cg@myrias.UUCP (Chris Gray) (11/20/87)
Tomorrow (or the day after if the meeting tonight is long!!) I'll be
officially releasing version 1.0 of Amiga Empire. The release consists
of one Amiga disk containing the source, executables and documentation for
both Empire itself and the EmpCre world-creation program. This new release
is considerably improved over the executable on the "Draco Other" disk
(Fish disk #77).
Amiga Empire is essentially a re-implementation of Peter Langston Empire
(Old Empire). It is complete except for treaties. The source is nearly
20,000 lines of Draco code. It has been developed, mostly by myself, over
the past 5 or 6 months in my spare time. This version supports up to 20
countries (plus the Deity), and worlds of size 16 x 16, 32 x 32, 64 x 64
and 128 x 128. The latter would require a hard disk to store. Players can
play on the local machine or can connect over the serial port at 300,
1200 or 2400 baud. A group of us here have played about four games over the
past 4 months (early ones only had the early features available of course),
so it should be fairly stable.
A couple of the commands have changed (e.g. there is an actual 'buy' command,
instead of doing it as part of the 'trade report' command). Also, some data
structures have been added to reduce the disk I/O needed - the program will
run quite happily on a floppy, but a hard disk or a RAM disk is definitely
preferable. Thus, you need only a 512K Amiga with one drive to run Empire
for half a dozen or more players. To BUILD Empire you need two drives and
a Meg or more of memory plus the Draco compiler (Fish disks 76 & 77).
Distribution: I'll be sending a disk along to Fred Fish, and to the two
people who sent me contributions for the Draco disks (shareware truly IS
dead!). Another friend has volunteered to upload the stuff to the Amiga
libraries on CompuServe. I'd rather let people like Fred do the
distribution, since they are set up for it, and keep my time for fixing any
bugs that show up, and working on my next-in-line projects.
More work can be done on Amiga Empire:
- add treaties (do they actually get used much?)
- allow more than one user at a time (the Amiga does multitask after
all. This is quite a bit of work.)
- start adding some of the features from other variants of Empire, such
as tanks, bombers, farms, etc.
- graphics (what kind, how do they interact with the text commands?)
Bugs: there are bound to be some, but as an indicator, no more than half a
dozen have shown up this last month. (It is run for typically 3 hours per
day on weekdays, 1.5 per day on weekends.) Please let me know about any
bugs, since we'd like them fixed in the version we play here. I don't know
how much activity there will be on this, so I don't know if its necessary to
volunteer to co-ordinate new variants of Amiga Empire.
--
Chris Gray Myrias Research, Edmonton +1 403 432 1616
{seismo!mnetor,ubc-vision,watmath,vax135}!alberta!myrias!cg