about the chosen
50,000 years ago, seven entities destroyed the entire human race.
This is their story.
That line's been revised a few times. Before this thing is over, it'll doubtless be revised a few more.
about the second edition
Regarding having spent the latter part of 2008 and the entirety of 2009 rewriting, reformatting, adding new pages and generally redoing The Dualist:
Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.
-- Raoul Duke
He said he understood. But I could see in his eyes that he didn't.
-- ibid
It was one hell of a time sink with a high cost in readership, it totally stalled story development for books two and four, and yes. It was worth it.
about the story
In broad strokes:
Book One : "Crash" : January 31, 1968 : A starship crashes in southeast Asia. Soviet-backed NVA troops and US Special Forces race to the scene.
Book Two : Dead City Radio : Pittsburgh, 1997. A man, a ghost, and a squad of cyborg ninjas. Cyborg ninjas from outer space.
Book Three : The Dualist : Five years after the events of DCR, a string of terrible coincidences!
Book Four : Transitional Voices : Or "Act Three" of The Dualist.
Book Five : "Society" : A glimpse at the world outside* the Templar/Heirotus conflict, as those involved struggle to figure out just what the hell is really going on. Also, bigass space battles and all kinds of explosions and whatnot.
Book Six : "Quest" : With all cards on the table, it's time to pick up the pieces and get down to business. All threads converge.
Book Seven : "Finale" : (no comment)
The above list is temporary and is a condensed excerpt from notes generated the weekend of 2008.12.06, during which several bits of books one, four, five and seven were roughed out. One ("Crash") has been on the drawing board for awhile, but since production began on DCR it's become obvious that there's no way in hell Jason can remember events he wasn't present for. And those events kind of matter.
As for the present mess that is production... everything after The Dualist depends on The Dualist. DCR doesn't become critical again until "Society" and while the entire story is built on the events of "Crash," certain details of that story won't actually matter until much, much later.
The story has a definite shape. It has a definite beginning, a murky, sloppy, drunken middle, and a definite end. It's getting there - to the beginning or end, take your pick - that's proving to be the hard part.
DCR, TV, and the second edition of The Dualist will be finished before I start serious development on anything else. Which at the current pace means I'll be starting on Book Five or Book One around 2015.
* By "outside" I mean "affected by but not directly involved with." This is the one point in the story where I'd love to "diverge" and turn things into an ongoing series... but considering just how long it's taken to get things as far along as they are, and just how big this particular book is going to be regardless, I doubt that's going to happen.
about the assets
Commissioned, freely downloaded, or purchased assets used in the production of ATC:
Vehicles
Daedalus (hull, engines, landing gear and UVW coordinates)
frame designed by Daniel H
landing gear and engines designed by Chris Bodine
modelled by Chris Bodine
LIV-238 (body)
frame designed by Daniel H
landing gear and rear landing gear housing designed by Chris Bodine
modelled by Chris Bodine
2002 Chevy Impala (body)
Purchased from Turbosquid.com user 21st Century 3d
Ural-375 troop transport (body and most textures)
Purchased Turbosquid.com user Alex Kontz
Barn in Ohl (April 09)
Turbosquid.com user Flipper42
Lincoln Town Car (driven by Ornix)
Turbosquid.com user cholasimmons
Textures
A lot of splattery, funky source materials were created by Chris Smith. The book wouldn't look anything like it does without his contributions.
Some concrete materials used in Chapter Eight began life at Robin Graham's website, spectralogue.com.
Star maps come from www.jpl.nasa.gov courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Terra
Assembled using JC Francois' Photorealistic Earth tutorial, which can be found at http://www.noirextreme.com/earth.
The surface was put together from high-resolution imagery downloaded from NASA. See The Visible Earth at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/ for more information.
Bump, specular, and night maps come from James Hastings-Trew's Planetary Pixel Emporium, which can be found at http://planetpixelemporium.com. The lunar maps come from the same place.
Cloud maps began life at Don Edwards's page at The Celestia Motherlode.
All URLs are valid as of 2007.08.01.
Except for the Ural-375 - which needed only a small amount of detailing - all Turbosquid media, all texture maps, and all Terra components have been tweaked, cleaned up, and/or extensively modified between acquisition and deployment.
about the staff
Eric is ATC's webhost and admin. He's a gloriously hoopy frood who does the command line level ickiness so I don't have to. He also kicked a hell of a lot of ass on the 2010 version of the website, for which Vai also deserves an honorable mention.
bda owns the ATC domain, and gave me the initial kick in the ass that got this thing off the shelf and into production.
Xenothaulus is the Official ATC Typornographer. This means I harass him to check a fresh page for typos and correct anything he finds before I print the thing off, duplicate the page folder and call it a night.
Linguistic gaffes don't really concern me unless they shit themselves all over a comic page- those take between a few minutes to forever to fix. I've no concern for typos in any section of the site save The Comic and the Wiki. Xeno handles The Comic. I've known him for as long as it's possible to know someone you're not related to- I'd love to be able to say he got the job through nepotism but the fact is he's good at it.
21:11 * xeno WILL typornorpgrahp;l.
21:12 <xeno> some day when ki'm not having drunk all the vaodak and beers
21:12 <xeno> studid fockad
21:12 <solios> O_o
21:12 <xeno> iI HATE IST
21:12 <solios> FOCKAD
21:12 <xeno> had klike have l bottle left
21:12 <xeno> and some mt. sdew
21:12 <xeno> and was like HEY!
21:12 <xeno> NAD misxed them
21:12 <xeno> and it sucked
21:12 <xeno> SO MUCHA SS
21:13 <solios> apparently.
21:13 <xeno> it was awesome
21:13 * xeno ponders bed (re: passing the fuciknout_
21:13 <solios> I AM blogging this.
21:14 <xeno> =P
Sometimes.
about the artist
Dan's been working on some facet of ATC since study hall in November of 1994. The 2008 edition of the website and the launch of the second edition of The Dualist mark the fourteenth anniversary of the first drawing of an Addicaine.
The fact that the Compost Heap Of Ideas didn't gel into the universe portrayed in the comic until around 2004 is a minor nit. It feels like more of a Big Damned Epic if the years of school, women, and drugs get counted as development time.
And they are, which is why what you're reading is more "David Cronenberg's Robotech" than "Michael Bay's The Crow" - what it would have been if production production had begin with all of the ideas and none of the experience.
When not working on ATC, Dan dabbles in video compositing and editing. He enjoys STALKER, Team Fortress, and whiskey.