The Blog of Xangis

If you don’t know what a multi-user dungeon is you may not want to read this post.

First there was Sojourn (also known as TorilMUD), a non-PvP MUD based loosely on the Forgotten Realms. It was created around 1992.

Somewhere between 1994 and 1996, a PvP version of Sojourn split off and called itself Duris. Some time later, Duris went down when the admins lost interest (perhaps 1998?). The Duris admins granted permission to use the codebase for another mud, Basternae. Over about a year or so, Basternae ran a different MUD, significantly different from Duris, yet still quite similar.

When the admins of Duris decided they wanted to bring the MUD back up in summer of 1999, they told the admins of Basternae that they had to shut down and stop using the codebase. That was about one week after I had signed on as a coder.

In a fit of massive insanity, we decided to recreate a new generation of Basternae from scratch, using the UltraEnvy (modified Envy 2.2) codebase. Mainly it was myself and Thendar (Jenn Bahrs) behind it, since we were young, energetic, and had too much time on our hands. Thus began Basternae 2: Phoenix Rising.

I essentially reverse-engineered the MUD based on the zone editor so that we could use all of the old zones. Thendar secured permission to use most of the old zones from the writers and tweaked and tuned them to work with the new codebase, while creating new zones and getting new builders to create more.

After about a year the MUD was playable, although there were a lot of stability issues at first due to the haste with which the codebase was thrown together coupled with lots of legacy code written before things like the standard template library were a standard of any sort. It also didn’t help that a bunch of other people also had a hand in the code, and many of them were not programmers but zone writers who wanted to get something done.

I left Basternae 2 in late 2000 or early 2001 because I was having more fun making music with Dr. Kilpatient. Illic and Xuande took over and did a fine job of maintaining and stabilizing the code. Although I returned briefly in 2003, the place just wasn’t the same, so without it being much fun to work on I didn’t stick around too long.

I believe it was sometime in 2005 that Basternae 2 shut down. There was talk of making it a different MUD, called Aramanth I believe, but I don’t think anything ever came of it. The codebase had evolved into a mighty fine game, but the admins were just not interested in running it.

I recently dug out the code from late 2000, from before I left and before who-knows-who had a hand in it. Although it’s less developed than the code from 2005, it’s code that I don’t have to ask permission to use. It’s also kind of buggy and underdeveloped, but because it’s also kind of raw it will be easy to rework.

That’s what I’ve been tinkering with off and on over the past two weeks or so. There’s no server online, but I have a raw website and a blog at basternae.org where I’m documenting my progress, if any. I don’t know whether the MUD will ever actually go online again, but at least I can clean up the code and use it to learn a bit more about development (and apply what I’ve learned over the past few years). I’m essentially rewriting the whole codebase and core engine, moving from C to C++. It’s something that’s a lot easier to do without a game online and without other coders to coordinate with.