Server : A Brief History of the Different Versions of Empire


NAME
  History - Empire Revision History

Level: Expert

  1985 PSL Empire, Peter Langston

  Naturally, the original creator (or at least the last surviving
  implementor) of Empire is Peter Langston.  He distributed the
  game that we all wanted to hack on, but naturally enough he
  didn't give out the source!  (he wasn't dumb...he probably knew
  what we'd do to his code)

  1986 UCSD Empire 0.x, Dave Pare

  Made Empire multi-player with fixed update times.  Added hex map, planes, nukes,
  satellites, ships, market, distribute, and updates.

  Jim Reuter (and his PDP/11 decompiler) provided Dave Pare with a large
  quantity of amazingly readable decompiled code.  His contribution
  came at a time when Dave's interest in reverse-engineering was
  flagging, and it provided what was necessary to create the
  original UCSD Empire.

  David Muir Sharnoff was responsible for promoting the early
  development of Empire 0.X.  Without David it is unlikely if Empire
  would have escaped UCSD!  He took on the onerous task of managing
  the source, creating mailing lists, applying patches, and generally
  making the early versions of UCSD Empire releasable -- they
  sure weren't when they left Dave Pare's hands...

  The rest of the folks who contributed to the early versions did
  so with code and/or ideas.  (If I've forgotten anyone, let me know!)
  They appear in chronological order.

                          Keith Muller
                          James Anderson
                          Julian Onions
                          Lewis Jansen
                          Peter Vukovich
                          Jeff Anton
                          Jeff Wallace
                          Gregory Paris
                          Edward Rynes
                          Sean Casey
                          Phill Everson
                          Kurt Pires
                          Jeff Okamoto
                          Nick Lai
                          Steven Grady
                          Jim Griffith
                          Chris Metcalf
                          Steven Grimm
                          Mike St. Johns

  1986 BSD Empire 1.1, Dave Pare

  The following people (listed in alphabetical order) have contributed
  to the development of BSD Empire 1.1.  Without these people, BSD
  Empire would never have happened.  Thanks also go to the XCF at the
  University of California, Berkeley, for providing the facilities on
  which we performed this herculean task.

                          David Davis
                          Steven Grady
                          Jim Griffith
                          Beorn Johnson
                          Phil Lapsley
                          Jonathan Lee
                          Kurt Pires
                          Jeff Wallace

  198? UCB Empire 1.2, ??

  Added announcements, food, removed weather, parks, petrol,
  edu, terrorists, shoot, many new ships.

  198? BSD Empire -- KSU Distribution (1.04), Jeff Bailey

  One of the goals of the KSU team was to make the server as
  configurable as possible.  As such, they added many OPTIONS, and
  global constants.  Added abms, asats, bmap, autonav, scuttle,
  NUKEFAILDETONATE, MISSINGMISSILES, SHIPNAMES, NEUTRON, RANGEEDIT,
  MISSDEF, NOFOOD, UPDATESCHED, DEMANDUPDATE, ORBIT, FALLOUT, SAIL,
  ALLYHARBOR, and fixed many bugs.  Other contributers were:
                          Yaser Doleh
                          Robert Forsman
                          Doug Hay
                          Alex Shatsky

  198? Merc Empire ?.?, ??

  Fixed many bugs and removed loans, added grind, starvation, and prod.

  1992 Chainsaw Empire 1.0, Thomas Ruschak

  Added land units, SUPER_BARS, EASY_BRIDGES, SLOW_WAR.

  1992 Chainsaw Empire 2.0, Thomas Ruschak

  Added trade ships, fuel, semi-land ships, ASW planes, payoff, wire, SNEAK_ATTACK
  retreat paths, sweep planes, budget.  Tom thanks the following people
  for helping him with ideas and play-testing:

                          Jorge Diaz (Ansalon)
                          Tom Tedrick (Afrika Korps)
                          Keith Graham (DreamLands),
                          Dave Nye (Evil_Empire)
                          Sasha Mikheev (Dolgopa)
                          Baldric
                          Elsinore
                          Brett Reid (Resvon)
                          Sam Tetherow (Kazzad'ur)
                          Tharkadia
                          Yikes

  1993 Chainsaw Empire 3.0, Thomas Ruschak

  Added land units, missions, bestpath, people take less damage from shelling, +1
  range bonus for 60% forts, cede, neweff, starva, forts interdict
  ships, mountain caps, RES_POP, NEW_STARVE, NEW_WORK, uncrewed ship
  decay, anonymous sub-launched missiles, stop & start, bdes.

