text:
[fov]

Previously we have demonstrated you the working system of Line of Sight on UO: Quintessence, which is a fully functioning ‘rogue-like’ LoS system integrated in the Quintessence client thanks to the power of the Ultima Client Shell system. The LoS will greatly influence the gameplay in a number of ways, such as during fights, in the process of spying, while hiding or searching for a secret object etc. Today we would like to show you continuation in development of LoS, by demonstrating our latest progress in LoS on the server side (for the fully functioning system it has to be supported on both the client and the server sides).

The Line of Sight system, as is evident on the following video, will be influenced by the number of factors, including your headgear (such as closed helmets, while providing excellent head armour will also penalize a player in LoS), player Stats, environment, light level, time of a day, other factors such as spells or player’s condition etc.

P.S. Our scheduled for October 2017 PRE-ALPHA was unfortunately (or fortunately?) delayed again, due to the fact that our trailer and the new website are still in development. Good news is, the website is 90% complete and the trailer will be ready in a couple of weeks. This is when we will announce a public pre-alpha test for UO: Quintessence, which will focus on the most sensitive issues at the moment, including early bugs, new movement system, combat and FPS. New systems will be added during the pre-alpha so you can watch the progress and contribute to the development of the project [by your support, of course ;)]. Stay tuned!

Link to the video update on our Youtube channel

It has been a while since we have released another update on the project of UO: Quintessence, but all these months the work was hard and we are [almost] close to an early pre-alpha stage! Today we would like to present you our latest development progress. This time it is an early preview of our Line of Sight system and a fix of an old [and nasty] bug in UO client! Enjoy and if you liked it feel free to share it with your UO friends 😉

If you are interested in knowing where we are right now feel free to subscribe on the twitter and the blog. New website and forums with international support are almost finished too and will soon be ready for public.

As you can guess the new system allows, quite literally, to hide objects (other players, items and NPC’s), which are located outside of the field of view. This makes the gameplay process more interesting, since players will not be able to know what awaits from on the other end or behind the corner in the dungeon, it also greatly improves the stealth aspect of the game. It changes approach the players use to ambush someone, make a trap or scout on something. Traps will be a real danger, since most of the time you will not be able to see them and will need to use available in-game resources and skills to effectively detect the trap before it ‘detects’ you. : )

Line of sight also implies that players should watch their backs. Imagine the fighting scene in the dungeon, and a player decides to make few steps backwards through the hall where he came from, but behind the turn (corner) a new pack of enemies awaits the player [on his way back], which came from another room or crawled out of somewhere else.
The line of sight increases the difficulty of chasing or spying on someone, allows one to crawl unnoticed behind someone’s back or to sneak away from the guards, or two enter the town at night unnoticed. There are quite a lot of scenarios how this will alter the gameplay UO fans are used to.

It also allows us to implement other systems, including our perception stat, which will allow players to instead hear certain voices or steps in the dark so the players could guess what exactly awaits them while they don’t see it. At the same time, many factors will influence perception, such as the type of helmet you will wear. Helmets like bascinet or close helmets will greatly decrease the viewing angle while still provide a great deal of head defense (armor rating is based on individual body parts rather than as a whole rating).

Other factors including exhaustion, thirst and hunger will also affect perception.
Overall, the LoS system changes gameplay radically and makes the feeling of immersion better. You won’t be able to know what is happening behind the walls while standing outside of the building, and player inside the buildings will have limited way of knowing what is happening outside, except for sounds and limited ways of seeing, such as windows, patios or towers.

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Dear friends, UO players and Ultima series fans, and the followers of Quintessence devblog

The team of UO: Quintessence wishes you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New year 2017! Today I would like to talk about what is UO: Quintessence, then go through some key events, which happened on UO: Quint in 2016 and talk about our plans for the next year!

Before I move to the subject, I would like to briefly talk about what UO: Quintessence is and how this project was born. It all started in 2009 (2008?) as another custom Ultima Online freeshard. However, it soon became clear that even some of the distinct features of UO: Quintessence were not enough to create the new gameplay, which many fans, including us, dream about. It was still the usual UO freeserver. One day StaticZ (main developer behind UO: Quintessence, creator of Fiddler+, CentreD+ and the UCS) was watching someone killing dragons after a week of character creation. After StaticZ’s approach to the character, he complained that dragons were ‘too easy to kill’. After that not only an overhaul of initial UO gameplay, but a radically new concept of online gaming was born, which included new client engine and new gameplay systems, which were not seen in any other online RPG before. UO: Quintessence was born, not as another UO freeserver, but as an Ultima Online remake with new approach to online gaming. It became clear that new systems with old gameplay do not satisfy us anymore, we need something completely unique to create a new chapter in online gaming.

[0092400]Year 2016 was not an easy year in terms of development for UO: Quintessence. Many of our previous systems and game concepts were changed from their initial vision and we have switched development several times. For instance, the initial idea of character creation based on professions was changed to support more old-school RP-style character development by the means of tarot-like cards:

[pic-20161222-005331]

[pic-20161201-175118]

It is now a complete system, which randomly, yet not that ‘clearly’ generates your starting parameters. This, in turn, took additional investments, as we had to hire professional for an exclusive design.

This was a year when some of our extremely important goals were achieved. First, the release of UO: Quintessence client and first closed tests were conducted. We have tested our new FPS systems on desynchronization issues, tested our early “field of view” system and many early bugs were fixed. Another vast change on the project was a complete redesign of the user interference, including new gumps and features, which changed the old concept and added new client possibilities (such as possibility to change your FPS rate is now a client feature).

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old paperdoll
It’s not just a client interface and new graphical features, which required a lot of designing work. One of the current problems is the choice of fonts. Since we are aiming for international community it is of upmost importance that our fonts support both Cyrillic and Latin symbols. In the past days we have been working hard on choosing “right fonts” for different game elements – static objects, speech text, journal text, emotions and other elements:

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It soon became evident that we need to integrate several fonts into the game, not just choose one. As you can guess, redesigning took a moderate amount of time of development, which is why our pre-alpha, which was forecasted months ago, could not be finished in time and we decided to postpone the open test until 2017. Redesigning is also not just an aesthetic option, but every feature is carefully prepared and is important, not just a placeholder. For instance, designing user interface also requires English version, which we already started to integrate in both client and the server-side.

Other recent updates include a new collection of paperdoll avatars:

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More than 350+ PC and 105+ NPC avatars were added, which do not merely serve as something cool, but also influence the gameplay at some point (names are hidden by default, how else will the guards recognize that thief?!).

In 2016 many important UCS releases were also done. Finally, this is the year when we started to actually spread a word about UO: Quintessence, which for years remained mystery in UO/RPG communities, for several reasons. Many features had to be heavily adjusted before we could show something to the public, not to mention that the gameplay design was changed several times, and until we established a clear vision of what UO: Quintessence will be in the future, we saw no point in advertising. This include our stances on the real economy, permadeath, open world PvP, RP factor, and many other important gameplay issues, which took careful analysis before we could set distinct and precise development objectives, which we now have achieved. To summarize, one can say that 2016 was important year for development of this project.

Meanwhile, we are slowly moving forward to create the best possible UO-like experience for everyone who ever cared for the word ‘Ultima’ and are working hard to deliver countless of unique features to make online gaming great again. As of right now, we are almost ready to release the next pre-alpha build client patch and the work on the combat system has started. In 2017 we plan to:

-   Finally launch the public pre-alpha of UO: Quintessence, which at first will be an early test of the combat system, while bugfixes and new features will come out as the test progresses;
-   Formulate our vision of PvP and social systems that from the basis of gameplay;
-   Depends on how smooth the first stage of pre-alpa will be, start implementation of the real economy and crafting;
-   Continue on writing a global lore for the game – yes, UO: Quintessence will include the lore and global events associated with it;
-   Start implementation of international English-based version of the client and server (such as NPC speech and client-side text translation based on the client choice);
-   Hopefully a new website and forums will be complete in 2017 and open to the public;
-   Continue on creating a revolutionary online RPG experience and making UO great again!

We hope to see all of you and many more in 2017!

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I would like to apologize to whoever is keeping an eye on the developer’s blog for not posting new content the last few weeks. Work at the UO: Quintessence is booming and today we would like to share a new update with you.

