Atlas is going open source! Read the details about the plan and what we're doing next.
Going Open Source
The Atlas project started in the middle of 2021, with the intent of providing a platform that would support DAoC longevity in the long term.
As you all likely know, we started working off the Dawn of Light package - a great piece of software that bootstrapped our journey but almost immediately showed its limitations in supporting more than a few handfuls of players.
Working off that codebase, we've spent the past year refactoring the core pieces: introducing the gameloop, reworking event driven systems to instead use entity/component architecture, removing the 'good enough' combat formulas and ensuring parity with accepted data, and filling an entire game world with NPCs for our players to enjoy.
The past year was not an easy journey - thousands of hours of personal time devoted to the project, some team members had to say farewell to family, and one of us even introduced a new little lurikeen into the world!
Despite these hurdles, we were able to launch Atlas and crown the efforts of many team members (and players!) dedicating their free time spanning over 12 months.
As mentioned, our goal was to provide a platform to support the DAoC freeshard ecosystem's longevity moving forward.
To that end, we will be open sourcing what we call the 'Classic Module' for Atlas.
The Classic Module will include the core server code (the actual game server itself), the queue service, launcher, and web admin.
Additionally, a 'lite' version of our existing database containing all classes, mobs and encounters configuration and some sample mob camps setup - basically all is needed to run your Classic DAoC server whether small or big.
A large portion of our development time went into validating and verifying the changes we were making were accurate for the patch level. Thanks to this diligence, we believe our Classic Module will make a great starting point for any server wanting to build off of a 1.65 baseline.
Open Source Server
We will reflect the "open source" philosophy on the existing game server as well.
Atlas will continue to stay open and the team will continue working on new changes, fixes and features in response to the players feedback. We have no intention of shutting down Atlas at this time.
Additionally, our work will be viewable in a public code repository that players or other community members are free to contribute to as well. Our dev team is quite small and we will gladly welcome community input.
Moving Forward
In the immediate future, the plan is to keep working through our bug backlog in order to polish the Classic Module to a point where we are happy with it. Our inital priority will be fixing high-impact class specific bugs.
Additionally, we are formulating ideas for a sister server, Titan, based on a Player versus Player (e.g Mordred) ruleset. This server is currently in the initial testing phases and we will have another announcement discussing Titan in more depth at a future date.
Github
Our code is freely available on our Github: OpenDAoC Github