1 .TH Server "A Brief History of the Different Versions of Empire"
2 .NA History "Empire Revision History"
6 1985 PSL Empire, Peter Langston
8 Naturally, the original creator (or at least the last surviving
9 implementor) of Empire is Peter Langston. He distributed the
10 game that we all wanted to hack on, but naturally enough he
11 didn't give out the source! (he wasn't dumb...he probably knew
12 what we'd do to his code)
15 1986 UCSD Empire 0.x, Dave Pare
17 Made Empire multi-player with fixed update times. Added hex map, planes, nukes,
18 satellites, ships, market, distribute, and updates.
20 Jim Reuter (and his PDP/11 decompiler) provided Dave Pare with a large
21 quantity of amazingly readable decompiled code. His contribution
22 came at a time when Dave's interest in reverse-engineering was
23 flagging, and it provided what was necessary to create the
26 David Muir Sharnoff was responsible for promoting the early
27 development of Empire 0.X. Without David it is unlikely if Empire
28 would have escaped UCSD! He took on the onerous task of managing
29 the source, creating mailing lists, applying patches, and generally
30 making the early versions of UCSD Empire releasable -- they
31 sure weren't when they left Dave Pare's hands...
33 The rest of the folks who contributed to the early versions did
34 so with code and/or ideas. (If I've forgotten anyone, let me know!)
35 They appear in chronological order.
58 1986 BSD Empire 1.1, Dave Pare
60 The following people (listed in alphabetical order) have contributed
61 to the development of BSD Empire 1.1. Without these people, BSD
62 Empire would never have happened. Thanks also go to the XCF at the
63 University of California, Berkeley, for providing the facilities on
64 which we performed this herculean task.
76 198? UCB Empire 1.2, ??
78 Added announcements, food, removed weather, parks, petrol,
79 edu, terrorists, shoot, many new ships.
82 198? BSD Empire -- KSU Distribution (1.04), Jeff Bailey
84 One of the goals of the KSU team was to make the server as
85 configurable as possible. As such, they added many OPTIONS, and
86 global constants. Added abms, asats, bmap, autonav, scuttle,
87 NUKEFAILDETONATE, MISSINGMISSILES, SHIPNAMES, NEUTRON, RANGEEDIT,
88 MISSDEF, NOFOOD, UPDATESCHED, DEMANDUPDATE, ORBIT, FALLOUT, SAIL,
89 ALLYHARBOR, and fixed many bugs. Other contributers were:
96 198? Merc Empire ?.?, ??
98 Fixed many bugs and removed loans, added grind, starvation, and prod.
101 1992 Chainsaw Empire 1.0, Thomas Ruschak
103 Added land units, SUPER_BARS, EASY_BRIDGES, SLOW_WAR.
106 1992 Chainsaw Empire 2.0, Thomas Ruschak
108 Added trade ships, fuel, semi-land ships, ASW planes, payoff, wire, SNEAK_ATTACK
109 retreat paths, sweep planes, budget. Tom thanks the following people
110 for helping him with ideas and play-testing:
113 Tom Tedrick (Afrika Korps)
114 Keith Graham (DreamLands),
115 Dave Nye (Evil_Empire)
116 Sasha Mikheev (Dolgopa)
120 Sam Tetherow (Kazzad'ur)
125 1993 Chainsaw Empire 3.0, Thomas Ruschak
127 Added land units, missions, bestpath, people take less damage from shelling, +1
128 range bonus for 60% forts, cede, neweff, starva, forts interdict
129 ships, mountain caps, RES_POP, NEW_STARVE, NEW_WORK, uncrewed ship
130 decay, anonymous sub-launched missiles, stop & start, bdes.
133 1995 Empire 2.0, Dave Pare
135 emp_player, emp_tm, and emp_update, were consolidated into one program
136 called emp_server. A threads package called "lwp threads" was used to
137 manage the player threads. Many options were made standard. Kevin Klemmick
138 added HIDDEN and NEWPAF options. Many options were made standard.
139 These are the people who submitted patches for Empire 2.0:
140 Chad Zabel (3 letter abbrev's, & autonav)
142 Scott Ferguson (Linux port)
144 Doug Hay (threads debugging)
145 Bill Canning (AIX port)
149 1995 Empire 2.1 beta, Ken Stevens
151 Organized info pages, wrote a "configure" script, made minor
152 improvements to many commands, rewrote missile, navigation, and march
153 code. Consolidated launch/bomb and missile/plane interdiction so that
154 hit chance and damage is the same whether it's a mission or done "by
155 hand". Added collateral damage, interdiction nuke detonation,
156 "friendly" trade relations, BIG_CITY, ATT_INTERDICT,
157 Consolidated sail, navi, and order. Added toggle, flash, wall,
158 shutdown, strength. Other contributers:
159 Chad Zabel (ship anti-missile defense)
160 Julian Onions (runtime configuration)
161 Sasha Mikheev (Linux port)
163 1995 Empire 2.2 beta, Ken Stevens
165 Completely rewrote attack, assault, board, and paradrop. Added
166 "players", "skywatch", "disarm", tend land units. Other contributers:
168 Janjaap van Velthooven (IRIX port)
169 Ken Huisman (RCS source managemant)
172 1995 Empire 2.3, Ken Stevens
174 After running a series of play-test games, Ken fixed all known bugs in
175 the server, organized and rewrote a lot of documentation (including
176 this info page) and released the Empire2 server out of beta.
178 1995 Empire 3.0, Ken Stevens
180 Empire 3.0 implemented the C_SYNC RFC, a powerful platform independent
181 client-server protocol for synchronizing the client database with the
182 server database. The Empire 3.0 server was released with the Empire
183 Toolkit written by Kevin Morgan, a portable C library which parses the
184 C_SYNC messages from the server into a database for the client. Thus,
185 clients can link with the Empire Toolkit and be confident that when
186 the server gets upgraded, their client will still work. Note that the
187 C_SYNC protocol is asynchronous so, in particular, players will be
188 able to watch their neighbors sail ships past their coast etc...
190 1996 Empire 4.0, Wolfpack (http://www.wolfpackempire.com)
192 A group of people got together to form a new server project. This project
193 is a new project, and is a complete takeoff from the Empire 3.0 server
194 project. There are many additions and some subtractions from the 3.0
195 code base. The Wolfpack is headed up by Steve McClure and consists of the
210 1998 Empire 4.2, Wolfpack (http://www.wolfpackempire.com)
212 The above authors (Dave Pare, Jeff Bailey, Thomas Ruschack, Ken Stevens
213 and Steve McClure) agreed to re-release the source code under the GNU
214 GPL. The source was already freely released to the public, but any
215 copyright issues (such as gaining permission from Phil Lapsley for the
216 A* code and removing any other copyrighted code which would violate
217 the GPL) were cleared up, and the licensing information was put in
218 place to keep the server source free forever. Yee-haw!
220 In addition, the server was made run-time configurable (yes, including
221 WORLD_X and WORLD_Y) so that you didn't have to re-build an entire server
222 each time you changed an option (you just have to rebuild the world
225 The source is still managed by the Wolfpack team.