Family

Introduction

The Kaos MUD family is a little-known branch of the great MUD tree, inspired by the MUD "Realms of Kaos", and their history will be recorded here--a history full of genius, creativity and fun, but also drama, theft, and betrayal.

Last updated: 10/07/2021

Family Tree

Because Realms of Kaos was a proprietary software, a particularity of the Kaos MUDs is that they are all coded from the ground up: hence, they should be viewed as spiritual successors rather than actual derivatives. Another characteristic of those MUDs is that they all have a graphical client, a hack-and-slash gameplay, one-a-day dungeons, and PvP events.

Ultimately, all MUDs are descendants of the original "MUD" (1978), by Roy Trubshaw.

(MUD)

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(Realms of Kaos Alpha)

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(Nightmist) (Fallen Dragons) (DarkHaven) (Realms of Kaos Beta)

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+-----------------------------------------+ +-------------------------------------------------------+

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(Opal Spheres)(NorthWinds)(Deity Online)(MirageMUD) (Eidolon) (Odious) (Alura) (Shards of Enigma) (DS)

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(Deity Online 2) (Aleveria) (Fable) (Ember Online)

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(Kaos: Revolution)

Realms of Kaos (1996 - 2014)

Wikia

Realms of Kaos was created in 1996 by Lance Hoskins (DungeonMaster), and coded in Visual Basic 5, even the server. Kaos was distinguished from other MUDs by its hybrid text/graphical client. The mechanics were based off AD&D mechanics: for example, Kaos' Curel spell is derived from the AD&D spell Cure Light Wounds. The game was created when the first MMORPGs, with their polished interface, started being developed, while text-based MUDs were sticking to their clunky TELNET interface. Perhaps for this reason, Kaos was never really considered a MUD and was ignored by the MUD community, and developed its own, separate community.

Realms of Kaos entered its beta phase in 2002 as a finished product conceptually, however its major bugs were never fixed, most notably server crashes, exhaust lag, and item duplication. The beta client's finest feature was its minimap, a feature now considered essential in modern MUDs, but that were not used in other MUDs until 2010, when MUSHclient's mapper was released.

After the last code update, in 2003, Lance Hoskins, who is a true Renaissance man, lost interest in Kaos and started focusing his attention on his metal band, Down to the Shake. In 2006, in an event known as "The Great Crash", Realms of Kaos was closed down. Nevertheless, following incessant requests from the admins, it came back online in 2007, restored from an earlier version, and it ran on until May 2014.

At its peak, Kaos had over 500 players online. It was also reviewed positively by Joystick magazine in 2000. Although the game is now dead, it's possible that build servers from the alpha version are still floating around. Those allowed a maximum of 4 players to connect. Kaos builders had to run the test server on their computer to build new areas, which they would then send to the head builder. Surprisingly, the test server was never reverse engineered by anyone.

Minor Derivatives

"The Fallen Dragons" (2002 - 2004) (archive) was a MUD created in 2002 by Aaron Jandle (Coax), in VB. His stated goal was to have "many more features than Realms of Kaos". Little is remembered about it.

"Darkhaven" (2002 - 2004) (archive) was created in Summer 2002 by a French team led by Lord Cahaan. The project was never opened to the public. It had a first-person view similar to the older Might & Magic games. Darkhaven's stated goal was to be "more visually impressive than Realms of Kaos". Little is remembered about it.

Nightmist Online (2000 - present)

Website

"Nightmist Online" is coded in Visual Basic 6 and was created in 2000 by Jonathan Leighton-Hoggett (JLK) and Simon Crowder (Pandilex) from the UK. Since an artist who worked for Kaos gave their art to Nightmist, both MUDs have some of their avatars in common. Nightmist branched off from Kaos alpha, which didn't have a minimap, and this feature is still lacking in today's Nightmist. Despite this, Nightmist is the most successful out of the Kaos family because it's the only one that has reached a final state and has a stable server.

At some point, Simon was working on a MUD project called Opal Spheres (link), featuring a minimap. A client was released in 2009, but is no longer available.

Nightmist Derivatives

"NorthWinds Online", or "NorthWinds-RPG", was created in 2001 by Azacca, coded in VB6 and derived from Nightmist, even using code snippets from Nightmist. Azacca said he had a playerbase of 400.

"Deity Online", by Thor, was a MUD derived from Nightmist in 2003 (archive). Deity Online 2 was created by Moonripper and Sepherus.

