It was a $1,175,000 minimum guaranteed advance against royalties for Fallout 3 (at the time, I thought it was for much more). In 2007, Bethesda purchased the Fallout license for $5.75 million. They then licensed back the IP to Interplay to develop an MMO. However, that agreement came with very stiff conditions.
Herve had 30 months to raise the a specific amount of capital.
He had to allow for random auditing of his books (at his expense).
He had to avoid any lawsuits . . .this was a very shadowy clause as the wording was more along the lines of he had to maintain the levels and standards upholding the image of Bethesda.
There were also some wording about promotion and such, which is the crux of his current lawsuit with Bethesda.
Ultima story writers were looking for a way to tie in the concept of multiple servers running parallel copies of the same world into the lore of the Ultima universe. Raph Koster got the idea that each server was the reflection in one of the many pieces of the shattered Gem of Immortality from Ultima I -- a shard world.
It is only a programming term for databases according to Raph Koster. It is not used by professional database developers (only neophytes might use the term). Yes, yes, I know what Wikipedia says about shards and database development, but use that term with a serious DBA and watch him crack a smile at you and walk away.
Instancing is quickly replacing the idea of shards in mmo development.
corith, i believe you just parroted something i said earlier this thread or in a diff thread
although you left out the part of each shard being an alternate reality from the "main" ultima world which is why it allowed them to "split" the story off from the core ultima lore.
such as bringing back blackthorn before technically he was even introduced to UO... UO happens before ultima 4 and after 3, and blackthorn was not introduced for like 200 years after U4, they side-stepped that issue by saying blackthorn was sent to the void and time is irrelevant there and he left the void and entered the shard worlds technically before he was introduced to the story
