AROA

Overview

AROA is the development name for a brand new custom mudlib developed from scratch for the DGD driver. It is considered necessary for a number of technical reasons including code maintenance and upgrades. Although AROA is an acronym, the wizardry have not released the name that it stands for, in part because of concerns for protecting the secrecy of some of the setting and storyline changes that may be included. Players have referred to AROA as "A4", or Astaria 4, continuing the progression from A1, A2, and A3, each iteration marking significant changes in the game.

Driver concerns

The driver is a combination of interpretation layer and compiler which serves as an interface in between the server's operating system and the MUD's lib. The original driver Astaria was built upon is MudOS, heavily modified over a period of years by Edison and renamed MUM. Because MudOS is not actively developed, and because Edison has retired from the wizardry, there is no actiive development on either MudOS or MUM drivers.

The choice of DGD for the new driver was made in part because DGD is a more technically advanced driver and in part because, unlike MudOS/MUM, DGD still has a community of active development. Moving from a very heavily customized lib to one much closer to off-the-shelf will also enable the administration to apply patches, bugfixes, and version upgrades cleanly.

Lib concerns

In the past, the wizardry have been very vocal concerning a number of limitations which serve to inhibit development. Among these are factors such as the age of the original lib and driver, the selection of unskilled coders to develop game elements, and historical game design decisions which no longer reflect the direction that the mud's setting and gameplay are desired to progress. The decision was made that it would be less work overall, and yield a superior end result, to create a brand new lib from scratch rather than trying to replace very large portions of Astaria's deep underlying code or trying to retrofit Astaria's setting and gameplay into an existing DGD lib.

Public announcements

On October 26, 2009, Kalder posted to the Notifications Board announcing the new lib. The post can be found archived here.

Excerpt:

Thanks to an outstanding and highly productive collaborative effort of the
staff members over the past few months, we now have developed a new core
mudlib which addresses a great many of these problems, and introduces a lot
of very significant new features that we've wanted for a long time, now --
both features that players would appreciate, and features to make the
coding aspect of our wizard jobs easier.

Kalder has repeatedly stated that because of the order of magnitude of work involved in a project this large, it is impossible to give any remote degree of accurate estimate in how long it'll take before the new lib is playable or even testable.

It has been confirmed by the wizardry that plans are being made to attempt to migrate data from the existing A3 lib into the A4 lib, although the amount of data that will be capable of being migrated is uncertain. No official statements have been made as to how levels will be handled, aside from that the staff does not want every player to have to start back from level 1.