WotMUD

Wheel of Time MUD

The Wheel of Time Mud Copyright (c) 2003

WoTmud's core codebase was developed from CircleMUD 2.2 by Flash and Zun in the summer of 1993, with Eileen joining in around 1999. Several folks have contributed custom code to the mud, including Mist, Urse, Sinprejic, Fafhrd, and Crafty. On-line building and coding has been the effort of a great many people over the many years.

The code for WoTMUD is not available.

All custom WoTMUD web site and mud content including but not limited to, descriptions, layout, world structure, and so on, is protected under a copyright by the WoTMUD implementors. At no time may duplications or derivatives of this content be used, recreated or redistributed in any form without the expressed written consent of the implementors. A noted exception to this is any material created by any non-implementor, which may only be re-used with the written permission of the WoTMUD implementors.

CircleMUD was developed from DikuMUD (Gamma 0.0) by Jeremy "Ras" Elson at Johns Hopkins University's Department of Computer Science. All code unique to CircleMUD is protected under a copyright by the Trustees of the Johns Hopkins University.

Many, many people contributed to CircleMUD in one way or another throughout the course of its development. Although it's impossible for me to remember them all, I'd like to extend special thanks to (in alphabetical order): Danny Baker, Bill Bogstad, Harold Ervin, Fenris, Furey, Gnort, Sharon Goza, Bryan Jolson, Steven Lacher, Jay Levino , Fred Merkel , Catherine Stanton , Naved Surve, and Tim Stearns. Circle would not exist without the contributions of these contributors.

CircleMUD is available for anonymous FTP at ftp.cs.jhu.edu in pub/CircleMUD.

The Exodus From MUME and the Early Years

The MUD itself was started in 1993 when a bunch of friends who used to play another mud called MUME decided they wanted to do one of their own. Flash, Zun, Mournblade, Ingtar, Kilvarnan, Mogrash and Nass all played MUME together. The first zones and coding were all done by these ex-mumers, and in the early days we'd all get hugely excited if we had more than three people online.

We are the oldest MUD set in the Wheel of Time universe; whilst Sanctuary got there before us in terms of the theme, that MUD folded and closed its doors early in the day. Our contemporary was Moment in Tyme; this MUD gradually moved away from its generic fantasy theme to convert to a Wheel of Time in the mid 1990s, and whilst it was very successful as a generic fantasy MUD, it failed to sustain its playerbase when it became strictly just roleplay orientated. Even MMORPG’s like Ultima Online have gone stale while WoTMUD is still standing.

wotMUD Expands!

The Wheel of Time MUD has had two major expansion phases. The first of these occured in 1996 following a website relaunch and the launch of clans, which led to us being chosen as Yahoo's New Site of the Day and featured as Mud of the Month by the MUD Connector. During that year, our player numbers went from a regular 10-20 or so players to between 50 and 75 per night, and many of our most senior immortals such as Doyn and Vivienne come from that period.

The second expansion phase occured after another website relaunch in 2000, which got us chosen as a Netscape Recommended Site and featured in several prominent online newsletters. During the period 2000-2004 the MUD expanded beyond 100 and 150 players, and one one occasion reached 227 simultaneous players in 2003. Oh, the spam! During that time the average number of players per night was 140-160, with Sunday and Monday evenings being the busiest. A "C" to "C++" codebase change in 2005 started the third expansion phase, one that is in progress at the time of writing.

For More Information

https://wotmud.info/ (telnet game.wotmud.org:2224)