2000-01-02: The Foundation
The Foundation
Jun 2 2000 9:20AM
I am supremely proud to announce the birth of the newest version of the UO team. The amount of talent, expertise, and sheer dedication that exists in the staff of this project is awesome. Just as we have released Ultima Online: Renaissance, we are enjoying a Renaissance of the team itself. Our cumulative experience and backgrounds make for an incredibly interesting team dynamic, and I’d like to present the development team to you now.
Heading up our programming staff is Bill “Dalt” Dalton. Dalt is responsible for writing the code that allowed us to double the size of Britannia without needing additional CDs or requiring massive downloads. Before working at OSI, Dalt worked at Kesmai on such products as AirWarrior 1-3, and Aliens Online, giving him many years of experience in the world of online gaming. And on top of that, he’s also got a Masters and a PhD in Astrophysics.
Also programming for UO are many big names that should be familiar to you. Kevin “Jalek” Saffel, our client programmer, who came to OSI with a bang and fixed the container crash bug in his first two weeks, still plugs away and improves our client daily. John “Krum” Matzen, the master of all things programmatical, has recently revamped our support tools to allow for a much greater ability to provide support to you. Chuck “ChuckyZ” Zoch, a long time veteran of OSI, has most recently been helping our volunteers get (and keep) the powers that they should have. Brian “Krelin” Crowder, is responsible for the vast majority of our server side enhancements. Tim “Alai” Schubert, brings worlds together on the localization front, which involves our ability to offer UO around the world in multiple languages. Matt Bush is the newest programmer to join the team, focusing his efforts on bandwidth optimizations, latency tolerance, and the like. Kirk “Runesabre” Black, as you probably saw from his own recent comments, is still working away with us as well.
Our Design team lead is Paul “Sage” Sage. Sage’s history at OSI is long, now approaching the 5-year mark. He’s been through more than one UO ringer, having spent time in Technical Support, QA, and Player Relations. Just prior to joining UO development last year, he was managing the GM staff. You’ve seen Sage’s direct handiwork in the introduction of Haven to UO, as well as with runebooks. Sage’s vast array of experience in all areas of our service fully prepares him to handle the demands of Tyrant in the months to come.
Our newest members of the dev team come in as designers… some folks you’ve seen and perhaps even worked with before. Michael Farone, like Sage, also has a long history with OSI, working for the last three years in Player Relations as both a Game Master and an Interest Game Master. Michael is an incredible story teller and wonderfully creative thinker, as well as being completely enthusiastic about UO. Dan Buckler joins us from the OSI web group. His contributions in that area are very visible, most recently in the BNN redesign and in the MyUO character pages. Tom Chilton, AKA Evocare, and Pete Warner, AKA Adrick, are joining the UO development team as designers as well! Many of you will recognize their names from BattleVortex (well-known for the site and the real audio show. (Sorry for stealing your talent, Fear!)) Jonathan LeCraft and Thomas Eidson round out our design staff, joining the team from the player community as well. Both of these fellows have a long MUD development history and have, along with the rest of the design team, all been players of UO for some time now. In fact, over the entire team, we now have more veteran UO players actively developing UO than we have ever had in the past.
The Development team, along with Player Relations, Community Relations, Event Programming, Network Ops, QA, and more, is primed to take UO into the next months of its life. We are all passionate about it. We are all committed to the future of Ultima Online. We look forward to seeing you in Britannia.
Regards,
Carly Staehlin
LadyMOI
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