“The Lands of Aethar” was a free online game which ran from 1994 to 2009. It was a text-based virtual world, a MUD (Multi-User-Dimension), one of the precursors to the modern MMORPG. In the early 2000′s, I was the head programmer for Aethar. I spent countless hours fine-tuning the SMAUG engine the game ran on, adding numerous features and surgically cutting to the very core of what the engine could do. It was really a lot of fun, seeing a feature evolve from wild ideas in the cloud, into blocks of C code, and finally into natural laws affecting the virtual world.
After he pulled the plug, the owner gave me all the datafiles. From these, I’ve reconstructed a frozen snapshot of the world as it was in the final moments. I’ve converted the entire virtual world into HTML, tens of thousands of webpages which can be wandered and explored like a ghost wandering the lands. The starting point is here: The Lands of Aethar.
Originally, the Lands were not available over the http protocol like this. They existed on a telnet server. Specifically: telnet://aethar.com:5500, but of course that address will no longer accept connections. Unlike HTTP, in a telnet connection, text data is continuously sent back-and-forth, so that instead of looking at mostly-inactive webcontent and occasionally clicking hyperlinks, the players interacted in realtime with the world. The NPC characters who stand idly now, once wandered on their own, and some would even attack the unwary player. Yes, the Lands have been sterilized somewhat in the conversion, transformed into a mere picture gallery of their former selves, but a picture gallery preserved forever against time and decay.
For me, this final Aethar code project was a perfect training grounds for me to teach myself how to use the powerful PHP/MySql technologies I just got recently got my hands on by buying a professional host. While the rooms of Aethar may look like static html files, those are actually virtual files, dynamically loaded from a single optimized database. I never understood what the big deal about databases was until a few months ago when I took a stab at creating a romaji dictionary. That dictionary endeavor demonstrated to me how important databases are. Before (e.g., as the Aethar coder) I always did code projects where there were just two kinds of data: fully-loaded RAM and fully-unloaded ROM. A database is a compromise between RAM and ROM, crucial for scenarios where you have limited memory resources.
With my new-gained knowledge of PHP/MySql, I feel like there’s no web application I couldn’t program, in principle. Facebook? Twitter? Give me enough time and I could program either one from scratch. Right now I have so many ideas for cool things to add to the web, the hardest part is just settling on one idea at a time.
Anyway, check out the frozen snapshot of a virtual world: Lands of Aethar. You can “save your progress” at any time just by creating a bookmark of whatever page you’re looking at. You’ll need to, since the world is far, far too vast to explore in one day 