The Historical Online Learning Foundation Studies Group welcomes you to the "Skunk Works."  This is the primary R&D center for the Foundation.  Current efforts are centered around finalizing the development of Stephen Schmidt's Napoleonic Wars On-Line (NWOL) and the development of a replacement game engine for Civil War OnLine.

Once development of these game engines is complete, the Foundation's Distance-Simulations Group will begin a regular schedule of annual events based on these games and other variants being explored.

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Stephen Schmidt's began work on  Napoleonic Wars On-Line (NWOL) game engine in March 2003. Envisioned as a multi-faceted game engine in the traditional of the five module CWOL model, Stephen quickly developed the first reliable web-based coded game engine offered by the Foundation. As Stephen accomplished his milestones, it quickly became apparent that NWOL was a new game design that incorporated little from the old CWOL design and offers the members of the Player's Guild a unique approach to a group-based interactive game of the Napoleonic era. Since 2003, Stephen has finished the initial, Alpha stage, development of all modules for NWOL. Currently he is running his series of Beta Tests with a large group of players to get the final tweaks for NWOL perfected.

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Work on the future game engine for Civil War OnLine  began in December 2004.  This development is currently involves the addition of naval and economic modules to the basic game engine, War Between the States (WBTS), authored by MALCOM Games of Australia . This development will then be followed by a series of  Alpha tests in the spring and summer of 2005 then Beta testing during Fall 2005.

It is hoped that  WBTS will be ready for use to conduct CWOL 8 during mid-2006.