Homage 2

[Sabedus]

Homage2: Evolution, Agency, and the Next 25 Years

Hey everyone,

We love this game. For 25 years, it has been a world of novelty and freedom. But we also know the technical "shackles" that can slow down our most ambitious ideas.

Homage2 is a nascent project built on ModernUO (.NET 10) that aims to gift the community with a more liberated engine—one where the code says "Yes" to your creativity.

Current Engine Breakthroughs:​

• Compositional Capabilities: We’re moving beyond rigid class inheritance. In Homage2, we use a "Capability System" to add logic (like mounting, swimming, or flight) to any entity on the fly.
• A Living World (AssetPush): Our real-time asset pipeline allows us to push map changes, art, and animations to clients without server restarts. The world breathes while you're in it.
• Synchronized Physics: By leveraging modern client-sync techniques, we’ve achieved smooth 60fps movement for water and air, perfectly integrated into the world's physics.
• Parallel Persistence: A dedicated save system for mods ensures that custom developments are first-class citizens, living independently of the core world saves.

We’re just getting started on this frontier, and we’re building it with a focus on hope, performance, and the original spark of UO novelty.

Thanks to all of you who contributed and created.
If attribution is required, it will be granted.
Regardless, let this be testament to our passion for this game.

 

[volto]

Incredible idea, this is the direction UO always should have gone. I'd love to check it out and see if I can contribute! Do you have a website, github or discord?

 

[Sabedus]

Hi! No not yet. This is still a nascent project (beginning of December), but I've been working on it as time permits!
Phase 1 was graphical upgrades, trees that sway in the wind, animated water tiles, and just improving the classic UO art to make it a tad more beautiful than it already is.

I've had a seriously fun (hard) time getting some legacy systems working with ModernUO. I would've stuck with ServUO (that was the first iteration of this project), but some of the things I wanted to do were very difficult with legacy C#, so I had to bite the bullet and start from scratch. But I'm happy to announce that the project is back on track. Some systems I'm finalizing now are real-time static and animation import. No more worrying about free slots, animdef bs. You want to make a beachball!? Cool! Upload the png and its in-game in ~3 seconds. Want to script it to do beachball things? There's an in-game script editor for that too (with hot-reload support). Want to make it into an npc? Make a .vd (GIF and PNG support are WIP) and upload it. Want to make the beachball a mount that enables you to traverse the oceans? Well, now you can. In (almost) real time and almost entirely in-game (just admins for now 😉). No downloading patches, looking for free slots, animdef workarounds, none of that. And it propagates in real time to connected clients efficiently. All this is pretty much 95% functional and almost production ready. We can finally add things to the gameworld in near real-time, with almost no limits. This was phase 2 of this project - to overcome the limitations of the engine.
Starting phase 3, I'll now be working on gameplay systems. I have a dual conversational NPC system, a branching dialogue system for story-type npcs, and LLM enabled smart npcs, for example - Iolo from the original Ultima games. We can place a Iolo NPC, have a story type dialogue tree (Ultima 7 style with triggers/conditionals), or an LLM enabled NPC that smartly sticks to context/lore, is able to barter/repair my bows, and create quests on the fly relating to bowcrafting - no scripting - all LLM. This system is about 70% done and I'm continuing work to make it more in-depth and varied. And speaking of Iolo, a true companion system for solo play - you can have an adventuring party of smart followers, a cleric, a wizard, a bard etc, that each play their role and use their abilities to assist you as you travel the world.
There is still a lot more to come! And in time, yes, I would love to have you guys jump in! Stay tuned!

And it goes without saying - THANK YOU to EVERYONE who contributed to the UO emu scene over the years! Especially here at ServUO. It is because of your contributions that this project exists! You all have my gratitude!