Today we introduce one of the new UO: Quintessence elements TO MAKE UO GREAT AGAIN – a complete overhaul of UO game client’s design, which unlike many other redesigning attempts includes:

1.  A redesign of each in-game client’s features and visuals, which not only includes new gumps over the old ones, but also new features available in the User Interface;
2.  Bilingual support of the redesign – each new gump and the text is available in English and Russian languages to support respective playerbases in the future;
3.  A lot of changes in the client work and UI. For instance, once a player enters his or her password, he is either automatically moved to the world (skipping all previous screens that UO players got used to, including server choice and character selection screen) or a character creation process starts immediately;
4.  A unique character creation process which is not only server-side but is also coded in the client itself.

The following are some of the key points of the UO: Quintessence redesign demonstartion (video links are available in the end):

[pic-20161201-185932]_English-based client version (work in progress)_

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[pic-20161201-174532]_Character creation screens starts soon after first login, not in-game. New hair and beard style choices, starting clothing, race and gender, and the character’s name go here_

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[pic-20161201-175118]_Tarot-like cards that randomly generate your characters starting stats and abilities in the process of character creation (on this screenshot, from left to right: the Hero, the Wanderer, the Hermit cards)_

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[pic-20161201-175743]_Demonstration of a map selection screen with a map region-scrolling feature_

Due to the fact that UO: Quintessence’s map is 4X TIME LARGER than UO’s original Felluca, we decided to divide the mainland map into several regions in the location screen by adding customly-drawn maps instead of the static map copies. Players will be able to choose from three different regions, each of a size of Felluca.

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[pic-20161201-181651]

_Animated paperdoll,  which displays the day-night cycle in real time (greatly affects gameplay)_

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[pic-20161201-183829][pic-20161115-185646]

_Annoying “black aura” which is used in UO to remove hair on the paperdoll if a character is wearing plate armor is fixed on UO: Quint_

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_[pic-20161201-182025]Complete Options menu overhaul with new features added and the unused ones removed_

For instance, one can choose from and change different Upscale features which would change the drawing of pixelated graphics without having to restart the client.

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[pic-20161201-183120]
_New journal, which now features different text filtes and is no more limited to 100 messages as original UO client _

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P.S. SOUNDTRACK, WHICH IS FEATURED IN THE VIDEOS IS ORIGINAL UO: QUINTESSENCE SOUNDTRACK

I decided to start a blog on the issues of Ultima Online, namely its combat-oriented gameplay mechanism that created a vastly open world PvP environment, which upon today is enjoyed by many online gamers, while also added a stratification between the players which eventually lead to UO’s demise. In part II I will describe what is the role of UO: Quintessence in facilitating player-run economy in the massive online RPG, which regulates in-game social interactions, unlike the strict mechanical regulations, such as the Trammel.

For years, UO has been considered one of the most fascinating MMO’s, which combined both game design simplicity, great social interaction, interesting gameplay and the atmosphere, which no other online world could offer during the time when Ultima Online was released in 1997. It was a brave attempt to introduce a living persistent virtual world, whose history is traced back to the glory of well-known Ultima titles. Upon these days many online players, who previously used to play UO struggle to find anything that is at least somewhat comparable to the great predecessor of online RPG’s. What makes Ultima Online so incomparable to other online games is perhaps its unusual way introduce the phenomenon of online gaming. The classic periods of Ultima Online, such as its release version (UO: Shattered Legacy) and the first expansion (The Second Age) are considered by many fans as the “golden days of UO”. Initially, UO players could (and still can) interact with other actors not merely by the fact of mutual existence within the online community, but also considering certain moral influences, which limited their conduct. Imagine somewhat soulless player-driven activities in such popular titles as the World of Warcraft or the Lineage II. Players gather for a boss raid, take a part in massive fights, farm different monsters, trade, and spend their time in long discussions. This, however, in the most if not all of the cases of popular titles feels trivial in comparison with UO. In fact, in Ultima Online players could be killed by other players or the so-called “player-killers”, who not only could kill you, but also possess all of your hard-earned belongings. This, unlike most of the other MMO’s created a special in-game atmosphere, where players could take different roles, yet also had to pay attention to their behavior as certain ill activities towards other players could easily provoke analogous reaction. The world was anything but safe and for this reason, social interaction became not merely an obvious feature of the virtual environment but a crucial aspect of UO’s online community which at some point almost fascistically dictated the “live by sword, die by the sword” wisdom.

Soon, however, the role of player killing became global while displacing other in-game elements, such as trading, crafting, running a household, or PvM (Player versus Monster) activities. Most of the player base notably participated in the game’s only ‘real fun’ option.

[sasaas]_Players gather outside of Minoc (town in UO). (Presumably) player body parts (center), player ghosts (right) and people in “death robes” are seen, indicating a fight, which broke out shortly before the screenshot was captured. Source: Google Search Engine_

It somehow became clear that Origins’s promises of the massive persistent world with deep storyline and actions, which have consequences on the rest of the world perished in vain. Direct PvP (Player versus Player) activities, such as player killing, “ganking” (outnumbering), “red hunting” (hunting the ‘red’ or player killers by the “blues”/non player killers) and PvP-based events, as well as indirect PvP, including luring players out of the guard zone, provoking monsters on the players, blocking dungeon entrances, house looting etc. became UO’s main forces which were driving gameplay.

[saassa]_A screenshot presumably portraying the ‘justice’ of killing a player killer by the ‘non-player killers’ after the red character (apparently) tried to kill a miner. Source: Google Search Engine_

In fact, most of other game’s features were poorly designed. For instance, crafting did not have much options during the early days of UO. In fact the colored types of metal ore were introduced only years after the game was officially released, and it took even more years to introduce the new types of wood and the new crafting skills. Fishing did not make much sense until the treasure maps were introduced somewhere between the first and the second expansion. Even then, however, T-Map or MiB’s (message in a bottle, sea version of t-map system) were merely mini games, which allowed some players to get quick cash and high-end loot in a little amount of time. Soon players learned to ‘mark’ (with magic runes that can be used for teleporting needs) certain treasure spots, where treasure chests can be found, and the “treasure hunting” became a “recall in>recall out” type of thing.

[xxdsd]_Treasure hunting spots in Ultima Online, which players learned to mark so as not to spend additional time of “hunting” the treasure. Source: Ultima Online Stratics_

PvM, for the most part, was grind-based, where players had to invest hours in the routine tasks of teleporting to the farming spot, spending time killing monsters, teleporting back to the city bank, storing the gold and repeating the task. In this regard PvP became both as means of having pure fun, building social interaction and the reason to stay in UO. Players who initially were not PvP-oriented had either to “integrate” or accept the tough reality of the harsh online world. Needless to say that characters which produced money, monster loot or other items such as PvM players, craftsmen and miners were in the risk group of being killed once they leave the guard zone. Often player killing happened in the guarded town areas too. This contributed to the rise of PvP-oriented players, which loved the game as it offered them almost never-ending sandbox possibilities, and, at the same time, made non-pvper’s quit, leaving UO community to ‘fun seekers’.

Ultima Online Commercial 1997

_Origins early Ultima Online commercial, describing global in-game features, which never existed_

At some point, Origins decided to regulate player-killing activity by introducing penalties for murdering other players, including an inability for the ‘reds’ to enter the guarded zones, reds being freely attackable by other players without penalty and the stat-loss system. The stat-loss system was meant to stop an out-of-hand player-killing tradition by introducing a permanent loss of player stats and skills upon the death of a player killer. Depending on how much ‘murder counts’ the PK had, he/she would lose a certain percentage of his/her skills and/or stats upon resurrection. Additionally, players could set bounty on the player’s head and, in case the PK’s head was delivered to the town guard, the one who delivers the head would get a certain amount of gold, depending on the amount of bounty placed. The system of stat-loss and bounty hunting was changing over the years, as well as the custom player-run shards (UO free servers) introducing their own vision of PK regulation. However, the key concept of stat-loss was based on prevention of imbalanced massacre what took place in the online world.

[fdfd]_An example of a bounty-based stat-loss system on a custom Ultima Online server, which replicates one the classic UO’s periods. Source: Google Search Engine_

However, stat-loss did not lower the PK activity nor did it ever made the ‘reds’ think twice before killing a fellow player, according to my personal UO experience and the overall evidence. In fact, one can argue that the stat-loss system did provoke a greater aggression within the community in response to the overall flawed regulation. For this reason, on most of the UO free servers, which replicate classic Ultima Online mechanics, the shard’s administration purposefully removed or did not add the stat-loss in the first place. However, the main reason why stat-loss system failed has most likely nothing to do with the fact that penalty itself was somewhat trivial and even annoying rather than regulative, but the fact that it was pointless in the first place. There was nothing to substitute PvP as now a key element of UO’s gameplay, given the overall boring and grind-based aspects of the game. Soon the server’s administration, both on the official UO servers and the most notably UO free servers, started promote PvP events including well-known Capture the Flag option just to create fun, which UO veterans enjoyed the most.

