Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootw0rm | Hacker News Reader

Awesome little anecdote, thanks for sharing. I learned about reverse engineering because of UO. I reverse engineered EasyUO's technique for running macros which involved code injection and shared it with the world. Long live T2A!

View on HN

We would block ourselves into a corner in the house and just use old school macros that just replayed the same mouse movements over and over to level up casting water elementals in our respective houses. Just keeping that magic at 100% :)

Haha if you cast a spell and walked out of line of sight it caused the spell to fizzle but still gain experience.

So we would lure an npc to the house and set a macro to cast and walk 1 tile out of sight. Used regents but it was faster due to cancelling and the npc never died.

Likewise if you attacked an npc in a city but not hit. Then walk 2 screens away you could set an in game hotkey for attack which would trigger and cancel causing you to gain exp but not do anything.

Brings back some memories. I remember macroing my magic resist up to 100. In the high 90s you'd have to flamestrike yourself hundreds of times for a point. It was really hard to nail the timing of the macro because on a bad die roll it could almost kill you, so if you were too aggressive the next one could wipe you out if you didn't leave enough time to heal in between casts. I remember waking up in the morning after an overnight macro setup and feeling like it was Christmas day rushing to the computer to check the outcome.

For me that was Meridian 59. That game taught me so much about everything, network code, packets, reverse engineering, dll injection, objects and oop, cryptography, btree, winapi. I was not the first but one of the first people ever to write cheats for a, no, the first MMORPG on the planet. A friend who I've met through m59 and who is way more capable took that to the next level and wrote in game radar which would show players and monsters as dots on the map. That was years later. Another guy on the team was interested in writing a bot and is now working in robotics. So yeah those early games are great learning material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com