"Deloria" was a 2D game derived from Nightmist and Revelation, developed by Steve (Xlithan) from the UK using a 2D stock codebase called "vbGORE". Xlithan later developed "Virellia" and "MirageMUD" (Final Saga), which was more like a traditional MUD but still used the same codebase. A video of MirageMUD can be seen on Youtube. MirageMUD is unrelated to Mirage MUD, coded in C#.

"Adventure To Fate", a phone RPG created by Randy Higgins (Element), based a lot of its mechanics off Nightmist and Realms of Kaos.

Eidolon Online (2003 - 2007)

Website (archive)

The core of "Eidolon Online" was created by Bruno Quaranta (Hildegaard) from Argentina, in Visual Basic 6. In late 2003, he gave the codebase to Calvin Hunter (Cal) from Canada, who coded most of its functionalities. It's worth noting that Cal was only a high school kid back then; that he became a MUD innovator at such young age is assuredly testament to his prodigy. This project was only developed for about a year before he lost interest. Yet, it continued to live for years, because his collaborator Brandon (Apep) leaked the codebase to the Aleveria team (archive) in exchange for the a staff position. At first, the Aleveria admins denied that their game was derived from Eidolon's codebase, but Cal knew bugs he had fixed in later versions of the codebase, and with this knowledge, was able to expose their lies. Knowing that he couldn't totally defeat evil, he allowed them to use his codebase on the condition that they kick Brandon out of the team, which they did, and that they don't share the code with other people. As it's common with stolen codebases, Aleveria never took off.

In 2006, when the Kaos server had been down for over a year, a team made of former Realms of Kaos staff members created "Realms of Kaos: Revolution", derived from Aleveria's codebase and, ultimately, Eidolon's. Realms of Kaos: Revolution was an emulation of Realms of Kaos, with the same areas, gameplay, and art. The project was doomed from the beginning because of its rogue server--Aleveria wasn't, after all, supposed to share the Eidolon codebase. After the real Realms of Kaos was brought back in 2007, Kaos: Revolution immediately lost all of its players.

Odious Online (2004 - 2008)

Website (archive)

Codebase

"Odious Online", also called "Project Odious", was created in 2004 by Michael Du Russel (Minion/Ethryx), in Visual Basic 6. At some point, one of his evil collaborators added a trojan to the client, in order to obtain the players' passwords and steal their items from Realms of Kaos. Unfortunately, the passwords of Project Odious were stored in plain text, and many players were using the same password for both games. This betrayal made the players distrust the project and doomed it to failure. Odious had artists from Kaos working on it, who weren't aware of the trojan plot. The development of Project Odious continued until 2008: the second version is called "World of Fable" and its codebase was released for free on Sourceforge.

"Prophecy Online" was a rival project, created by Ryan (Prophet). The MUDs were in competition on MMORPG.com, and possibly influenced each other's design. Ryan had a clan in Nightmist called "Prophecy Pwns Odious".

This is not the first time that a Kaos-related software was created for hacking the players. Auto-rollers (bots for rolling perfect characters) were notable for being infested with keyloggers.

Alura Online (2006 - 2008)

Website (archive)

"Alura Online: The Forgotten Realm" was created in 2006 by Matt (Mourik) and was coded in Visual Basic 6 too. He recruited Bryan Yeo (F4LL3NANG3L) from Singapore to do the coding, who now works for Ubisoft. Alura's innovation was that it used 3D rendering of items with Direct3D. Alura died when Cison, a staff member, stole Alura passwords, which, as in Odious Online, weren't encrypted, and robbed items from Kaos players who used the same password. It was not Cison's last successful heist, because he later collaborated with Hawk to steal passwords directly from Realms of Kaos. Lagg, a former builder, inherited the Alura code, but never managed to revive the game despite his attempts.

Ember Online (2008 - present)

Website

"Ember Online" was originally titled "Future Galaxy: Defenders of Materia" and was set in New York. It was then renamed to "Shards of Enigma" and later on, "Ember Online". Development really took off in September 2014, after Realms of Kaos's death. Faithful to the VB tradition of Kaos, it's coded in Visual Basic .NET. Ember Online was created by Chris Valleriani (Nitehawk) who was the last head admin of Kaos. Because of Chris's competency as an admin, Ember Online has been running smoothly since the beginning, experiencing no drama or corruption.

Dungeon Seeder (2004 - present)

"Dungeon Seeder" is coded in Java and development began in 2004. You can learn more about Dungeon Seeder by exploring this website.