russian and Czech reputation of there tactics. While we had to clean up all the crap that Moria left on there shitty map in a very bad trade in which Iluvatar was cheated (Map for Art) After I cleaned up a lot of the map, some of your countryman, as well as Russians, would come into IRC an begg, plead and out right lie in order to get back for there shard what I just cleaned up. Well NO, your not gonna get it. They told Iluvatar it was good map when they gave it him in trade for 100’s of mgs of art he did. Then when we load it we find they gave him a fucked up piece of shit that will take months to repair. The when it is fixed, some underlings come in an claim the Moria shard owners bailed an took all the files with him… please send us everything you have so we can replace it. Well of course it was all a lie. This went on for 2 months. I can remember atleast 20 different IP’s (all traced to Czech and Russian ISP’s) being involved trying to gain access to ftp’s, servers, personal computers… it was wild.

As I write this, I have received several PM’s, concerning this thread, telling me how you act in the European forums. So, I guess I’ll just chaulk it up to “yelling at the wall”

But I WOULD ask you to do this Demo…. Put your methods into a stand alone utility, closed source if you will. You don’t “have” to give away your art or whatever, that’s not really what this is about. This is ultimately about the new breakthrough method of importation you have done. So, do the world community a favor and do a mulbuilder, gump studio… “Infinity Ripper” canned utility and release it. Why do we waste so much time redoing what others have already done? Which is ultimately what your telling the community here that we must do.

BTW, I agree with HR on the GM’s. You could actually go to Sphere and RunUo boards too. Just retrain people in POL commands. I know Grimmworld uses it also and there an english shard.

But I think an english mirror, sister shard, of your shard in the US/W.Europe would be a much better idea.

Well, i will write you PM that Ryandor is mass killer because i know him from real and you would automatically believe me? Without any clue, what is going on?

Sending such PMs is only act of envy. I can only guess, but it would be probably not so far from Moria GMs like Radstar.
Many shards are envying succes and reputation of Endor, so they are trying secretly spread lies and half-truthses. Of course not publicly, they have not courage for that, because everybody who knows would laugh them out laud.
Btw, one that envying shard was your favourite Moria. When the Endor was starting, they made some deal with other shitty shard (Dark Paradise) and they were pretending from dial-up that they are our GMs and spreading lies. They even blocked domain www.endor.cz (on fake name) to prevent us have that domain and they made there fake Endor web with lies. Because name was fake, domain authority took them the domain and we were able to get it. So yes, Moria are really fair players, am not surprised, that they cheated you.

Because of that we were always distancing from theese shards and people and this is the reason, why they hate us some much. They are shame of all czech shards. But not every czech shard is like them.

And what i am telling on "European" phorums? Only truth and what i am thinking. Lots of people (especially Moria) have problems with that, because it usually shows them in totally different light.

As i told, US and W europe have good ping on Endor, so if anybody wants to play, he can. Running some mirror have many problems. To get good server, good hosting and good staff. And the last one is the biggest problem. I found out, that our staff was able to solve problems no one else in the world was able to. And this is reason of our quality and achievments. We managed to develop and perfect our ripping method in less then one month. Other people were trying six years. There is very little probability, that there is some second group of people like that without succesfull project of them own. And to let run second Endor some group of kids, i even dont know? Hey boys, i have worked 7 years, so here is my map, graphic and scripts and you can run you server too. Great idea. Ask anybody else in the word, what they will tell you.

On the other side, i will gladly accept group of foreign GMs, they can help us make Endor even more US friendly. There is really no reason to physicly have server in US.

Btw, you are freelance map builder, or you belong under some shard?

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
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Hehe ... sorry, but i am not from Moria

_________________
Ultima Online Builder - Programs

Who the hell said anything about Radstar ? NOT ME. The person you describe is know where near the Radstar I know.

AND ... I'm both. Depends on the shard i'm doing work for. If I enjoy the staff, the systems and the core players, I hang around awhile. Like Grimmworld for instance.

At the moments i'm freelancing as i'm working on about 9 different maps for people

an for the final time.... I'm not saying you HAVE to give away your entire shards, maps, scripts, etc etc. READ THRU THIS FUCKIN THREAD AGAIN!!!

Sorry.

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I am very bad and selfish, but not retarded and so i will not provide any shard with our map, or data. I am only willing to do some mutual benefit exchange like great map for great map, etc. Because this is how it works in shard world. I have never heard about anybody, who just gave their map, or data just for free. Even you told me, that you were exchanging data for map. Why you havent provided Moria with your data for free?

You can try to write Tragenna they have AFAIK nice map too and they will for sure willingly give it to anybody, who asks them

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
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demostenes, impressive shard that you have there!

Back on the topic of shard internationalization: it's a constant struggle to get foreign players to an established shard. One should ensure that
a. existing long time players are not against foreigners
b. new players are on-boarded and trained by some experienced players that know English and love what they're doing
c. important events and shard changes are discussed with players from other countries (bad habit of calling them foreigners should go away ) as well as czech players
d. there are no language obstacles on the shard itself - whatever a player can interact with should be clear (in English)

Being in Englsih-speaking tops (top200\top100 whatever) helps to get fresh players a lot, so ask your players to vote for Endor there whenever they can.

Excuse me if this is redundant, I've shared my vision that I've once used to bring English speaking players to my shard.

Hope that helps

_________________
"If karma had a shape, it would be a boomerang"

We were in top100 ultima shards long time between first 3, very often even 1. But then we (and other czech shard with very good score)received ban a nobody told us why. We were not cheating. We wrote them whats going on and they even not bothered to reply us.

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

There are several sites like that, just make sure Endor's listed on all of them to reach out more players.

_________________
"If karma had a shape, it would be a boomerang"

We are, it drags some playes, but in very small amounts and this is the main problem. There is never enough foreign people to establish community. Once community established, it will start grow...But problem is to get over that starting number. Foreigner come to the shard, he plays for some time, but because he is in different timezone, he plays alone and after few weeks he quits. We need to drag at least 20-30 people at once. And thats problem.

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

Still online and growing better and better.

http://www.endor.cz/prezentace/16

http://www.endor.cz/prezentace/15

_________________
Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
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