[dsddsdsdsdsd]_Modern custom-based PvP. Highly customized colors of player armor, clothing and pets are interweaved in a promiscuous fight scene. Source: Google Search Engine_

PvP in UO turned into type of a sport activity. Upon now there is not much UO can offer it’s players besides it. Most of the custom shards started introducing clothing, armor and even tamable pets of unnatural colors so the players could distinguish themselves. Of course, tamers (PvM oriented players) and crafters did not disappear completely, yet these professions became optional, where PvP’ers could also have additional crafting and PvM-related characters, which they could use to accumulate in-game resources, while their main in-game activity was limited to player versus player combat. The problem of constant irrational (in a sense that PvP had little to no economic value, besides other player’s loot) inter-player combat worsened with the fact that Ultima Online mechanics are close to the arcade genre. It focuses on the mouse-oriented movement, hotkeys and in-game systems, which strongly promotes teamwork unavailable in other in-game elements, such as the economy. Players learned to create various spell combinations which are based on synchronized spell casting that are needed for an effective team-oriented PvP combat. Players also learned to heal each other during the PvP so as to support soccer-like cooperation in “the field” (_jargon._ outside of town PvP combat). Unlike other popular MMO titles, where PvP is mostly based on the value and properties of one’s gear, in classic Ultima Online one can say that PvP system is purely “skill based”. This, in turn, created an unforgiving segmentation between the players who were ‘good’ at their hotkeys and teamwork and the actors, who seeked a more peaceful gameplay, were not interested in PvP, or were otherwise ‘bad’ at competing with established PvP guilds. The ‘wolf-sheep’ situation lead to many players quitting the game due to the fact that players which could not protect themselves either had to rely on the protection of other players or guilds or accept the reality that they had to share what they have invested their time into (high-end magic items, resources, gold) with others, who did not ask twice. Players could not use NPC’s (Non-Player-Characters) to protect them as the game’s dull artificial intelligence could not compete with its sandbox arcadish PvP system, which allows players to perform all kinds of different tricks, such as hiding in front of a tamed dragon, which then loses his target.

[sdsdsd]_Modern official expansion-based PvP. Source: Google Search Engine_

It is hard to conclude which factors contributed the most to the rise of PvP and its complete domination in UO, whether it was the ‘arcadish’ game mechanics, the lack of other fun elements or the absence of any more or less appropriate sanctions to regulate the mass combat. It nonetheless became clear even during the ‘golden Utlima Online days’ that players that are interested in rather mindless PvP (in a sense that it was not backed by any real economic value) constituted the majority of UO-sphere, while others had either search for less hardcore alternatives or continue playing the role of victims.

Behavior within the Ultima Online community was transformed into the non-regulative factor, where players would often be carriers of anti-social patterns, given the overall simplicity of in-game mechanics and the lack of social moral mechanism, which could possibly regulate it.

[dssddssd]_A screenshot depicting typical attitude among the players in UO community. Source: Google Search Engine_

Often aggressive behavioral patterns in UO (as well as other MMO’s) from my point of view are related to the common lawlessness of UO’s PvP system, which, as explained above, forms a lion’s share of gameplay. Another reason for the popularity of player’s ill attitude might include the overall online anonymity of Internet-based platform.

Rage video (NB! Explicit content)

_Video record of in-game ‘rage’ session by PvP players in UO _

However, the simplicity of gameplay, an open world/full loot PvP and Internet anonymity, while obviously remain biggest factors of UO decline, I can also see the destructive social influence in the very beginning of the title. Even before Ultima Online was released, it had already set certain moral boundaries, which were based on the values of power, competition and egocentrism. At some point one can argue that the very human nature did play a major role in establishment of this gameplay transition. The systems mentioned in UO developer’s blogs, including the ecology system, the merchant guilds and better economy, political factions and the persistent world became forgotten, first 1) due to technical issues and limitations of the time when Ultima Online was released; 2) necessity to regulate a multi-thousand player population; 3) complexity of the systems which needed to be introduced and 4) the lack of previous experience in the online gaming design. For instance, the ecology system did work at some point during the early UO days, yet, the lowered performance in the form of lags it created by it did not allow it develop into a more-or-less stable system. Therefore, initial UO gameplay ideas soon transitioned from a fully persistent sandbox open world towards a more casual open world PvP alternative, which, while had an interesting sandbox open world PvP system paid little attention to the overall gameplay. For example, the map of UO is static with not so much to do and most players remember every tile of it. The cities, castles and houses designed by original developers are abandoned with little purpose besides decorative, UO’s economy is limited to the buy/sell option with resources being randomly generated and most items can be bought or sold to the NPC’s with static prices. Player-based trade is limited to artifacts, handouts and player vendors. Player vendor system, on the other hand, is an interesting sandbox feature, however, the overall world’s economy is still poor.

[safdsfdssf]_A historical screenshot portraying the assassination of Lord British during the late Beta phase of Ultima Online (1997). Source: Wikipedia_

PvP did not just influence regular players. The role-players who liked to…play a role of certain characters mostly executed player versus player combat as well.

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[shadow2]

_Roleplaying guild the Shadow Clan Orcs, one of the earliest roleplaying guilds in Ultima Online – combined PvM and PvP gameplay aspects but was mostly PvP oriented. Source: Google Search Engine_

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[undg]

_The Undead guild fighting Yew Militia -two UO roleplaying PvP-oriented guilds. Source: Google Search Engine_

From the 1997 Google Groups archives I managed to find a chat by former UO players, which discussed different types of player-killing in game:

[pk]

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Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons/Ef2X7MaQejc%5B1-25%5D

As one can see, many players did not agree with the UO’s policy of an open full world PvP, while the majority of PvPer’s choose between the primary non-RP pvp and roleplay-based PK-oriented characters. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) for the minority that wanted the game to introduce “tools to effectively control” player-killing, including the ‘two-universe’ solution, which was fulfilled three years after the release of the game, none of the actual social regulations were ever created.

By the end of the Second Age era, Origins decided to radically change the course of how PvP was established. The introduction of Trammel, which is an alternative world facet where none of the basic criminal actions, such as stealing or attacking another player work, is considered by many to be the end of the end of Ultima Online. Another facet, which preserved original open world PvP, Felucca, was now only meant for PvP-oriented players, who purposely entered Felucca for the fights, while craftsmen and most of the “farming player base” remained in the peaceful Trammel, where none of the previous dangers could harm them anymore. This stratification has created even more problems. Many veterans started leaving UO or moving on the private servers due to the fact that PvP did not offer them the “wolf versus sheep” model anymore. The world did not feel as live as previously, player population started to diminish and the game has finally lost its sense of community. Lowered population was now spread between several facets, which turned the lands of Britannia into a desert with static decorations.

[lbcastle]

[]_An abandoned castle of Lord British in Britain (city in UO), which did not find any purpose beside decoration in the final game. Source: Google Search Engine_

Trammel was not an attempt to change UO. Rather, I would argue that it was a logical outcome of UO’s gameplay, which was directed towards sandbox open world PvP, excluding or limiting social interaction and moral values. After the core UO ideas were let go, UO’s development was mostly focused on creating a balanced PvP game, and the Trammel was its climax. While UO has yet seen several other expansions since Trammel was introduced, however, the core idea, which UO follows upon this day has been fulfilled in the year 2000, when players could freely choose between an open world PvP setting and an open world casual environment.

The role of UO: Quintessence in introducing an alternative to common online open world gaming

At the UO: Quintessence we believe that both approaches represent the core gameplay flaws, which were made for the most part unintentionally by the original developers. Both, the open world PvP with the lack of social regulation and a complete mechanical prohibition of certain illegal actions are two radical opposites, which turned the game into a ‘wrong’ direction, at the same time, did dictate other modern MMO’s the ‘formula’ of gameplay. We strongly believe that the main flaw of game design, which lead to the creation of the analyzed situation, was the lack of a good economic system, which would regulate and simultaneously provide reason for player’s actions. The project UO: Quintessence is opposing the idea that mechanical restrictions of certain actions must take place. This, in our opinion, is against the idea of a UO remake and a new approach to online gaming, as that would not distinguish Quintessence from many other MMO titles out there. Mechanical restrictions limit player’s possibilities, which would be unforgiving for a sandbox setting. At the same time, giving full freedom the players would inevitable lead to the situation described above.

