OT = How Does Shrapnel Stay In Business

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Originally posted by capnq:
LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

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I will have to check that out! I certainly do NOT want to waste my time reinventing the wheel...

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Originally posted by capnq:
Personally, your audio status indicators idea sounds like interface Hell to me. I've seen people describe Black & White as unplayable because of the scarcity of numeric status reports, among other things.
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I suppose I was not clear. As an OPTION to get a FEEL for how things are going with your managers and also to visually check for problem CLUSTERS on the map, you COULD specify association of four different values NORMALLY presented as tabular alphanumeric data, bar graphs, or charts to be displayed as color, texture, pattern, and sound. Each of the variables would have several possible values. Depending on the value of the variable, you get something different displayed on the map. For example :
1) Color : Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Cyan Magenta, anything else in the color chart, whatever you LIKE to move the color selection bars to create...
2) Texture : None, pebbly (dot grid), line grid, crosshatch, whatever you LIKE.
3) Pattern : any set of icon masks you like : such as plain old vanilla triangle, square, 5 point star, 6 point star, pentagon, octagon, circle, nested targeting circles, whatever in the world you LIKE.
4) Any sound file of appropriate length, Bach to Wagner, farts, screams, laughs, applause, whatever you LIKE.

And of course there is the old filter standby, STROBE whatever lies in the specified Category....

[Baron Munchausen]

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).]

[Atrocities]

spirit net, your only on in the after life.

Ditched them a long time ago. Now have qwest DSL. AT&T @ home is just as bad.

[Baron Munchausen]

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Originally posted by Atrocities:
spirit net, your only on in the after life.

Ditched them a long time ago. Now have qwest DSL. AT&T @ home is just as bad.

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Unfortunately I have no choice. It's not 'DSL' for me, it's the uplink for my ISP. So, unless they change providers there's not much I can do. The other ISPs in town are much more expensive than this one.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 02 August 2001).]

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Originally posted by capnq:
LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

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Okay, I checked out the Official site by Quicksilver Software. IMHO this is just a bigger Version of the SOS PHD they put out before, and while that was okay 3-7 years ago, it will NOT compete 3-5 years from now. I bet their AI still has to cheat and not use the same rules as the player just to survive....

Aaron has the right idea for the future, let the players/modders decide what they want the game to be. I propose taking Aarons concept further, but he was by NO means the first to think of this, nor was I of course. The General Purpose Simulator notion has been kicking around for a couple of decades ever since typical machines passed the Megabyte memory stage. (BTW that was thanks to the DEC VAX when they dropped the price of memory from $500,000 per Mb by IBM to $20,000 by DEC - BIG TIME OUCH FOR BIG BLUE!) But you need close to a Gigabyte and a mutiple GigaHertz processor to make it a usable notion. I propose writing the engines of a primitive GPS and providing seed data for a typical "game" along with all the interface required to make it playable. If I do it right, then the engine could be used with the appropriate data to simulate our world economy, or that of a nation, or a city, or a company, or whatever the heck you wanted. I just do not think that there is a market for it yet except as a game, because target specific simulations/ modeling would be MUCH MUCH faster and probably get MUCH MUCH more detailed than the interpretive engine would support on a PC. Of course the supercomputer of today is the pocket pc of next decade. Read John Varly "Marooned in Realtime" IIRC. My SF books have been packed since 89 for lack of shelf space.....

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
LCC, you are smoking something pretty strong if you think a game like you are describing can be done in 50,000 lines.

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The power company just taught me once again - NEVER EVER try to type a long post Online - ******* power glitch.
Okay, I will be brief. Way back in 82 I worked for a (long dead) company called NL McCullough Wireline Logging. They had a BIG TIME problem. Their customers all had a different notion of how to interpret the data coming up out of their oil wells. Although it paid BIG BUCKS ON BIG TRUCKS to service those customers, it was no where NEAR enough to support writing a customer specific realtime program for each one. Also, they had to support requests from geologists to change the formula used to generate the graphs in the next FIVE MINUTES. The data had to be done right and done NOW because the decision to take more depended on what they saw, and it cost $2-20 MILLION PER DAY for downtime on those wells. So the guy I worked for (Mike Smith, still out there somewhere?) had a BRILLIANT notion. (Those of you who are software developers will recognize his notion as similar to later Versions of Basic, but THIS WAS 82!) He developed a macrocommand interpreter engine (MIE) and a runtime engine (RE) to use its output. Basically a macrocommand was an assembler language function with just one call parameter - the address of an address/data block (ADB). The ADB size varied but contained just one kind of parameter, the address of an input/output parameter for the function. So with a little indirection it looks the same as any multiple argument function call. What the MIE did was parse the macrocommand language (TDS-11) file line extracting the function name, and text argument list. If the function had not already been loaded into memory then its name would be used to open the relocatable file and overlay load it into memory (the PDP-11 used was 64kbytes ADDRESS space) The list of arguments was translated into the adresses of standard data storage blocks with offsets for the specific variables. Then the function address was added to a chain of function calls along with the address of the ADB into which the variable addresses had been placed. When the file had been completely interpreted you would run the RE to execute the chain of function calls, passing the ADB pointer to each function. It was up to each macrocommand to correctly process its input list, calculate the outputs, and place them at the proper addresses. If the customer wanted to change the TDS-11 instructions, then all the MIE had to do was remove changed links and insert the new ones into the proper point in the list of function calls. The TDS-11 language was so simple that even the customer geologists could write and maintain their own custom programs. All of this was done in 82 on a miserable PDP-11 with less than 10000 lines of source code for the engines. So having seen it done, I KNOW HOW TO DO IT, AND ANY REASONABLY INTELLIGENT COLLEGE FRESHMAN COULD DO THE SAME USING THE DESCRIPTION I JUST PROVIDED.

Okay, so much for the language engine at 10000 lines. The other tricks lie in system and user interface of course. I estimate that at 20000 lines, as generic and data driven as possible, based on my experience with the Amiga. The final Category is the macrocommands to be interpreted by the engine and which in turn use the data files to either generate more macrocommands or to process the game data. What I plan is generic black box functions to do a variety of data manipulations, but NONE OF THEM HAS TO KNOW WHAT THE DATA MEANS. That's why I feel confident that 20000 lines will be sufficient...

So having spent a year or two writing that stuff I will still face the problem of game data - which could take another year just to create the tens of thousands of lines of names and numbers for the seeds to be used by the configuration generator. Plus all the audio and video files too of course, never forget that! But that can be done by OTHER people, and probably will be....

[capnq]

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I estimate that at 20000 lines, as generic and data driven as possible, based on my experience with the Amiga.

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And this is why the younger programmers who've never wrestled with anything but Windows APIs think you're hallucinating. Bloatware breeds bloatware, and modern hardware capacity allows the majority of programmers to hardly care about resource usage.

I can believe you're capable of writing tight enough code to meet your estimate, but I don't believe such code can be written for any flavor of Windows OS.

Also, I strongly recommend that anyone with unreliable power invest in an uninterruptable power supply.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[This message has been edited by capnq (edited 02 August 2001).]