What Is The State Of The Atlas Project

[Rhobher Nichaleir]

I had seen a page or two of the Atlas project about a year ago. It was good stuff.

What is the current state of the Atlas???

[Athos69]

I can't speak for the Atlas team, but I do know that Ian Hoskin's computer suffered a motherboard and CPU meltdown in the hot Australian summer. His Hard Drive is still OK, but as far as I know, his access to the internet is limited through the local library. I would hazard a guess that the files are on his HD, and we are awaiting his getting a new MoBo and chip.

Ian, if you read this, please drop me a line at mikeDOTdowdATshawDOTca. I have an enhancement to run past you for the section of the atlas that is almost done.

[Fearless_Leader]

I think I can speak on the state of the Atlas pretty well (though the below may be out of date, as it has been some time since I discussed the release plans with Ian (these plans having been devised around November 10)).

We decided to release the Atlas in smaller chunks than originally intended, so that fewer people can accomplish more. Originally, we intended to release the Anuire section after a few months, but nearly 80% or more of our authors dissappeared after contributing nothing. :angry: This led to the problem that if we continued doing all the domains in Anuire in a fairly haphazard way, working toward a release of All Anuire, it would be a long, long time before we ever finished, if at all. So it was basically decided that if we released smaller sections, we could rely on fewer people, and thus get work done faster... in effect, we've divided the work down even further than before. Who knows... if we have more people working, we could probably work on several of these smaller sections at the same time. At the moment, we're aiming toward releasing the first of these sections, which is nearly complete, and will probably be released around the same time as the revised BRCS (though I'm not sure about that... not being on the BRCS team, I can't say with any certainty).

The first release, covering the Southern Coast (assuming the above plan is still in effect), will probably be around 70 or 80 pages in length (as compared to about 12 pages in Ruins of Empire). The last rough draft I saw was 50 pages in length and it included about 2/3rds of the Southern Coast realms and a few of the other organizations (guilds, temples, wizards). Beyond that, a great deal of work has been completed for the other releases, though there's still a mountain of it to be done. The plan is to hopefully be able to put out one of these smaller sections a month or two after each other (the next release after the Southern Coast is the Western Coast).

A couple months back, Ian recruited some more authors from the forum, but I don't know what the state of that is. When he gets back from his computer problems, I'll know more.

The scope of the Atlas I think has grown quite a bit. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that if we succeed in covering the whole of Cerilia (a long, long ways away and through much work) the entire Atlas might well exceed 1000 pages in length.