In order to introduce a “golden middle” in designing the PvP aspect of an open world game it is not enough to merely provide the tools, which would ensure player’s security. The core gameplay concept must be changed, and that is to include specific economic mechanism which would form the social system in many of its aspects, including crime and justice, feud and friendship, egocentric seek of benefits and altruistic support et cetera.

Part II of this piece will discuss specific mechanisms the development of UO: Quintessence will undertake in order to introduce a new approach to the open world online gaming to formulate a way in which Ultima Online Remake can be both tremendously fun while preserve the UO’s intial hardcore gameplay.

REFERENCE

BARTLE, R. _Designing Virtual Worlds_. New Riders, 2004.

FULLERTON, T. 2014. _Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Third Edition_. CRC Press.

GIOVETTI, A. _Ultima Online: Kill the Player Killers?_ Retrieved from http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/news/uoplayerkillers.htm

Google Groups. _rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons_. 1997 archived posts. Retrieved from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons/Ef2X7MaQejc%5B1-25%5D

KLINE ET AL. 2003. _Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing_. McGill-Queen’s Press.

MESSNER, S. _5 stories of murder and theft that prove Ultima Online was one of the best MMOs ever_. Retrieved from: http://www.pcgamer.com/ultima-online-stories/

TUCKER, J. _18 Years Later, Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online?_ Retrieved from: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/30/ultima-online-retrospective/

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Welcome to Quintessence blogosphere! Here you will find the latest news on the project Quintessence as well as developer’s thoughts on the issues of creating a revolutionary online RPG.

question: Where is this published?

answer: The Quintessence blogosphere

question: Who is this written by?

answer: A developer of the game Ultima Online: Quintessence

question: What is the purpose of this article?

answer: To explain some of the game's features and create interest / sustain interest from players

question: When was this published?

answer: Based on the file names of the pictures, like 1st December 2016 or slightly after.

question: What kind of game is the subject of the article?

answer: Ultimate Online: Quintessence is an online role-player game, with rogue-like and stealth elements. Players are able to take enemies in the game through a number of means. Armour, exhaustion, thirst and hunger are all elements in the game.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: A series of blog posts on the developer's blog for Ultima Online: Quintessence explains the line of sight mechanic in the game, the history of the game's development, and some new changes to the game.


split: train

text:
For the sake of expediency let's assume you're not really crazy.

You don't have a mental illness. The voices you're hearing and the outrageous emotions and anxiety you seem to spontaneously generate are not the result of a faulted brain or some past emotional trauma.

Let's go so far as to assume that you've even worked out most of your personal issues with yourself and the world and are relatively comfortable with yourself.

Or at least you were.

Then one day, in your calm little mind space you noticed another voice. An exterior voice masquerading as your own thoughts, perhaps even playing off your own thoughts, but consistently chiseling at your esteem and self confidence.

Being aware of this is important, but let's not make something that isn't there.

Let's assume a lot here. Let's assume you went to doctors and you sought help. Let's assume that you've already listened to hundreds of opinions and perhaps even experimented with dozens of psychiatrics at the behest of learned practitioners in an attempt to reclaim the calm inner space you remember having.

For whatever reason, no amount of consoling from loved ones and no amount of professional advice or meditation silences these extra voices. These constantly chiding and nagging and crippling voices, or the unexpected sudden instantaneous reversal of emotional feelings with what would appear to be no outside provocation. You can sit in silence and be laughing and in another ten minutes be bawling your eyes out all to the tune of whatever foreign orchestra is playing in your head.

And because that's where it is, in your head, you can't ignore it. Like the radio in a neighbors apartment at three in the morning, there's nowhere to move your bed where there is a silent spot. A calm quiet place. The sound is all present, the mood all consuming.

Your experience with medications have left you physically damaged, while on them tired, perhaps lagging. The expense and constant taking of a new thing to counter act the effect of the old thing you where taking has slowly accumulated to a meal of pills and liquids and regimens and for whatever reason, they still don't work. You begin to feel like a thirsty boy, now drowning when all that was asked for was a glass of water. So you ween yourself, and you quit the medications because they weren't helping anyway. Because even as tanked as you are they're still there.

Perhaps even you enviously eye others, who having similar complaints as you seem to work fine on the medications. Their laughter and joyous good mood is crippling as you yourself barely made it out of bed today.

But you know what that feels like, because you have felt that way before. So you know something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.

And it is.

Here is a record of my experiences and how I dealt with them.

Your experience may vary.

title: This is Not a Guide for Beginners (part 1)

question: Why go off meds against medical advice?

answer: Because the meds don't take the voices away but they have nasty side effects.

question: If the meds didn't take the voices away how does the narrator suddenly notice the presence of new voices?

answer: He refers to a clear mind space. This contradicts his assertion that the meds didn't take the voices away

question: The narrator is aware that the problem arises because of his failure to take medication so why doesn't he start taking them again.

answer: He doesn't want the return of the side effects, and he doesn't trust the meds to silence the voices.

question: Write a ~11 sentence summary.

answer:
You don't have a mental illness. The voices you're hearing and the outrageous emotions and anxiety you seem to spontaneously generate are not the results of a faulted brain or some past emotional trauma.

Then one day, in your calm little mind space you noticed another voice. An exterior voice masquerading as your own thoughts, perhaps even playing off your own thoughts, but consistently chiselling at your esteem and self-confidence.
No amount of psychiatric help or friendly advice has silenced the extra voices. Because it's in your head you can’t ignore it. Your experience with medications has left you physically damaged. So, you ween yourself and quit the meds.

 But you know what that feels like because you have felt that way before. So, you know something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.


text:
Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said today the automaker needs clarity on free trade policies from president-elect Donald Trump before the company can make decisions on any future investments in Mexico.

[Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles takes a question during a press conference at the 2017 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, January 9, 2017. ]
Marchionne also said he needs to know what U.S. automotive regulations will be as it develops new cars and trucks.

“I need clarity. I think we all need clarity,” said Marchionne when asked about Trump. “And we are not the only ones that need clarity.”

Trump has frequently suggested he would push a 35% border tariff on goods imported from Mexico and wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump made the revision of free trade agreements, and specifically NAFTA, a centerpiece of his campaign.

If that were to happen, Marchionne said FCA would consider closing plants in Mexico.

“It’s possible that if economic tariffs are imposed . . . and are sufficiently large, it will make production of anything in Mexico uneconomical and we would have to withdraw,” Marchionne said. “It’s quite possible.”

On the campaign trail, Trump frequently took aim at Ford for deciding to move its small car production from Michigan Assembly in Wayne to Mexico. Last week, Ford reversed course and canceled plans to build a $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and said Trump's "pro-business policies," along with declining car sales, were factors.

While Trump largely ignored other automakers during the campaign he criticized General Motors for making a version of the Chevrolet Cruze in Mexico and selling it in the U.S.and Toyota for its plans to build a $1 billion plant in Mexico to make the Corolla.

“I think we will adjust whenever the rules get changed, if they get changed. We have no choice in this. We are not policy setters,” Marchionne said during a press conference at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. “I am not sure exactly what the rules are. Let’s wait.”

Marchionne’s comments come one day after the automaker announced plans to invest $1 billion at its plants in Warren and Toledo and add 2,000 jobs. The company confirmed plans on Sunday to make the Jeep Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer at its Warren Truck Assembly plant by 2020 and to make a new Jeep Wrangler pickup at its Toledo Assembly South plant in Toledo.

That was has been in the works for more than a year, and had nothing to do with Trump or his policy ideas, Marchionne said.

“It has been part of the discussion going back to 2015 with Dennis Williams and the UAW,” Marchionne said.

Nevertheless, Trump praised the Jeep investment in a tweet on Monday.

Marchionne also said the investment at the Warren plant also could result in production of heavy duty pickups made in Mexico being moved to the Warren plant, a move that would also please the incoming president.

FCA also is investing in Mexico. The automaker has spent $850 million to retool its plant in Tolcua, Mexico, to build the all-new Jeep Compass, which was previously built in Belvidere, Ill.

Marchionne said today that production of the Compass in Mexico will begin later this month and will go on sale by March.

The Compass that the automaker will produce in Mexico will be sold in the U.S. and in many other countries around the world.

FCA has seven assembly, engine and stamping plants in Mexico and employs 11,659 workers there.

Marchionne also said automakers need clarity on fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions. The industry agreed to regulations in 2011 that covered the industry from 2012 to 2015.

A review of those regulations began last year but has not been completed. Automakers have been lobbying the Obama administration for relaxed regulations while the government has been saying no changes are needed. The incoming Trump administration might be more willing to make changes.

