Mehul Patel

Mehul J Patel is a creator of Utopia and it's coder and owner till July 2008.

Mehul was Born in 1977, lives in Texas, USA. He holds a B.B.A. in Finance from The University of Texas at Austin which he graduated on May 1998.

Early Projects

Mehul Patel was the creator of some of the most influential and revolutionary BBS games of all time including Barren Realms Elite and Falcon's Eye. Barren Realms Elite were based on his older brother Amit Patel's own Solar Realms Elite. Mehul wrote an SRE-like game called Alpha Colony VI (AC6), then BRE, Falcon's Eye, The Arcadian Legends, and Earth:2025. The games were based on the same type of interface, and were designed with an almost identical look and feel. Also, they were InterBBS capable which was quite an acheivement in and of itself. however, After developing Falcon's Eye, Mehul began losing interest in the dial-up BBS world and began a project he called "Earth".

Earth 2025 was his first web-based game, built in Borland Delphi in six weeks and hosted on his Solarianet.com site. At first his target audience was 500 users, but within weeks thousands were playing the online BRE clone.

Old Code

Old Code is a first game engine, used from 1998 till July 2009. It was replaced by New Code.

Engine is written by Mehul Pattel on Delphi with records serialized into text files (i.e., there is no DBMS). It used IIS webserver, with no separation of data, presentation or game logic.

User interface is based on HTML 4, pre-CSS style HTML is embedded directly into the application code, later CSS libraries were added.

Old Code was used on from beginning till Age of Rebirth on World of Legends server, all Ages on Battlefields server and most Ages of Genesis, Utopian Standoff, Great Utopian War and Second Great Utopian War.

CGI Error

The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers.

A most feared message, that used to plague the servers and cause downtime of up to 24 hours at a time. Naturally, this led to quite a lot of dissension especially when people were in the midst of wars.

This mistake was at Old Code, but now is absent in New one.

Utopia

Utopia was his next project, and was essentially a clone of Falcon's Eye with many teamwork-type enhancements taken from BRE that weren't implemented in Earth. Utopia came online in November 9, 1998 after a series of betas (referred to by players as "First Beta", "Long Beta" and "Short Beta") and was even more popular than it's predecessor. Utopia was originally created under the company Solaria Games, which had its roots as early as 1996. In 1999 Solaria Games was renamed to Echelon Entertainment, then renamed in July 2000 to Swirve.com.

At July 2008 Mehul sold Swirve.com to OMAC under the stewardship of Brian & Sean.