  1995 Empire 2.0, Dave Pare

  emp_player, emp_tm, and emp_update, were consolidated into one program
  called emp_server.  A threads package called "lwp threads" was used to
  manage the player threads.  Many options were made standard.  Kevin Klemmick
  added HIDDEN and NEWPAF options.  Many options were made standard.
  These are the people who submitted patches for Empire 2.0:
                          Chad Zabel (3 letter abbrev's, & autonav)
                          Ken Huisman
                          Scott Ferguson (Linux port)
                          Kevin Klemmick
                          Doug Hay (threads debugging)
                          Bill Canning (AIX port)
                          Julian Onions

  1995 Empire 2.1 beta, Ken Stevens

  Organized info pages, wrote a "configure" script, made minor
  improvements to many commands, rewrote missile, navigation, and march
  code.  Consolidated launch/bomb and missile/plane interdiction so that
  hit chance and damage is the same whether it's a mission or done "by
  hand".  Added collateral damage, interdiction nuke detonation,
  "friendly" trade relations, BIG_CITY, ATT_INTERDICT,
  Consolidated sail, navi, and order.  Added toggle, flash, wall,
  shutdown, strength.  Other contributers:
                          Chad Zabel (ship anti-missile defense)
                          Julian Onions (runtime configuration)
                          Sasha Mikheev (Linux port)

  1995 Empire 2.2 beta, Ken Stevens

  Completely rewrote attack, assault, board, and paradrop.  Added
  "players", "skywatch", "disarm", tend land units.  Other contributers:
                          Craig Leres
                          Janjaap van Velthooven (IRIX port)
                          Ken Huisman (RCS source managemant)

  1995 Empire 2.3, Ken Stevens

  After running a series of play-test games, Ken fixed all known bugs in
  the server, organized and rewrote a lot of documentation (including
  this info page) and released the Empire2 server out of beta.

  1995 Empire 3.0, Ken Stevens

  Empire 3.0 implemented the C_SYNC RFC, a powerful platform independent
  client-server protocol for synchronizing the client database with the
  server database.  The Empire 3.0 server was released with the Empire
  Toolkit written by Kevin Morgan, a portable C library which parses the
  C_SYNC messages from the server into a database for the client.  Thus,
  clients can link with the Empire Toolkit and be confident that when
  the server gets upgraded, their client will still work.  Note that the
  C_SYNC protocol is asynchronous so, in particular, players will be
  able to watch their neighbors sail ships past their coast etc...

  1996 Empire 4.0, Wolfpack (http://www.wolfpackempire.com)

  A group of people got together to form a new server project.  This project
  is a new project, and is a complete takeoff from the Empire 3.0 server
  project.  There are many additions and some subtractions from the 3.0
  code base.  The Wolfpack is headed up by Steve McClure and consists of the
  following people:

                          Mark Ballinger
                          Geoff Cashman
                          Bill Frolick
                          William S. Kaster
                          Pat Loney
                          Steve McClure
                          Richard Moss
                          Walter Smith
                          Sam Tetherow
                          Yannick Trembley
                          John Yockey

  1998 Empire 4.2, Wolfpack (http://www.wolfpackempire.com)

  The above authors (Dave Pare, Jeff Bailey, Thomas Ruschack, Ken Stevens
  and Steve McClure) agreed to re-release the source code under the GNU
  GPL.  The source was already freely released to the public, but any
  copyright issues (such as gaining permission from Phil Lapsley for the
  A* code and removing any other copyrighted code which would violate
  the GPL) were cleared up, and the licensing information was put in
  place to keep the server source free forever.  Yee-haw!

  In addition, the server was made run-time configurable (yes, including
  WORLD_X and WORLD_Y) so that you didn't have to re-build an entire server
  each time you changed an option (you just have to rebuild the world
  sometimes. ;-) )

  The source is still managed by the Wolfpack team.

SEE ALSO
  Server