Marchionne, who has been CEO of both Chrysler and Fiat since the Italian automaker took a controlling interest in the automaker in 2009, also confirmed today that he plans to retire after 2018. Today, Marchionne said his retirement will occur in early 2019.

_Contact Brent Snavely: 313-222-6512 or bsnavely@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @BrentSnavely._

A LOOK AT FCA'S OPERATIONS IN MEXICO:

-   SALTILLO ENGINE PLANT: 1,549 employees; opened in 1981; makes 2.4-liter, 5.7-liter V-8 Hemi, 6.2-liter V-8 supercharged Hemi Hellcat, and 6.4-liter V-8 Hemi engines.
-   SALTILLO SOUTH ENGINE PLANT: 1,416 employees, opened in 2010; makes 3.6-liter, V-6 Pentastar; 3.6-liter, V-6 Pentastar and 3.6-liter, V-6 Pentastar plug-in hybrid engine.
-   SATILLO STAMPING PLANT: 304 employees; opened in 1997; makes body panels for Ram pickups.
-   SALTILLO TRUCK ASSEMBLY: 3,663 employees; opened in 2005; makes the Ram 1500 regular cab, Ram 2500/3500, Ram Mega Cab, Ram 3500 Chassis Cab, Ram 4500/5500 and DX Chassis Cab.
-   SALTILLO VAN ASSEMBLY: 1,504 employees; opened in 2011; makes the Ram ProMaster.
-   TOLUCA ASSEMBLY PLANT: 2,992 employees; opened in 1968; assembles the Dodge Journey, Fiat 500 and Fiat Freemont.
-   TOLUCA STAMPING PLANT: 231 employees; opened in 1994; makes body panels for Dodge Journey, Fiat 500 and Fiat Freemont.

question: What does the text say about the U.S's free trade policies?

answer: Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat Chrysler, sought clarity regarding the free trade policies in the U.S from the then-president-elect Donald Trump because his company was making plans to invest more car plants in Mexico. It turns out that Trump stated he would push a 35% border tariff on goods imported from Mexico and planned to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This meant that Marchionne would have to consider closing plants in Mexico because production in Mexico with significant economic tariffs will be uneconomical for their company.

question: What does the text say about Ford motors' decision to build a car plant in Mexico?

answer: Initially, Ford Motors planned to move their small car production location in the Michigan Assembly in Wayne to Mexico and set up a $1.6 billion plant there. However, Trump's pro-business policies, which would be the hike in the border tariff plan in Mexico, along with declining car sales, were factors that discouraged them and caused them to cancel the project.

question: Briefly describe Marchionne's next course of action after learning about the proposed free trade policies by Donald Trump.

answer: After the automaker learned about Trump's border tariff plans in Mexico, the company switched lanes and invested $1 billion in their Warren and Toledo plants. In addition to that, the company also planned that by 2020, they would produce the Jeep Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer at the Warren Truck Assembly and produce a Jeep Wrangler pickup at the Toledo Assembly South plant. Because of the investment at the Warren plant, the heavy-duty pickups in production in Mexico would be moved to the Warren plant.

question: Why is Mexico a choice location for car manufacturers?

answer: Mexico has been a choice location for large car manufacturers because of its higher number of international free trade agreements, which holds economic appeal for car companies. Mexico had over 40 free trade agreements encompassing 45 countries, including EU member countries. Because of this, Mexico's trade pacts give it appeal in the global car market, and it offers exporters from Mexico duty-free access to markets that contain 60% of the world's economic output.


text:
 Under the Rug
New neighbor moved in a few weeks ago downstairs. I don’t like him. I never even met him. The only thing I know is that he’s a chemist, calls himself an inventor. All he knows to invent are new ways to make me mad. He’s the kind of person that likes to take his work home with him. He works with Helium, a precious gas that will hopefully be wiped off the Earth. Though I never spoke to him, I know what he does. I feel it through the floor. He made a solid thing that floats. I heard thumping on my floor. The thump grew louder. There was a loud crash. The mad man broke my floor. I did not know that at the time, the object was contained in my rug. I panicked, so I grabbed my chair and threw it at the “bump” the object left. Ripping my rug, my chair landed on the floor below. He got the message, without a doubt. I lay awake during the next few nights waiting for his next attack. There was nothing other than the usual thumping that would drive me mad. One week passed, nothing; the thumping even stopped. That was the most soothing, peaceful week of my life. On the second week, he sent the helium object up again, breaking my newly fixed floor. Out of panic, I threw my chair again, breaking my rug again. To his surprise, my reaction was just and civil. I invited him to talk about how he will repay me. He made a promise to pay for any repairs necessary. Using my advanced persuasive skills, I made him tell me just when he would leave his apartment. I had a plan to sneak into his apartment and take some of that stuff that he calls “work.” I was going to let him taste his success, quite literally. The very next day I picked his lock, rummaged through his apartment only to find a gallon container filled with the stuff. It gave off a retched odor. I took a handful, put it in my pocket, locked his door and walked upstairs, knowing he would be back exactly three minutes past two. That was only twenty minutes away. As I entered my apartment, my mind raced with ideas. The only one that stood out, that was simple, yet clever, was to boil it and put it in tea. Yes, that would be perfect. I do my laundry and wash my hands; I set up several candles and spray air fresheners to steer away from the smell. Inviting him over was simple. Getting him to drink was the difficult task. He gladly sat down at the table while I brought over drinks. He rejected it. I then began using my persuasive skills to get him to drink. He then gave me a look as if he was sick of me. That’s how I know it worked. He took a sip and I smiled. I told him to drink up, and he did. He said he felt weak. I told him to lie down as he fell unconscious. By now, the tea got to his blood stream and in his heart. It must have started to clog his heart. He got weaker and weaker until I heard his last words “What is happening to me?” As he lay there, dead at 3.a.m. in my apartment, I grabbed a garbage bag and slipped him the hole through that he created. Knowing the evidence was not hidden, my plan started to turn into Swiss cheese. The body bag hit the floor with a thump. My heart started racing. I thought that the noise would be alarming and a neighbor would barge in while I stand peering over a dead body in a trash bag. I dashed downstairs. Opening the bag, I started to smell his dead body. I lift this man, who was surprisingly heavy, and lifted him on the couch. I moved his gallon of solid helium next to him. Later, I rummaged through his kitchen and made some tea. I spilled some in the sink and set it on the coffee table next to him. Going back upstairs, I entered my apartment. I took my helium covered jacket and burned it.

title: First short story I ever wrote for school, not quite finished, this is my first draft, feedback would be appreciated.

question: How does the narrator know what the man in the apartment below him does for a living?

answer: The man brings his work home. He's a chemist and he does experiments in the apartment. He uses helium in the experiments and the objects that he makes keep bumping into the ceiling disturbing the downstairs neighbor.

question: How did the madman break his floor?

answer: The heavy floating object that the man had made floated up through the ceiling leaving a great big hole.

question: How did the narrator react to the second hole in his floor?

answer: He threw a chair into the hole and then invited the chemist to come up to his apartment and discuss how he would pay for the damages.

question: Why does the narrator want to know when his neighbor will leave his apartment?

answer: He plans to break in and steal some of his chemicals

question: Why did the chemist refuse to drink the tea that the narrator had made?

answer: The contents smelled putrid.

question: Why did the narrator fill a cup with the tea in the chemist's apartment?

answer: He wanted investigators to believe that the chemist had made the tea himself.


text:
[How to Choose a 3PL Logistics Provider (Top 5 Factors)]
Selecting the right LOGISTICS SERVICE PROVIDER can be a tough experience for companies. Don’t shortcut the process though, because the reputation and success of your company may soon depend on your logistics provider’s reliability.

Avoid a potential logistics nightmare by using these 5 elements in selecting your perfect logistics provider (such as a third-party logistics company, or “3PL”).

1. CAPABILITIES

A prospective logistics provider must be competent in the specific service areas that meet your company’s needs. Just because a provider is a rock star in one area, it’s not a forgone conclusion that they can service your firm properly.

Also, they should have a set of abilities that can satisfy your both your short-term and future requirements. For instance, EDI-capability may not be a requirement for you today, but what if it does become required for you in 12-24 months? Do you really want to unwind all the onboarding and integration work invested in a new relationship? Dig a little deeper and ask:

-   Are truckload lanes repetitive, originating from a limited number of shipping points and terminating to a relatively limited number of consignees?
-   Are shipments time-sensitive and/or do they require drop trailers? A mid-sized, asset-based carrier would meet these needs without getting sidetracked by their exceedingly large list of clients.
-   Are truckload lanes sporadic? Is there live loading/unloading or do shipments come from a high number of origins that terminate to a high number of receivers? If so, a 3PL provider or broker might be a better fit.
-   Do you require access to dedicated trucking assets and 3PL? A logistics provider that possesses both assets and a 3PL division may be able to offer optimal solutions.

