Before Malevolence: Heaven7 Development
In it's earliest form, late in 1991, Heaven7 was nothing more than a 2.4.5 LPMud at a site known as GUMBI Mud. Development there saw the emergence of an early spell and class system.It wasn't until Dragons Path, January 1992, that Heaven7 came of age, and emerged from the mess of 2.4.5. Here, Zilanthius and Angel were commissioned by the Admin at the site to develop a comprehensive player skills system, one with unlimited advancement. Thus, H7 was born in a flurry of code in as little as 3 months. Security was also rebuilt from the original code at Dragon's Path.
Many people will remember H7 as the lib behind the Australian mud Sands of Time. Kingbilly, the site admin, entertained a couple of eager coders, namely Zilanthius and Angel, and allowed them to install their code in the mud. While there was a little resistance at first, Sands of Time became one of the most popular muds of it's time, both with players, and with it's coders who got to see the development of this mudlib at first hand.
At this site, major debugging of the core code was undertaken, while the spells and skills system was redesigned to include casting time, components, and various other new elements. It was at this time that the mudlib gained it's name, Heaven7.
Early Development of Malevolence
Malevolence began in November 1995 with a Heaven7 version 2.07 lib. In this stage of infancy, Deathlok applied his coding skills to rid Heaven7 of many of its more glaring lacks. His most significant improvement was to change the inventory system from the old H7 which included no support for plurals. Thus, inventory display changed as illustrated below.
Heaven7 : You find here:
A guardA guard A guard Malevolence You find here: Three guards
Deathlok also changed the death system, replacing Heaven7's old death mark routine with a simple ghost system. He also implemented the bury command.
In March 1996, Shwaine made her first attempts at lib coding by making the first version of the chat channel. This was further revised and expanded over the years to the current channel system. Around the same time, Ugly was making attempts at implementing equipment saving. Xanax added a few features, including some lib-level implementation of drugs and configurable shop code.
In late summer 1996, Adept came forward with an offer of a merger with his H7 mud Patterns of Time (PoT). While this merger eventually failed due to Adept giving rights of PoT to other coders, the addition of Adept to Malevolence's creators did set the stage for Heaven7's further development.
In the fall of 1996, Angel came onto the scene. The time of Angel at Malevolence was a tumultuous one which is little talked about now, being a taboo topic on Malevolence and almost completely denied by Heaven7. Angel brought with him the upgrade to H7 v2.08. The previous improvements to the lib were retained. Angel finished the work that Ugly had started with the first limited version of inventory saving.
The mood within the creators at this was tense as there were frequent confrontations between Angel and Shwaine, both of whom had their own views on the development of the lib. Angel and Adept soon joined up, Adept offering Angel a site to continue development of Heaven7. The H7 v3.0a lib was quickly developed using many of the ideas implemented on Malevolence. The coding rights of Angel and Adept were revoked on Malevolence. At this point, Heaven7 and Malevolence went on their own developmental paths.
Primary Development of Malevolence
After the full break from Heaven7, Shwaine became the main mudlib coder. Her early contributions until the time of the hack were varied, the major features being in-mud channels, wildcards for aliases and skill-based leveling.In spring 1997, Shwaine began developing new features in earnest at home, including a better method for saving inventories as well as many other new features. When Malevolence was hacked in June 1997 and forced offline, Shwaine continued lib development from her home driver.
The main feature Shwaine codeed in the downtime was an integrated plural system. Previously plurals had been limited solely to inventory displays. Shwaine expanded the plural system to allow items to be referenced collectively without using parse command. Player commands were converted to a bin system allowing easy update and addition of commands. The inventory saving system was updated. Other player-friendly features such as nicknames, an improved wildcard system, guest names, two handed weapons and a new party system were also implemented.
In January 1998, Chancellor purchased a machine for Malevolence and agreed to host it at sdic.net. Thanks to Uzbad, who had an uncorrupted copy of the last backup before the hack, Malevolence was able to get back online with minimal loss of area code. Shwaine's improvements to the lib were uploaded and put in place. Xanax completed and installed his Artificial Intelligence monsters. The AIs had many unique feature such as the capacity to gather equipment and treasure, buy and sell at shops, fight, reproduce, age and explore. Perin created a new quest system far superior to the stock H7 quests.
In July 1998, Chancellor purchased a second server for Malevolence, allowing the player and development sites to be housed on seperate machines. Shwaine began work at converting the lib to MudOS which is expected to take until 1999 to complete. A development MUD composed of a the admins of multiple H7 derivative MUDs also began to form, hosted on Malevolence's servers.