This software started as a c++ library (Strand, 2002) and has been modified to be a c++ backend and R frontend. The idea is to provide a flexible environment for designing and running forward-time genetic simulations. Populations can have complex demography and there can be arbitrary dispersal among them. Microsatellites, Infinite alleles and sequences can be simulated.
Several functions (landscape.amova.locus, landscape.locus, landscape.locus.states, landscape.mismatchdist, landscape.states) that access genetic information from landscapes had a strange order for parameters. That has been resolved to be the same as the rest of rmetasim, where the first argument is the landscape. If you have code that uses these and is based on rmetasim v<3.0, you will need to rearrange the parameters for these function calls, unless parameters were explicitly named in the calls.
Strand, A. Metasim 1.0: an individual-based environment for simulating population genetics of complex population dynamics. Mol. Ecol. Notes, 2:373-376, 2002