If a provider claims to possess all the capabilities “under the sun” but your organization requires only a few core services… be wary of a company that is a “jack of all trades” and master of none.

2. CUSTOMER SERVICE

Does the logistics provider prioritize customer service, responsiveness, fluid lines of communication and effective problem solving? These elements can be difficult to ascertain early on but do your homework.

Virtually all companies claim to have excellent customer service, but how do you know? You ask their customers. Ask for references, preferably from companies in similar industries and needs. Good customer service is no accident. If the customer service is consistently excellent, it’s likely a result of a well-documented and repeated process that will continue over the years.

[Find a Logistic Provider with a Great Safety Rating]Another yield of good process execution is safety. It is uncommon for a logistics provider to achieve excellent results in customer service and poor results in safety or vice versa. It can be deduced that a safe logistics provider, probably provides good customer service.

3. SAFETY RECORD

Due to the ever-changing landscape of safety regulations, it is imperative that you select a carrier with a strong safety record. A review of safety ratings and statistics is available to the public here. Also, see how we value safety.

4. COMPANY STABILITY

Whether your supply chain is simple or complex, select a logistics provider with overall company stability. Top suppliers are consistent suppliers. Quality can be jeopardized as companies experience rapid change. How long has the company been around? (Since 1958, we’ve been saving time and money for our customers with logistics services.)

Furthermore, if one high-liability event occurs and your provider cannot withstand the fallout, the liability often shifts, in effect, to you the shipper. This concern can be eased if the provider’s “word”, name and reputation has remained intact through decades of market turbulence and economic uncertainty.

5. COMPANY REPUTATION

In a new business arrangement, you can rest assured that at some point the relationship will be tested. Often it as at this juncture, that the character of the service provider’s leadership will be revealed.

Before it is too late, investigate whether the provider is likely to respond with integrity and honor. Time will reveal whether the firm has a good, bad or ugly reputation with customers, suppliers, and employees.

-   How do they treat their suppliers and employees?
-   Are they an active and positive force within their community?
-   What type of reviews do they have online?
-   What are the consistent themes that appear again and again in their marketing material?
-   How long have they been in business?

The answers will go a long way to determining how the provider will be as a supplier and partner.

BONUS: Double-check all elements if a supplier’s price is significantly lower than the market.

-   What good is a cheap price if a provider doesn’t deliver consistently or provide an adequate response in the event of mishap?
-   What good is a cheap price if service failures cause you to lose revenue?
-   What good is a cheap price if your team spends countless hours resolving claims and problems?

Think about _THE TOTAL COST_ associated with selecting a long-term solution provider. The provider that offers you the overall lowest cost of working together is the partner you want around for years to come.

As we’ve discussed, finding the right logistics provider can be a daunting task. Use these 5 elements to narrow the field of applicants. We’ve been providing logistics services in the USA since 1958 and would be happy to figure out how we can help you improve your business. CONTACT US TO GET STARTED!

ABOUT BR WILLIAMS:

With humble beginnings back in 1958, BR Williams has grown into an award-winning supply chain management company servicing all 48 contiguous states and Canada. With facilities in Mobile AL; Piedmont, AL; Tallahassee, FL; Anniston, AL (two facilities); Eastaboga, AL; and Oxford, AL, B.R. Williams’ distribution network supports over 50 customers and another 2,550 in the Trucking and Logistics divisions. Industries served include the following: automotive, defense, home improvement, education, food raw materials, textiles, chemical, industrial packaging, metals (finished goods), highway safety and more.

TO DISCUSS YOUR DISTRIBUTION, LOGISTICS, OR TRANSPORTATION SERVICES OPTIONS, PLEASE CONTACT US ONLINE OR CALL (800) 523-7963

question: Summarize the main points of consideration when choosing a third-party logistics supplier.

answer: The supplier's capabilities should match the needs of the shipper even if that means choosing a smaller provider. The supplier should also communicate well with their customers while also possessing a good safety record. Stability over a long period and the associated reputation also go a long way in establishing trust.

question: What does the article say about how to ship large products?


text:
THE MCKENZIE LECTURES are a series of annual public lectures delivered by “a distinguished scholar on the history of the book, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts”.[1] The lectures are held in Oxford at the Centre for the Study of the Book (Bodleian Libraries). The series was inaugurated in 1996, in honour of Donald Francis McKenzie (1931–1999),1 upon his retirement as Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, University of Oxford.[2]

Lectures

-   1996 David McKitterick: _Printers in the Marketplace_
-   1997 Roger Chartier: _Foucault’s Chiasmus: Authorship between Science and Literature_
-   1998 Joseph Viscomi: _Blake’s Graphic Imagination: the Technical and Aesthetic Origins of Blake’s Illuminated Books_
-   1999 Lawrence Rainey: _The Cultural Economy of Modernism_
-   2000 Harold Love: _The Intellectual Heritage of Donald Francis McKenzie_
-   2001 Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy: _Women’s Literary History by Electronic Means. the creation and communication of meaning in the Orlando Project_
-   2002 Paul Needham: _The Discovery and Invention of the Gutenberg Bible_
-   2003 Laurel Brake: '' 'Daily Calendars of Roguery and Woe’. The Politics of Print in 19th-century Britain''
-   2004 Graham Shaw: _In or Out? — South Asia and a Global History of the Book_
-   2005 John Barnard: _Keats and Posterity: Manuscript, Print, and Readers_
-   2006 Gary Taylor: _The Man Who Made Shakespeare. England’s First Literary Publisher_
-   2007 Robert Darnton: _Bohemians before Bohemianism: Grub Street Libertines in Paris and London 1770–1789 — Keats and Posterity; Manuscript, Print, and Readers_
-   2008 : _Gandhi’s Printing Press: Print Cultures in the Indian Ocean_
-   2009 Jerome McGann: _Philology in a New Key: Information Technology and the Transmission of Culture_
-   2010 Henry Woudhuysen: _A. W. Pollard (1859–1944): Friends and Fine Printing_
-   2011 Paul Eggert: _Brought to Book: Book History and the Idea of Literature_
-   2012 John B. Thompson: _Merchants of Culture_
-   2013 Xu Bing: _The Sort of Artist I Am_
-   2014 William Noel: _Bibliography in Bits: the study of books in the twenty-first century_
-   2015 Sheldon Pollock: _Editing in India: the First 1500 years_
-   2016 : _Authorship in Transnational Perspective_
-   2017 Peter Kornicki: _Publish and Perish in Japan: Why manuscripts continued to circulate in the age of print_ [3]
-   2019 Kate Nation: _Learning to Read: linking biology and culture via cognition_ [4]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

title: McKenzie Lectures

question: What is the topic of the McKenzie Lectures?

answer: History of books, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts.

question: Who are the annual lectures named after?

answer: Donald Francis McKenzie, a professor of bibliography and textual criticism at the University of Oxford.

question: What is the latest lecture listed?

answer: Kate Nation's "Learning to Read: linking biology and culture via cognition".

question: Who started the McKenzie lectures?

answer: The article doesn't mention the organizer of the first lecture. However, it was given by David McKitterick.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: The McKenzie Lectures are a series of annual public lectures delivered by a scholar of renown about the topics of the history of books, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts. The lectures are held in Oxford at the Centre for the Study of the Book (Bodleian Libraries). They were inaugurated and named in honor of Donald Francis McKenzie, a professor of bibliography and textual criticism at the University of Oxford.


text:
You come home every night to the same thing. Refuel, recharge, return to work the next day. It's a simple living, and you don't mind. You've settled nicely into this life.

Every dinner is a bowl of soup and a crust of bread. Some may say that it's a depressing meal, but you enjoy it. It's warm, it's easy, it's satisfying. It isn't as boring as people think when there are thousands of varieties of soup in just one grocery aisle nowadays; there are twenty-two kinds of the brand you eat. The sodium may be your eventual downfall, but you probably get in more veggies than the fast food junkies. All in all, there are worse things to be eating for dinner.

You pop the top off your soup of choice (they've even eliminated the need for can openers now), pour it in a bowl, and microwave it while breaking off a piece of bread from the loaf you pick up weekly. You grab a spoon, sit down at the counter, and flip on the television sitting in the corner of the kitchen to catch up with the nightly news as you eat your dinner.

You do not notice when one day your spoon begins to leak.

