Medievia was started in 1991 by a group of people interested in such things. At first Medievia was a stock diku mud. A mud is short for Multi User Dungeon. The first few months, we tested many public domain mud packages including DIKU and Merc. Our first reaction was that the code while free was buggy and poorly thought out if you wanted a truly large game. We ran the original Medievia for a while as a standard Merc 1.00 Mud. Medievia II followed about one year after with much of the game and code re-tooled. At this point we may have been one of a handful of muds that were stable enough to be interesting. Our player base grew and along with it our interest.

In 1993, Vryce decided to do it again and we started work on Medievia III. Medievia III had things like formations, ANSI color, new undead death code and a totally redone internal structure making the game much more stable and memory friendly. The result was the first mud with a vision. Our player base again grew quickly. We had our own machine by this time and our sponsor (Avi Freedman, owner of netaxs.com) proved as stable as the mud. Vryce decided that Medievia was more than a passing hobby. As 1993 turned into 1994 he added feature upon feature until the mud was world renowned as the most stable and advanced mud. Early in 1995 we decided to yet again push the envelope. This time we wanted to PUSH it to the brink and that we did.

MEDIEVIA IV.

Medievia IV represents the cutting edge in gaming technology and game design philosophy. By the time Vryce started thinking of Medievia IV he finally had a group of stable implementors. We now had the time to re-code the whole game with the design to handle 1500 on-line players. Shalafi had been around for a while by then. Shalafi had proven to be the first implementor capable of balancing all the world stats, objects, mobiles and world. We were ready. We began work on Medievia IV in early 1995. The first thing Vryce decided to do was wipe the world and rethink it all. Every mud around seemed to be following old 1991 DIKU technology and most muds have become very similar as no one wanted to jump ahead and recode their whole mud. When we were in the designing stages of Medievia IV we held many group idea sessions and decided we would drop the old world and attempt to make a world that more would seem much more realistic. We ended up recoding most of the game yet again. We no longer call ourselves a mud. There is just no comparing Medievia to most muds.

February 1st, 1996 Medievia IV opened to the public. Brand new and full of promise it remains the shining example of the mud community.

There are some people get on Medievia's case about starting as a DIKU Game yet today we do not post the DIKU Originators names on our title screen. Medievia is not a DIKU mud. We got our feet wet way back when with a Merc beta release in 1991. That was 26,000 lines of programming, Medievia IV is over 250,000 lines of programming. DIKU mud did not work when you used it as it was full of memory leaks, poor design and an architecture that would never scale up to what we needed. DIKU was basically ABER mud re-tooled. Merc then took DIKU code and re-tooled it again. Today Medievia is over a quarter of a million lines of logic code. Its internal architecture, structures, code, and design philosophies have nothing to do with DIKU. Medievia II had the names of the DIKU authors on the title screen. We played by their rules. Medievia III was more than re-tooled. It was re-written and proved to be one of the most stable and popular muds of all time. Medievia IV again was much more than a re-tool. Medievia IV used our new HoloCode module that created a vast interactive real wilderness of 4 million rooms. It had off-line windows applications for zone makers. It had all new structures for monsters, rooms, objects, command parsing, network code, player files, etc. Medievia IV then added module after module. There is no other game like Medievia. It is now its own genre. It has a following of devoted players that support this ever increasing and complicated world. Medievia V is under construction now. It will handle 250,000 players on-line at once using a multiple server/continent architecture. It will have our new MobFactions, HoloDetails, HoloAffects, MobDetails, Dungeon Master, Adversary and HoloDetailedHoloSection modules completed. Some of these modules are actually already in Medievia IV but not yet fully implimented. It is amazing to realize what Medievia has accomplished and what it will become when you consider that it was made for free by players and myself (Vryce) in our spare time. We all have normal jobs like everyone else. We are just completely addicted to and passionate about this game. We will never stop coding and re-coding Medievia.

Today we have master programmer Ozymandias helping Vryce bring Medievia into the future. We have the best game managers that ever existed with our gods Ikuska and Iskandar who oversee the new areas and the balance of the game. The time and dedication the God staff puts in is unimaginable. The future is always our concern, Medievia will be a better game tomorrow, and the day after. It is a never ending process that we do for the love of the game. It is amazing what that kind of passion can do!

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