cg@myrias.UUCP (Chris Gray) (09/22/87)
As anyone who has looked at my Draco distribution will know (Fish disks 76
and 77), I've been working on a rewrite of Empire for the Amiga. Well, I'm
almost done and am nearly ready to distribute it. We've talked here about the
possibility of going commerical with it, but have decided not to (too much
trouble, we'd need some GOOD documentation, don't want to copy protect it,
etc.) So anyway, my question to you folks out there is this: should I post
the stuff (nearly 20,000 lines of Draco source, and the final linked object
file is about 250K), or should I just pack it all on a disk and send it to
Fred Fish (I think it'll fit on one disk)?
Those of you who don't know what Empire is have my sympathy, but it is
basically a long-term, multi-player territorial/naval/economic/military game
which is a fascinating way to burn up LOTS of time. It's been around on UNIX
in various versions for a few years.
My version (I should say "our version" - Chris Thierman was the original
pusher for doing it and he did some of the code) contains everything that
the Peter Langston "Old Empire" contains, with the exception of treaties.
The implementation is completely new, the first half being done based only
on the user documentation. It will run happily on a 512K Amiga (I think!!),
but will need extra memory to rebuild (BLink runs out on a 512K system).
It allows only one player at a time, but that player can either be on the
Amiga locally or can be connected over a modem at 300, 1200 or 2400 baud.
We've been playing with various versions of it for a few months, and it is
stable enough for use, although there are certainly a few bugs left. What it
really needs is some GOOD documentation, about 100 pages worth (I'm serious
about that - its a big game). Hopefully, someone out there who can write
better than us will provide this.
Anyway, MAIL me your thoughts on my above question and I'll let you all know
what we end up doing.
P.S. Working on Empire turned up one of the three known bugs in the
distributed version of my Draco compiler.
--
Chris Gray Myrias Research, Edmonton +1 403 432 1616
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