Well, after 8+ hours of imprisonment behind Sprintnet's f*ed-up services I can finally access Shrapnel again & what do I find? Development of new games starting in the open forums?

(BTW, anyone got some good terms of abuse for Sprintnet?

)
LCC, you are smoking something pretty strong if you think a game like you are describing can be done in 50,000 lines. Back before MS Windozer plowed all the competition under I was writing relatively simple things in Turbo Pascal like usenet news readers.

And my simple MS-DOS newsreader ran to 20,000 lines if you include the supporting units as well as the main code. (I tended to think "object oriented" even back then before it was a buzz word and kept compartmentalizing stuff into units to make it manageable.) Anyway, this was a single-user program designed for immediate user input and output. No multi-player, no PBEM, no AI, no 'simulations' of planetary or stellar events, no combat between ships with various settable attributes.... you get the picture. I would bet SE IV or even SE III are over 100,000 lines. MOO III will probably be a quarter million or more. The latest Versions of Windozer are supposed to be several million lines. You are WAY behind the times and had better take a refresher course on programming in Windozer environments, or *IX, before you get too far along in your estimates of how much work it will be. Aaron should be back from vacation soon. I wonder if we can get him to tell us how many lines of code are in SE IV?
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 02 August 2001).]