Watching the news and eating at the same time comes naturally to you by now. You don't even look at it after you smile in anticipation down at the bowl as it comes out of the microwave hot and steaming. A bite of bread, a spoonful of soup, over and over until you're finished with both and the weather is on. You do not notice that you begin to dribble more soup on the counter as you eat, you do not notice the soppiness of the napkin on your lap. We are all prone to spilling a bit of soup, so you don't think much of it, just mop it up when you clear the table and bring your bowl to the sink.

A few weeks later, you notice that your trousers are looser. A few drops of soup adds up day after day, unnoticeable but significant. You wonder what has happened, utterly perplexed because, to you, nothing has changed. You begin to worry since your weight has been stable since you finished college. Was somebody messing with your pants? Another few weeks and another belt notch down, you begin to look gaunt and you throw yourself into investigating the matter. Something is happening to you.

Still, nothing has changed. Same job, same walk back and forth to and from work, same bowl of soup for dinner. You wonder, is someone poisoning you? Someone at work? Someone who, for some reason, has a vendetta against you and is trying to kill you slowly? Is someone putting something in your coffee mug while you retrieve milk from the fridge in the break room? You begin to guard your cup closely in the mornings.

You buy a scale and keep records as the pounds keep coming off, week by week. One day you inspect the soup as you decide between Minestrone and Creamy Mushroom. It is the same soup as always, same label, same nutrition facts, same woman with an apron and curls smiling at you on the logo. But maybe they've changed their formula. You write to the soup company. They send a polite letter back, thanking you for enjoying their soups, and no they have not changed their time-honored recipe since their inception in 1972, as always, keeping their soups 'Just how Mom used to make it!'. They include a coupon for 75 cents off your next purchase of their soup.

The mystery is on your mind day after day. Maybe it's a tumor on your small intestine, you decide, and you book an appointment with your doctor. He runs the test and says everything is normal - the weight loss is not fast enough to be alarming - to come back if things do not improve.

Maybe a vampire is sucking out pieces of your soul as you sleep. You stay up an entire night waiting for him to appear and regret it the next day at work. You look increasingly bedraggled and people begin to worry about you, but you wave them off, blaming it on the flu.

One day, you are eating dinner as breaking news flashes across the screen. Somewhere in a town far away dozens of people have been shot by a man on a rampage. The manhunt is still on, and they describe him as someone who is possible mentally ill, or a terrorist, or a kid who has played too many video games, or all of the above. You are frozen as they show stark images of people bleeding on stretchers, police lights flashing, your spoon poised midair as a woman wails about her husband, who has been shot in the stomach. You feel an inexplicable warm trickle along your belly. When you look down, you begin to panic. There is blood on you too! You leap back from the counter, toppling your bowl of soup, and suddenly there is hot blood splattered across your entire kitchen, you are stepping in crimson, my god what have you done?

No. You catch your breath. It's only the borscht you chose for dinner. The beet soup is the exact color of blood in the low thrumming light of the television set. You try to relax, but your knuckles remain bone-white around the spoon you are still holding in your hand. Suddenly, you notice something. There is a pinhole at the bottom of your spoon, a hole just big enough for you to see the images of the scared people in Wherever, Missouri if you squint while holding it in front of you. Aha! You've solved it! At last, it's all clear. Now that you look back, you realize you hadn't noticed that your Italian Wedding soup had been drier, your Chicken Noodle closer to salted pasta than to soup. It wasn't cancer; it wasn't the soup company trying to sneak cheaper ingredients in for profit; it all made sense. You're ecstatic! You laugh aloud at the ridiculousness of it, the ridiculousness of how you have been acting.

Suddenly you stop and wonder, *who drilled a hole into your spoon?*

title: [RF] How to tell your spoon is leaking

question: Give a summary of the circumstances that led to the protagonist's weight loss and the cause.

answer: The protagonist adopted a daily routine of eating bread and soup every night with the same bowl and spoon and get lost watching the news. Because he mindlessly engaged in the same practice, he didn't realize that he was eating less because of a hole in his spoon. Since he wasn't eating anything else, his body soon became starved. He eventually noticed he had lost some pounds and his clothes became bigger. Thinking he was afflicted with a strange illness, he visited the doctor who confirmed he was, in fact, healthy. It was not until the night he spilled the bowl of soup on his body while watching the news that he realized that his leaking spoon was the culprit of his weight loss.

question: What does the story say about why the protagonist liked eating bread and soup every night?

answer: The protagonist lived an effortless and ordinary life. Every night, once he got back from work, he'd grab a bowl of soup with bread and watch the nightly news as he ate. He seemed to appreciate his rather habitual lifestyle. He couldn't care for outside opinions about him because he believed his choice of dinner was better than consuming junk foods that add no nutritional value to the body. He also liked to purchase the soup from the same grocery store with a wide variety of soups.


text:
SAJID YOUSUF DAR is a former Indian football player and is the current manager. During his playing days, Dar represented Jammu and Kashmir in the Santosh Trophy from 2000–2002. He is considered to be one of the greatest football coaches in Indiaof all. He holds the record for Winning two consecutive Silverwares, the Gold in South Asian Games and the SAFF CUP. He is a son of international footballer Mohammad Yousuf Dar.

Playing career

Born in Jammu and Kashmir, Dar played for YMCA in the Federation Cup. He also represented Jammu and Kashmir in the Santosh Trophy from 2000 to 2002 and was considered as one of the best defender (stopper) in North India.[1]

Coaching career

Currently Dar is considered among top talented coach of a country with high potential. He began his coaching career in 2012, being selected as the assistant coach of the India U19 side.[2] In 2014, Dar was selected to be the head coach of the India U16 side bound for the 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup when they were part of the AIFF Elite Academy.[3]

In March 2015, Dar was selected to become the head coach of the India women's football team before their 2016 Summer Olympics qualifiers.[4] His first match in charge of the side came on 13 March 2015 against Sri Lanka. His India side came out as 4–0 winners but a 7–0 defeat to Myanmar in the next match ended India's hope of Olympic qualification.[5]

He was selected to attend the AFC instructors course in Malaysia.

He attended DFB course in Hennef, Germany conducted by the German Football Association in September 2015.

A year later, Dar won his first trophy as India head coach as he led the country to gold during the 2016 South Asian Games. He got remarkable victory over Nepal 4–0 in the final.[6]

On 4 January Dar again emerged champion with India women's national team to clinch the 4th consecutive SAFF title.

Statistics

Managerial statistics

.

  Team          From   To     Record
  ------------- ------ ------ -------- -------
  G             W      D      L
  India women          2017
  Total

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

title: Sajid Dar

question: Where did Sajid Yousuf Dar represent in his playing days?

answer: He represented Jammu and Kashmir in his playing days.

question: Who is Sajid Yousuf Dar?

answer: He is a former Indian football player and the current manager of the football team.

question: When was Dar selected to be the head coach of the India women's football team?

answer: He was chosen to be the head coach of India's women's football team right before their 2016 Summer Olympics qualifiers.

question: When did Dar win his first trophy?

answer: Dar won his first trophy in the 2016 South Asian Games.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: This article describes Sajid Dar's playing and coaching career. Sajid Dar was a Indian football player and now is the coach of the football team. Dar also coached India's women's football team and helped win them a few victories.


text:
_NB: For more on Tony Greenstein, see here. For other examples of his willingness to engage in respectful discussion with Nazi apologists, see his contributions here._ Tony Greenstein and the Nazi Apologists By Paul Bogdanor Tony Greenstein is a British communist activist who supports numerous terrorist and totalitarian murderers. He has justified an IRA massacre intended to kill Britain�s Prime Minister and he admits to visiting Baathist Syria with PLO funding. Greenstein openly campaigns for the destruction of Israel. He defends communist collaboration with the Nazis but denounces Zionists as joint perpetrators of the Holocaust. A typical Greenstein outburst can be found in the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain:-
Yes, I deliberately described Israel�s actions as a blitzkrieg. Those who use starvation, thirst and hunger as reprisals against civilians, who destroy water and electricity plants, are, in the words of the late Yehashayu [sic] Leibowitz, a distinguished religious philosopher and winner of the Israel Prize, Judaeo-Nazis...

Yes, I want the state of Israel to be destroyed...

[The] attempt to justify Zionist collaboration with the Nazis and assorted fascists by reference to the German Communist Party�s attempt to win over plebeian members of the National Socialists is ludicrous. The KPD�s appeasement of the Nazis flowed from their third position politics - eg, the fact that none of its Reichstag members were Jewish from 1930 onwards or its attacks on �Jewish� capitalists. But Hitler wasn�t fooled for a moment and KPD activists were put in Dachau from the moment the Nazis took power.

