History

Basternae has been around in some form or another for quite a while.

Basternae 1 was started when Duris: Land of Bloodlust decided to shut down in the late 1990's. They "loaned" the codebase to the admin staff of what would become Basternae 1, who went on to customize it and build their own style of MUD.

After about a year, the staff of Duris decided that they wanted to start the MUD back up again. They revoked Basternae's rights to use the codebase. Some of the staff of Basternae found this to be very inconvenient because they were having so much fun running the game.

Ski, Thendar, and Veygoth (who was so new to the Basternae staff that he hadn't really *done* anything yet) decided that it would be a wonderfully insane idea to rebuild the MUD from scratch. They already had the zones, so all they needed was a codebase to run them on.

Thendar set about gathering and editing the zones and rebuilding the world, Ski set himself to some design work, and Veygoth reverse-engineered a codebase that could support the existing zones. He started by selecting a fairly mature Diku-type codebase that could easily be expanded to support the new features that would have to be added. Zen's UltraEnvy 0.87j was a good choice because it was stable, advanced, and easy to add to.

After about a year of work and testing, Basternae 2 opened to the public and had half a decade of operation (2000-2005) before finally closing its doors. As tends to happen with MUDs, the original staff of Thendar, Veygoth, Ski, Lohrr, and Govno cycled out and was replaced with newer admins like Illic, Sniktiorg, and Xuande. Running a MUD tends to take a lot of time and effort, so the life of an admin is often short, typically only 1-4 years before moving on.

After Basternae 2 shut down in 2005, Veygoth (now known as Xangis) started thinking about putting it back together again. In the summer of 2005 he wrote a rudimentary semi-graphical MUD client. In 2006, he ported it to Linux. This only served to make him want to start working on a Basternae 3 project.

In early 2007, Xangis began rewriting the old C codebase for Basternae 2 as a C# codebase, taking advantage of the fancy new features of .NET and re-engineering much of the way things are done on MUDs, from both a gameplay and administrative standpoint. Knowing that burnout is a very real problem with MUD administrators, he has been taking it easy, working on the project only as it amuses him. That's why there isn't a scheduled release date yet. The first testing server might be up as early as spring of 2008, but only time will tell.

The Basternae 3 project is sponsored by Zeta Centauri, Inc.