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From: maden@rzsin.sin.ch (David Maden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Empire
Message-ID: <351:maden@rzsin.sin.ch>
Date: Mon, 2-Nov-87 21:44:28 EST
Article-I.D.: rzsin.351:maden
Posted: Mon Nov  2 21:44:28 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Nov-87 21:54:56 EST
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Considering all the recent mail regarding EMPIRE, I can't resist putting
my own 2 ha'p'orth (*), for what it's worth, into the discussion.

First, I don't see how Walter Bright can restrict distribution of a program
which he once put into the PD (I assume that DECUS received its copy of the
source for the VAX version of Empire from him, or at least with his blessing -
if not, I retract the following comments). It appears, though, that in a
moment of weakness or whatever, Mr Bright released the said source to the PD,
later realised that he had, perhaps, made a mistake in giving away something
which had commercial value and has since been trying to minimise the damage. It
sounds to me rather like crying over spilled milk, an occupation which is not
normally considered to be good business practice.

OK, having got that off my chest, let me say something about Empire, itself.

We happened to be one of the 'lucky' sites to have a copy of the Fortran source
of Empire from an old DECUS SIG tape. Having purchased my ST and having spent
rather too many hours playing Empire on our VAX, I thought it would be a fair
project to test out the PRO Fortran compiler on the ST by seeing how difficult
it would be to port the program. In fact it was quite easy, though the idio-
syncrasies (idiocies might be more apt) of the OTS as far as screen output
were concerned caused some headaches and the lack of debugging tools
meant a painful iteration loop to find and eliminate bugs. As far as I can tell,
it works as well as it ever did on the VAX. The map generation is slow but
its responsiveness afterwards is OK.

Now the bad news and why I never bothered to tell the world of this work.

a) The version is old (the startup message says Version 4.3 27-Aug-81) and
   rather easy to beat. You have to give the computer umpteen free moves to
   make it interesting. In the meantime, Version 5.00 (also old if the date of
   1-Dec-82, which it prints, is anything to go by) appeared on our VAX and was
   much harder to beat. It doesn't, as far as I can tell, have any new fighting
   units but its strategy is more purposeful and agressive. As a result, my
   ported version seemed rather uninteresting. I had the intention one of these
   rainy days of getting the updated source and porting that, an intention
   which I see is now likely to remain dormant.

b) In comparison with most ST type games, the mainframe version of Empire is
   rather lacking in decent graphics and sound effects. I simply assumed there
   would be no interest until I had invested some effort into this area too and,
   without a hard disk, the compile/link/try loop was too painful for me to
   raise the interest.

BTW. There is a commented out format statement in the source saying to send bug
     reports to ELROND::EMPIRE. Does anyone know who/where this is?).

* - ha'p'orth = halfpennyworth = not very much! A term derived from the
    halfpenny (pronounced haypenny), an obsolete unit of currency dating from
    the times when 'twopence' (pronounced tupens) could be abbreviated as '2d'
    without risking ambiguity with the American abbreviation for 'second'.
    Everybody else, of course, uses '2nd' when they mean 'second'.

<maden@rzsin.sin.chunet>                David Maden,
maden@czheth5a.bitnet                   Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research,
                                        CH-5234 Villi47`P