mclure@sri-unix (05/10/82)
I think it would be quite useful to be able to specify the pair of sanctuary sectors for a new country. Recently, we had some new players join the game when there were very large countries. In a large world, it would be nice to place them far away from all these large guys so they have a chance to develop before encountering anyone.
pavel (05/11/82)
Keep in mind that the add command does not place the initial two sectors as it is currently written. This means that you can easily succeed in adding a nation and then find that they can't log in because there are no adjacent pairs left. It seems clear that the allocation of sectors should be done at add time and that the selection could be done manually. Also, note that there is a bug in the VAX version of Empire which gets highly non-random random numbers. Thus, even after looking 1000 times for an adjacent pair, it's really only looked at about eight places. (In 4.1BSD, if you take the numbers from rand() mod 8, you end up with a sequence of period eight...) Pavel Curtis Cornell University
pcl (05/11/82)
"In 4.1BSD, if you take the numbers from rand() mod 8, you end up with a sequence of period eight..." If I remember the details from my data structures class well enough, one should NEVER take the output of a nrandom number generator MOD anything (if you're trying to get random numbers, that is). The least significant bits are also the least random, and thus one should use DIV. Paul Lustgarten Bell Labs - Indian Hill