Archipelago
From Mudpedia
|
Archipelago began in the Fall of 1993 when Alastair J. Neil (Ponder) took a position at the University of Essex in the Psychology Department. It was based on CircleMUD 2.2 code and was modified by Alastair Neil, Soraya Ghiasi (Kalliste) at the University of Colorado, and Shawn L. Baird (Scarrow). Alastair's friend at Essex, Angus Hamilton (Arg), was also an early influential source of ideas.
These four core-implementors all originally mudded together on Perilous Realms (PR) on which Shawn was also a coder. The original goal of Archipelago was to make a better PR, but having quickly achieved that goal the core team moved on to more ambitious tasks, the most notable being the rewrite of the magic system so it is based on the Ars Magica RPG. The Ars Magica (no-mana) magic system was strongly advocated by Soraya and primarily coded by Alastair.
In the spring of 1994, other players and builders on PR left and joined the staff of Archipelago. The first new staff additions were Jason Chayes (Ansalon), who in turn recruited David Czeck (Magnifico) and Robert Chin (Xero), who all three were once builders on PR. A little later that year Soraya's friend Chuck Blomberg (Saladin) joined the building staff and soon after Bryan Wride (Ratatosk), another player on PR, did as well. These five individuals, plus the core-implementors, were primarily responsible for building Archipelago's completely original world, with Alastair building Lamman, the starting city. A few ideas, most notably the Quay, were based on the town where Alastair was living at the time, Wivenhoe, Essex. Soraya and Alastair built the Mill. Angus built Arg's Island. Jason built the Ruins of Paeldair, David built Wivernhoe (named after Wivenhoe), Robert built Abernach (which was once called Vohanna), Chuck built Megalith Island, and Bryan built the Forest of Northmarch. Those formed the core zones of the Archipelago.
During 1994 Archipelago was in constant development and play-testing. In addition to the Ars Magica magic system, three other distinguishing code features were an original Online Creation (OLC) system, no character classes, and gradual leveling. Archipelago had 200 levels and each of these levels were broken down in ten mini-levels. At each mini-level a player-character gained either more hit points, more movement points, or more practice points which could be applied to skills.
On January 15, 1995 there was a player wipe of all the test characters and Archipelago was officially opened. The first few months the average number of players connected was between 15-20 and primarily came from various universities about Britain. The net lag between the University of Essex and the United States was usually extremely bad and aside from most of the immortal staff, American players were an extreme minority.
Archipelago continued on for eighteen months with new zones being added. A few new builders joined the immortal team during this period, most notable was Sandra Miura (Grace), another PR player. Growing apathy on the part of some of the builders (Jason and Bryan) and increasing rivalry between a two builders (Robert and David) created a tense environment, while new code development slowed down considerably as Alastair's workload became greater. In the middle of all of this, Shawn left Archipelago to take a job with a company in California developing games commercially.
At the end of the summer of 1996, Alastair announced he was quitting his job in the Psychology Department and as a result Archipelago would be losing its server. In September, Alastair made David the implementor and gave him the source and world files to run. Alastair also left a stripped down mud world and source tree with the wish that it be made publicly available. David uploaded it to ftp.circlemud.org in compliance with these wishes. Then he moved the mud to ruby.ils.unc.edu 2895 and did a player wipe. Since the MUD had primarily British player base there were constant complaints about how laggy the server was and the pwipe didn't prove popular either. After a month looking for a new server, Archipelago was moved, for the first time to a foreign site at mystik.net 2895.
David signed-on a cadre of new coders which resulted in new code was being added for the first time in about a year. The most notable new code was Jan Møller's addition of a mobile scripting language called DML. David tried to organize the Archipelago into a democratically driven body of immortals, but due to apathy and continued hostility between Robert and David it was impossible to run this way. David resigned from Archipelago at the end of December 1996 and three months later formed the spin-off mud, Tempora Heroica.
Archipelago was taken over by the owner of mystik.net who went by the name Judas. He put a new immortal, from England, in charge of the mud, Mark Rogers (Tzu). Development slowed afterwards and the player base and immortal staff was split between Archipelago and David's new mud Tempora Heroica. In an alienating move, Mark removed the names from the core developers and other coders from the login menu screens and placed his and a few of his friend's names on the menus. He then removed the mud from mystik.net, temporarily ran the mud on a server in Italy, and then settled on a server back in England. This was a rough time for Archipelago and its players and slowly fewer-and-fewer players logged onto Archipelago. By the end of the year, Mark had done another pwipe. The few players who had stuck with Archipelago left, and Mark shut Archipelago down for good in early 1998.
