Space Empires on Facebook?
 

I've been playing a lot of Scrabulous, a Scrabble clone on Facebook, when it occurred to me that a 4X space empire building game could work really well inside Facebook. Think about it.

It would work much better than play-by-email since turns won't get thrown in with all the work, personal, and spam emails. Games would play a quite a bit faster.

Alliances, clans, and play-by-committee games would actually become practical, since the Facebook API gives access to friends lists and there are built in community functions. (If we had a tool like this back in the day, the League of Empires vs Chaos Contingency war might have actually happened.) Plus there would be a central place to find players and open games. Scrabulous lets you invite friends to play or have an open table that anyone can join.

Treaties and interstellar politics would be much more detailed since there's already a built-in messaging and notification system. You could piggyback gifting, trading, and treaty proposals on top of that.

Since Facebook apps tend to spread virally, quick small-scale games could be available to casual players, while large galaxies and quadrants would satisfy those who want their games to last several months or years at a time.

Note: this post is identical to a duscussion thread I posted on the Space Empires Facebook Group.

Re: Space Empires on Facebook?
 

Hmmm... well I don't think you mean SE directly in the browser. But something like PBW, only much easier to log in and have a one-time blitz game in like 1-5 systems. And an already established messaging and notification framework.

Could be something interesting to look into for PBW v2. I'm willing to work on it.

Re: Space Empires on Facebook?
 

It would be intersting to see a version of Space Empires in-browser. Not SE5 of course, but maybe something like SE3 or SE4. I believe both were built in Visual Basic, so I don't think a direct port would be possible.

On the other hand, a full web-based interface that gave access to a desktop version of Space Empires would probably be more powerful.

Re: Space Empires on Facebook?
 

They were written with Delphi. SE1 and SE2 were VB.

Re: Space Empires on Facebook?
 

Ahh. I knew it was something wierd. I remember playing SE2 and hearing someone say it was written in Visual Basic. I assumed 3 and 4 were too. I don't know much about Delphi. If you had access to the source code, would it be easy to implement some sort of API in a Delphi program that would easily interface with a web-based app?

Re: Space Empires on Facebook?
 

...Facebook has always sounded to me like something you do just after you've been embarrassed.

Re: Space Empires on Facebook?
 

Depends on how it was written. If the code follows the object-oriented dogma of MVC to the letter, then yes; you're just writing a new 'V' part. But it's not often that a project of that size will have that much code discipline, especially when it's basically one coder with no review processes. There would need to be at least some changes.