Hello,
pure coincidence to have a look at the current development brought me to this forum, and I am happy to help You out.
I have no idea what Arcadia is.
I found that later release later, but I don't know how much better it is, and it was after Qwerty helped me get this to compile.
There is that one game, but I think a game with just Bay12'ers would be awesome.
Arcadia was a series of games based off a branch of Atlantis. The later versions had significant changes. After they finished, they released their source code somewhere, but as you can see, their site's gone.
Beeing the initiator, co-developers and co-gamemaster of the project I can shed a little light of what Arcadia was:
We ran four games (Arcadia, Gruehelm, Nylandor, Xanaxor) based on the Atlantis pbem framework, gaining some experience in setting up the server and playing around the rulesets. All of our games had pre-defined victory conditions with a background story (i.e. civil war, dragon plague), and our main developer even programmed a whole quest into Nylandor, and a adventure labyrinth, the
One Eyed Labyrinth, into Xanaxor.
At the end, the Arcadia code was much more diverse than the Atlantis 5 main branch, and some of its features were even ported back into Atlantis 5.
Arcadia V core features were:
* new battle system
* heroes with many interesting attributes
* a much more interesting and diverse magic system
* quest/Labyrinth levels
* hex side terrain
* versatile game editor
* its own, modifed version of the Atlantis Little Helper Client program
* close ended game with game goals
* smaller map, viewer players (around 12-16)
* highly competitive enviroment (our players very very agressive)
The mailing list of our games can still be found at
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/arcadia-pbm/. I know that I have put up the sourcecode for public download somewhere, and certainly I have given the crew of atlantisdev a chance to put it up to their site. Right now, however, I can not find it in my files.
If You intend to start programming Your own Pbem, either by making Your own engine or by modifying one, seek help from some experienced GMs. Atlantis pbem games offer some downsides that can be addressed with some tweaks. I advise reading the
atlantisdev mailing list thoroughly.
Cheers,
Piotr