[sent to Darren Hebden, Roguelike News, on July, 12th, 1998]


        I am writing you to inform you that I am going to shut down the
        ORCS! project, due to the unsuccessful attempt to form a good
        programming group aiming at bringing our project to life.

        After exactly an year of life, I had to draw a picture of what
        has been done and what has not. The website and mailing list 
        were brought up in little time, and the "word" spreaded very 
        well around the globe. The mailing list collected several 
        contributors, and some of them are *good* programmers, but 
        no one (including, of course, me) was so free from work to
        dedicate much time to it (other than small messages of course).
        I had a lot of both work and personal problems last year that
        kept me away from ORCS!, and my unability to coordinate the
        project kept all of the other contributiors in an idle state.

        Obviously, this is not the fault of anyone (other than mine) and
        there were simply too many things to talk about and nothing to 
        work on. So, I have decided to shut down the PUBLIC ORCS! project
        for a while, and to start working on it on my own. I have already
        started to work on the game and compiler kernels, and since I 
        will be alone, I won't have to spend hours chatting about this
        and that. I want to end up with something usable within a few
        months, and to be able to offer to the public a stable protogame
        kernel as well as a protocompiler and a language. At *THAT* time,
        with a working tool in our hands, I will put the ORCS! project
        back on track, and will give huge announcements around the 
        newsgroups and on your webpage. 

        I will also shut down the ORCS! webpage and replace it with a
        brief "news bullettin" with the progress of my personal work 
        and the directions I will be taking step by step. At the same
        time, you will be the only person I will try to constantly 
        update on the progress of the project. 

        Hoping to have a better success this way ;-)

        Greetings. 

        Fabio d'Alessi