Wolfpack Empire - mirror of https://git.pond.sub.org/empserver
http://wolfpackempire.com/
Markus Armbruster
a269cdd7e9
Before Empire 2, nukes could be delivered only with bomb (special mission 'n', airburst only) and launch (targeting sectors or satellites only). Empire 2 made nukes available for any kind of bombing, and for any missile strike on sectors or ships. This included interdiction and support missions. Nuclear-tipped anti-sats and bomb mission n were removed. Unfortunately, this was done in a messy way, which led to inconsistencies and bugs. The problem is that ordinary damage affects just the target, while nuke damage affects an area. Code dealing with plane damage was designed for the former. Instead of rewriting it to cope with area damage cleanly, nuke damage got shoehorned into pln_damage(), the function to compute conventional plane damage, as a side effect: computing damage blasted sectors in the area. If the plane carried a nuke, pln_damage() returned zero (conventional) damage. Without further logic, this simply bypassed the code to apply damage to the target. This worked out okay when the target already got damaged correctly by the side effect. However, some targets are immune to the side effect: when interdicting a move or explore command, the commodities being moved are not in any sector. For other targets, damage has effects other than damaging the target: offensive and defensive support don't apply the (conventional) damage to the target sector. Instead, they turn it into a combat bonus. Without further logic, nuclear damage doesn't contribute to that. To make all that work, pln_damage() returned the nuclear damage for ground zero as well. Because a plane does either conventional or nuclear damage, one of them is always zero. Most callers simply ignored the nuclear damage, and applied only the conventional damage. Bug: land units and ships failed to retreat when pin-bombed or missiled with a nuke. That's because they received zero conventional damage. The mission code flies planes and missiles and tallies their damage. This mission damage included nuclear damage at ground zero (except for missiles sometimes, see below), to make support and commodity interdiction work. Unfortunately, this broke other things. Bug: when bombers interdicted ships or land units, nukes first damaged the ships or land units by the side effect, then again through mission damage. Interdicting missiles had a special case to avoid this. Bug: when interdicting move, explore or transport, nukes first damaged the sector by the side effect, then again through mission damage's collateral damage. There may well be more bugs hiding in this mess. The mess is not worth fixing. While the idea of interdicting and supporting with nukes sounds kind of cool, I believe it's pretty irrelevant in actual play. Instead, go back to a variation of the original rules: nukes can be delivered only through bomb mission 's' and launch at sectors. Make arm reject marine missiles in addition to satellites, ABMs and SAMs, and clear the mission. Make mission reject planes armed with nukes. Oops when they show up in mission_pln_equip() anyway. Make pln_equip() allow planes with nukes only for missions 's' and 't'. Clean up pln_damage() to just compute damage, without side effect. Change strat_bomb() and launch_missile() to detonate nukes. Simplify the other callers. Parameter mission of msl_launch_mindam() is now unused, remove it. Missiles exploding on launch no longer set off their nukes. That was pretty ridiculous anyway. |
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| doc | ||
| include | ||
| info | ||
| m4 | ||
| man | ||
| scripts | ||
| src | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| bootstrap | ||
| compile | ||
| config.guess | ||
| config.sub | ||
| configure.ac | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| depcomp | ||
| GNUmakefile.in | ||
| INSTALL | ||
| install-sh | ||
| Make.mk | ||
| README | ||
Welcome to Empire 4, code-named Wolfpack.
Empire is a multi-player, client/server Internet based war game.
Copyright (C) 1986-2009, Dave Pare, Jeff Bailey, Thomas Ruschak, Ken
Stevens, Steve McClure
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License (in file
`COPYING'), or (at your option) any later version.
See file `CREDITS' for a list of contributors.
Directory `doc' has additional information. File `doc/README'
describes the files there and what they talk about.
To build the server and set up a game, follow the steps below.
(1) Unpacking the source tree
If you downloaded a tarball, unpack it.
If you cloned a git repository, run bootstrap. This requires
recent versions of Autoconf and Automake to be installed.
(2) Building a server
Prerequisites: IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (POSIX.1-2001), GNU make, a
curses library, Perl, and either nroff or GNU troff (`groff').
See file `INSTALL' for detailed compilation and installation
instructions. Quick guide for the impatient: run configure; make;
make install. The last step is optional; everything runs fine
right from the build tree.
If make fails without doing anything, you're probably not using
GNU make. Some systems have it installed as `gmake'.
Solaris supports POSIX.1-2001, but you need to set up your
environment for that. Try passing
SHELL=/usr/xpg4/bin/sh PATH=/usr/xpg6/bin:/usr/xpg4/bin:$PATH
to make. See standards(5) for details.
(3) Creating a game
* Create a configuration for your game. make install installs one
in $prefix/etc/empire/econfig ($prefix is /usr/local unless you
chose something else with configure). You can use pconfig to
create another one.
* Edit your configuration file. See doc/econfig for more
information.
Unless you put your configuration file in the default location
(where make install installs it), you have to use -e with all
programs to make them use your configuration.
* Run files to set up your data directory.
* Run fairland to create a world. For a sample world, try
`fairland 10 30'. This creates file ./newcap_script, which will
be used below. You can edit it to change country names and
passwords.
Check out fairland's manual page for more information.
* Start the server. For development, you want to run it with -d
in a debugger, see doc/debugging. Do not use -d for a real
game!
* Log in as deity POGO with password peter. This guide assumes
you use the included client `empire', but other clients should
work as well.
For help, try `info'.
To change the deity password, use `change re <password>'.
* Create countries with `exec newcap_script'.
Your game is now up!
Naturally, there's more to running a real game than that, but that's
beyond the scope of this file.
Please report bugs to <wolfpack@wolfpackempire.com> or via SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/empserver (registration required).
For more information or help, try rec.games.empire on Usenet, or send
e-mail to <wolfpack@wolfpackempire.com> and we'll try to answer if we
can. Also check out our web site at "http://www.wolfpackempire.com".
Have fun!
Wolfpack!