The Zionist emissaries swanned around Nazi-occupied Europe organising kibbutzim and facilitating the emigration of their own cadre and no one else. The KPD, for all its sins, was part of the labour movement. Zionism was a movement of the most reactionary section of the Jewish bourgeoisie.

Thus Greenstein acknowledges and justifies discrimination and incitement against Jews by his fellow communists who were trying to win Nazi votes. Needless to say, he offers no evidence of the existence of Zionist kibbutzim in Nazi-occupied Europe. While Tony Greenstein purports to oppose antisemitism wherever he finds it, his principles seem to be rather flexible. For months he publicly deplored the celebration of Gilad Atzmon by Britain�s Socialist Workers Party. Yet in a private message he offered nothing but praise:
I shall be more than happy to hear you play the sax...

Dare I say it, some of your remarks re the holocaust were spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. And that is the point anti-Zionists should make rather than flirting with holocaust denial...

Greenstein�s private encomium to Atzmon should occasion little surprise, since their antisemitic positions have much in common. In fact, Greenstein is happy to applaud anti-Zionists who are guilty of �flirting with holocaust denial.� Consider his attitude to Asghar Bukhari of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, who was exposed as an ally of the Nazi propagandist David Irving. According to press reports:
In one email Bukhari tells Irving: �You may feel like you are on your own but rest assured many people are with you in your fight for the Truth.� Bukhari pledges to make a donation of �60 to Irving�s fighting fund and says that he has asked �a few of my colleagues to send some in too.� He also offers to send Irving a book, _They Dare to Speak Out_, by Paul Findley, a former US Senator, who has attacked his country�s close relationship with Israel. Bukhari says Findley �has suffered like you in trying to expose certain falsehoods perpetrated by the Jews.�

In a follow-up letter, Bukhari writes: �Here is the cheque I promised. Good luck, if there is any other way I can help please don�t hestitate to call me. I have also asked many Muslim websites to create links to your own and ask for donations.�

In a rambling online essay, Bukhari admitted that MPACUK had repeatedly posted images from neo-Nazi websites but nevertheless complained that he was the victim of a Zionist smear campaign:
The machine plotted and worked it seemed almost day and night to smear us... A picture of a monster with horns on his head under an American flag was deemed �anti-Semitic.� It was obtained after typing words like �Zionist power� into a Google image search. I can�t believe MPACUK pulled the picture due to the pro-Israeli lobby complaining about it. How can a monster with a flag be anti-Semitic? The Zionists are monsters (they kill kids), and they have influence in America (AIPAC), what�s the problem?

I realise that maybe 60 years ago some German may have used monsters to depict Jews, did that mean we could no longer use monsters to depict Zionists?

Greenstein then contributed the following comment:
I write as someone who is Jewish, but not a Zionist.

This is a very excellent and painfully aware article.

Asghar Bukhari made a mistake and has been honest about that. The one�s who attack their opponents as anti-Semitic, when their movement is the most guilty of all of working with anti-Semites (hence why they�re once again trying to ban _Perdition_ in Scotland which details what they did) are the ones who have problems with anti-Semtism.

Zionism is a Jewish variant of anti-Semitism. After all,even today, if someone tells me I don�t belong in England they are either a Zionist or a fascist and anti-Semite.

The real lesson from this affair is that like the boy who cried wolf, Zionist attacks on people who are not anti-Jewish have one effect, to legitimise anti-Semitism.

I�m glad that Asghar has been so honest and defied those whose stock in trade is guilt and blackmail.

Greenstein once wrote: �there is nothing the Zionists love more than �proof� that anti-Zionists really are anti-semites.� Does he now expect his readers to blame the Zionists every time he makes excuses for Nazi apologists?

question: Who is Tony Greenstein?

answer: Tony Greenstein is a British communist activist who supports numerous terrorist and totalitarian murderers.

question: What is one of the outbursts said by Greenstein?

answer: "Yes I want the state of Israel to be destroyed..."

question: Zionism in this article is described as a movement of what?

answer: It is a movement of the most reactionary section of the Jewish bourgeoisie.

question: Bukhari offers to send Irving which book?

answer: "They Dare to Speak Out" by Paul Findley

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: This article discusses Tony Greenstein who justifies discrimination and incitement against Jews and wants Israel to be destroyed. The article further talks about Zionism and Greenstein's perspective on it.


text:
The garage was gone, one side blown away by an explosion weeks earlier. The landscape outside was one of sadness and desolation, desert scrub and dirt covered in wreckage of various machines, smoke obscuring the skyline. The horizon was a deep orange, nearly red, intermingled with a glow like gold illuminated by halogen. He looked out the door way into the garage, sparing a look for the outside before quickly ducking back inside in case of prying eyes scanning the landscape for refugees and supplies.

 Turning around he walked down the hallway. The inside of the house was dark; electricity having stopped flowing weeks ago, the only light they had left was the sun and the moon. When the smoke cleared. Peering into the rooms as he passed, they no longer held much other than furniture and trash. Old mattresses and non-working televisions, various odds and ends lay strewn about. Anything of worth had been stripped down or discarded long ago. He stopped at the end of the hallway, there he found his brothers body, he knew he would find it there. Sparing one last glance at his younger brother, not a child but far from a man still. He closed the door quietly behind him and continued down the hallway into the common room.

He glanced out into the back yard, it was quiet. But that made it worse. Even through the smoke and debris and dust in the air, it was calm and still, not peaceful, but still like death. He picked up a small satellite phone he had left on the floor amongst other things, blankets and small canisters, batteries and small cans of food. There were two pistols on top of a large metal case. It was filled with ammunition of a smaller caliber. Large weapons were hard to come by so he made due with what he could find. He dialed a number into the phones keypad and waited silently, wondering how long it would take for the worlds communications to fall. They worked on batteries, but how long the satellites would last was anyone’s guess. He considered the fact that someone must be maintaining them, perhaps a remnant of the government, he knew not.
"Hello?" A voice said on the other end, "I’m ready to go," He replied. "Did he make it?" The voice asked, sounding somewhat hopeful, "No he didn’t, but we need to move now so please come quick." The voice on the other end never replied, just clicked back at him as the user hung up. He sat down, methodically fitting bullets into eight magazines, four to fill each firearm. As he completed the final magazine, a man opened the front door and quickly slipped inside. "Is this all?" He asked, gesturing to the supplies he had gathered. Without answering he rose from the ground, handing one pistol to the man and beginning to gather the various objects. He stuffed them into large ruck sacks; he had found them in the back of a truck a ways down the road the night before. They finished filling the bags and moved outside, throwing them into the backseat of a small pickup truck, they pulled out of the driveway. Neither would ever return.

title: The end of the beginning. [550 words.]

question: How old is the narrator's brother?

answer: Probably a teenager.

question: What was the narrator's objective?

answer: To gather supplies

question: What sort of setting does the story take place in?

answer: A post-apocalyptic setting.

question: Why does the house no longer have electricity?

answer: Presumably because civilization has collapsed along with its various infrastructures.


text:
KESSO BARRY (born 1948) is a Guinean autobiographical writer in French.[1] Her autobiography, dedicated to her daughter, recounts the restrictive gender roles of her traditional upbringing as a member of the Fulani nobility in Guinea-Conakry, and her escape to a Westernised life in Paris.[2]

Life

Kesso Barry's father was Al Hajj Ibrahima Sory-Dara, almamy of Mamou. She was educated in Koranic and primary schools in Mamou, before continuing education in Conakry and Dakar. She married aged 15, and had two children. In 1966, after divorcing her husband, she moved to Paris. There she pursued a successful career in fashion, married a Frenchman, and wrote her autobiographical novel.[3]

Works

-   _Kesso, princesse peuhle_ [Kesso, a Fulani princess], Paris: Seghers, 1988.

[1]

[2]

[3]

title: Kesso Barry

question: Who was Kesso Barry?

answer: A Guinean autobiographical writer.

question: What is the focus of her autobiography?

answer: The restrictive gender roles of her traditional upbringing as a member of the Fulani nobility in Guinea-Conakry, and her escape to a Westernised life in Paris.

question: List the named members of Kesso Barry's family.

answer: Al Hajj Ibrahima Sory-Dara (her father)

question: What was Kesso Barry's occupation?

answer: She had a career in fashion.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: Kesso Barry is a Guinean autobiographical writer. Her autobiography, written for her daughter, focuses on the restrictive gender roles of her upbringing as a member of the Fulani nobility as well as her escape to Paris.