Felucca

A felucca (Arabic: فلوكة‎) is a traditional wooden sailing boat used in protected waters of the Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean including Malta, and particularly along the Nile in Egypt, Sudan, and also in Iraq. Its rig consists of one or two lateen sails.

They are usually able to board ten passengers and the crew consists of two or three people. Despite being made obsolete by motorboats and ferries, feluccas are still in active use as a means of transport in Nile-adjacent cities like Aswan or Luxor. They are especially popular among tourists who can enjoy a quieter and calmer mood than motorboats have to offer.

San Francisco's fleet

A large fleet of lateen-rigged feluccas thronged San Francisco's docks before and after the construction of the state-owned Fisherman's Wharf in 1884. Light, small, and maneuverable, the feluccas were the mainstay of the fishing fleet of San Francisco Bay. John Muir said of them, "These workhorses featured a mast that angled, or raked, forward sharply, and a large triangular sail hanging down from a long, two-piece yard".

Ultima Online

Ultima Online (UO) is a graphical, massively multiplayer, online role-playing game (MMORPG), released on 24 September 1997, by Origin Systems. It was the first game of the genre to reach widespread popularity and influenced all later games of this type.

Ultima Online is a fantasy role-playing game set in the Ultima universe. It is known for its extensive player versus player combat system. Since its release, it has added eight expansion packs, a booster pack and dozens of free content updates. The release of Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn in 2007 brought a new game engine with an upgraded visual experience.

History

Development

Ultima Online is the product of Richard Garriott's idea for a fantasy game involving several thousand people who can all play in a shared fantasy world. Prior games allowed hundreds of people to play at the same time, including Habitat (beta-tested in 1986), The Realm Online, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version) and Meridian 59; however, Ultima Online significantly outdid these games, both graphically and in game mechanics. The initial team was composed of Garriott, Starr Long, Rick Delashmit, Scott Phillips and, a bit later Raph Koster, who became the lead designer. Koster wrote public "designer letters" and usually went by his nickname of Designer Dragon. Koster drew inspiration from prior online games, such as DartMUD.