From: lance@shoppe.ucolick.org (Lance Bresee) Subject: Re: Origins of Empire Date: 1996/11/24 Message-ID: <57a52p$acj@darkstar.ucsc.edu>#1/1 references: organization: UCO/Lick Observatory newsgroups: rec.games.empire An addendum to the history of Empire which I would not like to see forgotten is Ken Dowers. He and three other people at the University of Oklahoma University Computing Services ported the existing code in the mid 1970's to run on a vax 11/780 under VMS. They also transported the Moria code (developed at UOKUCS) to the Unix environment. The game Ken and company ended up with used memory for the map data, and the file calls locked up the machine by overloading the IO queues. There were no land units and no distribute, but there was weather, and a country could get considerable damage from storms. The weather function merely associated each sector a numerical value between 0 and 9, with 0 being extremely low pressure (hurricane) and calculate damage proportional to the severity of the weather. The function was not completely random, but would have ellipsoids generated in a rather random manner, but which, once created, travel about the map either increasing or decreasing in size and intensity untill they dispersed. I thought it a very interesting addition. Before planning an attack, you had to check the weather report. It is still running as a file called empirium on aardvark at uokucs.uoknor.edu. Ken was probably a better than average computer geek, but a terrific human being, and a great help to many people, myself included, at OU. It was a great shock when he committed suicide. lance@lick.ucolick.org http://www.ucolick.org/~lance/home.html