"From 1994 to 1998, I spent all my hobbyish coding time working on the various aspects of a MUDBase called RoA. The RoA MUDBase originally started as a MUD itself, Realms of Aurealis (hence RoA), and it ran in beta mode for roughly 2.5 years at the State University of New York @ Utica / Rome on the DogNET. Near the end of '97, situations arose (basically, everybody graduated) which forced us to move to Mudservices. After running for a few months there, I decided to focus my attention on making the RoA code suitable for public consumption as an entire MUDBase, with an emphasis on Online Creation (OLC). With that in mind, I decided to take down the actual RoA MUD and focus on the code at home. An assistant of mine at RoA, Mouseglove, talked me into letting him be the first beta test site for the RoA MUDBase and it is currently (and proudly) up and running at http://www.aurealanrealms.org/ or you can jump directly into the Aurealan Realms via telnet://aurealanrealms.org:4000.

After hammering in some last minute changes into version 2.0 of the MUDBase, I decided to release the code to the public in a somewhat unfinished state... not that it's necessarily lacking, but I did have some things on the "todo" list that I didn't get to (OLCable races and classes for instance). I wanted to move on to a slightly different project the client side of things :), so I "officially" resigned from AR, though I still remain there as a consulting type figure. Shortly after this happened, a friend of ours who had just recently joined our coding team, known as Darkenelf, decided to take up the MUDBase lead and plow forward with it... heading for version 3.0, cleaning up a lot of the things I forgot about and finishing off much of the things I originally wanted to do. I have returned to some degree, to help here and there with the minor difficulties that arise from time to time, but I'm still spending the majority of my extracurricular time on the RoAClient.

In any event, what is available now, version 2.0+, is a stable MUDBase with MANY OLCable features. If you are interested in getting a preview at what may be coming with version 3.0, Aurealan Realms is the primary Beta Test Site (BTS) where the 'public' playtests the latest features of the MUDBase. I will tell you this, OLCable classes and races are already complete and running in the current version of AR."

James T. Rhone, RoAMUD v2.0 Author