Basically, ATHR is a service backend for a series of games and related services that Rez is making for SecondLife. This service includes things like account management, inventory, terrain/water mapping, loot generation, and statistical data.
Acronymized Trade Holdings Resources is an abbreviation of a dumber backronym ‘Acronymized Engine for Trade, Holdings, and Extracted Resources’. If you’re not familiar, Rez is sort of autistic about acronyms and dumb names.
A few years back, Rez was toying with games that used geo-location. At the same time, some friends were making crab fishing boats. And then someone asked for a cargo hauling game. All of these use pretty much the same parts, or could probably all use the same backend.
The only project that got off the ground was Get The Freight Out! (GTFO). Rez and co learned a lot. Namely, people who get traffic / sales for free will drive you nuts. Rez sold GTFO! to contributing admins and is no longer a part of it. GTFO!, at the time, was just about hauling cargo and getting people moving around. Rez had more plans, these are the rest of the plans. _ _Rez is not making another cargo hauling game, even if there will be hauled cargo, it’s not the same thing.__
So you want to make your RPG, game or something in SL but don’t want to deal with fiddly database bits, ping us and we’ll see what we can do. We’re working on some top-to-bottom examples (see planned project summaries) to flesh out the system and to show you what our stuff can handle.