From: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pbm
Subject: Re: Galaxy Option Requested
Date: 14 Dec 92 19:48:07 GMT
Reply-To: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Organization: Carderock Division, NSWC, Bethesda, MD

In rec.games.pbm, kjp@cvcggcv.ic.ac.uk (Mr K.J. Pankhurst) writes:
>Another suggestion I had by a player in my Alpha & Beta games, was to have
>ship speeds (unloaded and fully loaded) and shield strengths listed for each
>ship in the 'Your Ship Type' section.

There's a problem with this.  The speed and strength depends on the research
levels, so this information will be different depending on when you build
the ship.  You could of course use the current research levels, which would
show you what the numbers would be if you built the ship "now".

For shield strength, you really should show 3 numbers (like the "safe"
command someone posted)  You need to know what size gun can't break the
sheield (the 0%) number, what size gun has a 50% chance, and what size
gun has a 100% chance.

The problem however is there's almost no end to the amount of information
you might want on these reports.  I think that in general, it's better
to keep the reports simple, and make sure they continue to be easy to parse,
and then develop tools to generate all these other numbers.

For that mater, instead of adding more information to the reports, I'd
really like to see a different output format that was designed to be easier
to parse.  This would make it much easier to develop our own tools.  This
would also help reduce the size of the mail messages.

The new format should continue to use spaces to seperate fields, but it
should only use one space between each field.  Every line should start
with a record type number.  Like the "Status Of Players" section could
be type 1, "Ship Types" could be type 2 etc.  Each section should begin
with a special (type 0) record that marked the beginning of the new
section.  It would specify the name of the section, record format, and
field headers.  It would look somthing like this:

0 1 Status_Of_Players xffffffix NDWSCPI#R
1 VOGONS 1.66 1.00 1.44 1.00 2298.57 1867.07 8 Peace 
1 Interferons 2.00 1.97 1.35 1.00 7497.09 4832.23 16 
1 Plague 2.21 1.93 2.41 1.00 3102.13 2048.65 8 War 
1 Ergonauts 3.47 2.38 2.61 1.00 6848.03 6254.38 13 War 

0 2 Ship_Types xxfffff PNDAWSC
2 Interferons Drone 1 0 0 0 0 
2 Interferons Gunship 4 2 2 4 0 
2 VOGONS D 1 0 0 0 0 
2 VOGONS BigGun 0 1 300 2000 0 

0 3 Planets ixxffffffxfff TPNXYSRPIP$MC
3 0 Interferons Glyco 124.21 69.13 1000.00 10.00 1000.00 1000.00 CAP etc. ...
3 0 Interferons 135 124.21 69.13 1000.00 10.00 1000.00 1000.00 CAP etc. ...
3 0 VOGONS 136 124.21 69.13 1000.00 10.00 1000.00 1000.00 CAP etc. ...
3 0 VOGONS 137 125.83 69.42 1000.00 10.00 1000.00 1000.00 CAP etc. ...
3 1 Uninhabited 124 84.56 83.33
3 1 Uninhabited 125 85.65 84.92 564.21 .23
3 1 Uninhabited 126 85.65 84.92 
3 2 Unidentified 132 94.23
3 2 Unidentified 132 94.23

0 4 Groups xiixffffxfxf PG#TDWSCTQDR
4 Interferons 1 89 Drone 1.00 0 0 0 - 0 126 
4 Interferons 2 560 Drone 1.00 0 0 0 - 0 127
4 Interferons 3 32 Drone 1.00 0 0 0 - 0 128
4 VOGONS 1 18 BigGun 1.00 0 0 0 - 0 VOGON

Notice that I've done things like combine the different ship type
sections into one section where the each line includes the race
name of the ship.  Same thing with the Planets.  All the planets
are shown with the same record type.  I changed the order
of the information in the planets so the size and resource level
come before all the other numbers so that the missing information
will always be at the end of the record.

The first tool to write would be one that took a format like this
as input and produced a "standard" turn report.  Then everyone
could modify that program as needed to produce the numbers
they wanted to see, in the way they wanted to see them.

Messages from other players would have to be in a different format.
And I'm not sure how battles should be encoded.

And if you had a format like this, here's some more information
I'd like to see added to every turn report:

    The game name, race name, turn number, and the e-mail address to
    send moves to should begin every report.  This is what uniquely
    defines the report.  You need the e-mail address because multiple
    GM's have a tendency to use the same game name.  For example, I'm
    in two different games called Alpha right now.

    The version number of the galaxy game (so the software tools can be
    written to work correctly with different versions of galaxy).  I'm
    now forced to maintain multiple verions of some of the tools and
    I have to remember which version to use on which turn report.  It's
    a real pain.

    Information about the format of orders should be included in each
    turn report.  The required Subject line, the header and trailer
    lines, and the e-mail address to send the orders to.  This way,
    the galaxy tool can pre-format the e-mail message for you.  It's
    hard to remember these things when playing multiple galaxy games
    where every GM wants a different format.

    The status of players should also include the e-mail address of the
    player, and the name and X-Y cord of the player's homeworld (whether
    they sill own it or not).  In games like Kevin's Alpha and Beta games,
    which have around 50 players each, it gets real hard to figure out
    who controls which sections of the galaxy.  It would also make it
    easier to spot Russell when he takes over a role mid-game so all
    his neighbors can gang up on him :-).

    The other way to do this is to have a new section that just listed
    all the homewords.  This would be nice because it would show

    A machine readable list of all the undefined groups (i.e. - on the
    map).  All you need is the X and Y cord of the group.  You might
    argue that if you had this, you could write tools to figure out the
    exact speed and destination for each group.  If this was seen as a
    problem, then you could round the X and Y cord off to whole numbers
    to make this calculation harder and less accurate.

I have a galaxy viewing tool I wrote for my NeXT.  Right now, I only
use it for looking at the galaxy and for calculating distance.  To make
a move, I have to go though a many-step process of editing, sorting,
and processing the turn report to get all the informatioin I need and
in the right order.  I use a whole collection of different tools to
do this.

If the above information was included in the turn reports, it would be
easy to add enough features to my NeXT tool so that I could use it for
everything.  And because it's an interactive tool, it can be much
better than any static report.  You can ask it to show you the
information in different formats.  You don't have to pick one format.

Curt Welch