Hi Tracer. I never had the pleasure of meeting you when you made maps but I am aware of your contributions. You've missed a lot in the intervening years. I took over running the site and the Community Pack at Jay's behest several years ago, and I've made a huge amount of improvements to keep NAB running smoothly on modern systems.
Firstly, join the NAB Community Discord as that's the primary method I use to keep players up to date with the evolving changes taking place.
discord.gg/P8xwrd6
As for your questions, I had to make considerations for user-friendly-ness and efficiency's sake. When loading a huge list of maps into NAB's memory, longer lists took a huge amount of time to load, leaving the game hanging like it had crashed. The easiest solution at the time was to cut down the maplist to only the most played and most complete maps.
Maps were archived if they were of poor gameplay quality (IE the bots were just clustered in a room plinking at eachother with default weapons and little else), or were archived for historical preservation after having been renovated to the new standards (new improvements to the base game that affected maps had to be proliferated into all the old files one by one). That is why I started the NAB Map Index sheet to keep track of the mess.
However, that ended up being a stop-gap measure, as some recent developments have made the efficiency issue less of a problem. I refactored the map-loading code and it runs something like 3 to 4 times faster now. Still, players tend to be overwhelmed by the 500ish maps in rotation, so I still think the archive is a good idea for maintaining that list with basically only maps that don't have outstanding issues.
However, my work in archiving and updating maps was never completed, and at some point in the middle I also changed my standards of quality. As a result, a few maps slipped through the cracks. Charlotte wasn't exactly chosen, it just remained as I didn't want to disturb what was essentially a memorial. As for Stadium, I archived the "updated" version under the name Stadium as that original test version isn't available to download anymore.
The new NAB Updater program I made makes it pretty easy to download even those archived maps one by one if your only goal is to re-live them. This can be done by changing the community pack version in the advanced mode to the archive branch and selecting only the maps you want to download from that list.
As for your last question, right now I'm just working on NAB every now and then in my spare time. Usually I'm adding quality of life features (like UI-based maplists, mutators, botmatch menus etc...) or investigating bugs brought up by users. Sometimes I also work on updating maps. I've been remaking a small number of unfinished community maps (in a process I call renovation) but I have to have some inspiration to go off and that usually requires the presence of a strong theme I can expand upon. Examples here:
rajada.github.io/portfolio/games.html#comparisons
Additionally, my work has been split between maintaining this version of NAB and a new engine updated version that is still in the works that fixes a number of stability issues related to modern hardware. Suffice to say I've been busy and not very organized in my efforts.
However, if you do want to help I value feedback of any kind. Weapon and map balance are a main concern of mine and I definitely don't get enough feedback regarding updates. If you want to help out a bit, join that Discord server, DM me, and I can throw you some resources and get your opinion on how I plan to change things moving forward, because this iteration of the Community Pack isn't even the final one I had in mind when I picked up the mantle years ago.
