SunUO

Experience has shown that CPU power is not that important. Even a huge shard will not load a consumer-grade Pentium IV more than 10%. Memory is much more important; for a big shard, you should consider using a 64 bit operating system, since you cannot make a process larger than 3 GB with a 32 bit operating system. A quick hard disk can accelerate world saves.

SunUO requires a .NET 1.1 runtime. On Windows, you can get Microsoft's .NET Framework via Windows Update. On other operating systems like Linux, you have to use Mono instead; please use the most recent version available. Most current Linux distributions come with Mono nowadays. On Debian Etch, the following procedure will install Mono:

apt-get install mono mono-mcs libmono-winforms1.0-cil

I have been told that you can do the following on Fedora:

yum install mono

Also ensure that the Mono C# Compiler (mcs) is installed, SunUO needs it to compile scripts.

SunUO uses the data files from the original Ultima Online to calculate its world. Copy the whole UO directory to your SunUO server, e.g. /opt/games/uo. On Windows, SunUO should be able auto-detect an UO client.

Unzip the SunUO binary zip file.

Edit the file conf/sunuo.xml and set your preferences. You might want to set the location of the UO client (element data-path).

If everything is set up, you can start your new SunUO server by running run.bat or run64.bat (Windows 32/64 bit) or ./run.sh (all other operating systems, including Linux).

If you have got less than 512 MB of physical memory or a slow CPU, the first script compilation can take 15 minutes or longer.

The first account created gets administrator privileges. Therefore make sure that auto-accounting is enabled during installation.

If you are on Unix with Mono, edit the file config.mk and change the paths. Then type:

make

Note that the resulting executable does not work on Windows. I am yet unsure if this is a Mono MCS bug or a Microsoft.NET bug. On windows, run the file compile.bat. If that does not work, edit compile.bat and check if the "csc.exe" location is correct. The executable compiled on Windows also runs on Mono.

SunUO 0.5.0 adds support for the UO client version 6. This patch requires several script changes. The following scripts have been changed for this:

Items/Misc/BulletinBoards.cs
Items/Skill Items/Magical/Spellbook.cs
Mobiles/Vendors/BaseVendor.cs

The ZLib.cs workaround was removed from the core; instead of excluding that script from compilation, overwrite it with the version shipped with SunUO.

Core.AOS is disabled by default. Enable the feature age-of-shadows instead.

In RunUO, much of the configuration is done by editing the ./Scripts/ source codes. That makes upgrading a nightmare. SunUO tries to put as much as possible into the file ./etc/sunuo.xml, although this is limited currently, because compatibility with RunUO is important. SunUO creates this file on its first run.

<sunuo-config>
  <locations>
    <data-path>/usr/local/games/uo</data-path>
  </locations>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <network>
    <bind address="127.0.0.1" port="2593"/>
    <bind port="2594"/>
  </network>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <server-list>
    <game-server>
      <name>Our first server</name>
      <address>1.2.3.4:2593</address>
    </game-server>
    <game-server>
      <name>The second server</name>
      <address>5.6.7.8:2594</address>
    </game-server>
  </server-list>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <global>
    <feature name="disable-context-menus"/>
    <feature name="prefer-ascii"/>
    <feature name="delocalize"/>
  </global>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <login>
    <auto-create-accounts value="no"/>
  </login>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <login>
    <max-logins-per-ip value="2"/>
  </login>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <login>
    <max-created-accounts-per-ip value="1"/>
  </login>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <login>
    <max-chars-per-account value="3"/>
  </login>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <global>
    <save-interval>60</save-interval/>
  </global>
</sunuo-config>

<sunuo-config>
  <encryption>
    <enabled value="yes"/>
    <allow-unencrypted value="no"/>
    <login-key name="6.5.4" key1="0xdeadbeef" key2="0xbeefdead"/>
  </encryption>
</sunuo-config>

Many of the original RunUO scripts are written in a non-portable way, or just buggy. This section is a collection of workarounds. You do not need to read this section if you did not upgrade from RunUO, since the SunUO scripts have been corrected.

./Scripts/Misc/CrashGuard.cs
./Scripts/Misc/AutoRestart.cs
./Scripts/Gumps/AdminGump.cs

Process.Start( Core.ExePath );

Process.Start( "mono", Core.ExePath );

echo ':CLR:M::MZ::/usr/local/bin/mono:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

<libraries>
  <library name="legacy">
    <ignore-type name="Server.Engines.Reports.Reports"/>
  </library>
</libraries>

SunUO includes the log4net library, which is a very flexible library for logging. SunUO provides a good default configuration, which should be enough for most cases. If you want to do more, please refer to the examples section on the log4net home page.

For scripts authors, the use of log4net is very easy. Add the following declaration at the top of each class body:

private static readonly log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);

Now in your code, you may replace Console.WriteLine() with method calls to this log object. The following example demonstrates some of these:

log.Debug("Entering MyMethod");
try {
    if (!foo)
        log.Warn("Foo is disabled, bla");
    int result = DoSomething();
    log.InfoFormat("Did something, result={0}", result);
    if (result < 0)
        log.Error("Invalid foobar");
} catch (Exception e) {
    log.Fatal(e);
}

For more information, read the API documentation.

Whether you use script libraries is a matter of taste. There are good reasons for doing so:

You can specify an arbitrary path where SunUO should compile sources from:

<library name="foo">
  <path>/opt/sunuo/src/foo</path>
</library>

<library name="foo">
  <ignore-source name="Bar.cs"/>
  <ignore-type name="Blubb"/>
</library>

This tells SunUO not to compile the file "Bar.cs", and to ignore the type "Blubb". You can use this to disable commands or to disable items in the game.

<library name="foo" disabled="true"/>

SunUO ignores libraries marked disabled. By default, if no explicit configuration is available, all libraries are enabled.

In many cases, you want to use classes from another script library, but for doing this, the other library has to be loaded before the new library is compiled. To change the order in which libraries are compiled and loaded, you may declare library dependencies:

<libraries>
  <library name="bar">
    <depends name="foo"/>
  </library>
  <library name="foo">
  </library>
</libraries>

This tells SunUO that "bar" imports classes from "foo", and that "foo" has to be compiled and loaded first.

If you do not use the "<depends/>" element, libraries are loaded in random order.

To configure RunUO, you need to edit the original RunUO scripts (./Scripts/) often. However, for easier upgrades, it is better to move edited files over to another library and simply replace the files in ./Scripts/ - this method is called "overlay":

<libraries>
  <library name="legacy">
    <overlay name="bar"/>
  </library>
  <library name="bar"/>
</libraries>

Now you can edit the file ./local/src/bar/Misc/ServerList.cs, which is then used instead of ./Scripts/Misc/ServerList.cs.

It is obvious that you should pay attention to compiler warnings, as they may reveal bugs which are otherwise hard to find. However, if you are using code from others which emits lots of warnings and the author won't fix them, you might want to disable compiler warnings:

<library name="legacy" warn="0"/>

According to the Mono MCS manual, the default warning level is 2, and 4 is the highest level.

There is a mailing list for SunUO support.