From: wang@cs.uiuc.edu (Eric Wang)
Subject: Re: Strategy algorithms
Reply-To: wang@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Distribution: inet
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 02:51:39 GMT

>hmallat@robin.cs.hut.fi (Hannu Mallat ~ PurpleHaze!) writes:
>>I'm planning on programming a simple(ish) strategy game, something
>>like Empire.

draper@ais.org (Patrick Draper) writes:
>I think Walter Bright wrote that one. Empire has a long history, dating all
>the way back to Fortran IV on a mini, if I am not mistaken.

>Does anyone know the history of Empire?  Is the Walter Bright that is with
>Zortech and often on the net the same one as the author of Empire?

The following is drawn from the READMEs of several versions of Empire,
clouded over by the haze of many years.

Single-player PC Empire originated at Reed College in Oregon in the late
70's, I believe, as (of all things) a tabletop game.  Peter S. Langston,
one of the Reed gamers, wrote the first computer implementation, I think
in Fortran on a PDP-11, to relieve the players from the vast amounts of
bookkeeping that the game required.  This version was ported to numerous
other platforms, including VMS.

Some time later (soon afterwards, I think), Walter Bright implemented
essentially the same game for IBM PCs, apparently while an undergrad at
Caltech.  (When I was there from '83 to '88, there were rumors that
WGB's original Fortran source code still existed in compilable form
somewhere in Dabney House, but was jealously guarded.  Once, while
visiting Dabney House's computer room, I actually saw somebody tinkering
around in an ...\empire\src directory that contained about 40 files with
names like move.f attack.f fighter.f city.f, but I had to leave almost
immediately and never got another chance to snoop on that computer.
However, this is now moot, as C source for empire has been in the public
domain for several years, and can be anon-ftp'd from various archives.)
I'm not sure how WGB Empire is related to PSL Empire.

Eventually, WGB sold his implementation of Empire to Interstel, who
retconned it into their Starfleet series of games.  (Starfleet I was a
success; Starfleet II: Krellan Commander, as you might recall, was a
total flop, as it was thoroughly riddled with fatal bugs.  Empire became
Starfleet 1.5, but it doesn't really fit.)  The latest version I've seen
of Interstel Empire is 2.05, which by now is about 5 years old and is,
in a nutshell, no challenge to a moderately skilled player.  WGB and his
co-author spent much work making it graphical and implementing a pretty
user interface, but no discernable work in improving the play of the
computer opponents over the non-graphical public version 1.5.  Overall,
I found it to be rather disappointing, nice on the outside and hollow on
the inside.

While at Caltech, WGB also wrote a C compiler, which he later marketed
as the Datalight C compiler, which was one of several viable compilers
in the mid- to late-80's C market.  He later joined Zortech and was, so
I hear, instrumental in developing their C++ compiler.  I recall seeing
infrequent posts from him before Borland C++ took off, but I haven't
been haunting the right newsgroups since then.

Finally, numerous persons have ported Empire to C on Unix, and source
code for a couple versions thereof are available for anon-ftp from all
of the big archive sites.  If you want to write your own Empire, try
downloading one of these first -- it'll get you started in the right
direction or cripple you forever with its bad ideas, take your pick.
I've never compiled one of these suckers, so I can't say how well it
plays.  I seriously doubt they're any better than WGB's computer
opponents, though, otherwise the game would be worth playing, people
would still be playing it, and I'd have heard about it.  And I haven't
(more's the pity).

>If it is, we can go right to the horses' mouth, so to speak.

Well, you could try, but I'd guess that Zortech C++ is much higher a
priority to him than a game.  I've heard rumors that WGB is working on
the next version of Empire, naturally written in Zortech C++.

Eric Wang
wang@cs.uiuc.edu




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