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There was a small group of people working to redevelop the game from scratch, but participation on that project forum dropped off, and now it looks like their board is being eaten by spambots.
I’d like to work on it myself, if I can get a collaborator. I’ve had a space empire game design of my own that I will write one day, and a gamer pal of mine is designing one himself right now. (He’s looking for playtesters!)
I wouldn’t bother picking up Verns MS Access code - obsolete. Better to write a modern app. His genius was in the design, not the implementation.
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12-07-2020, 06:00 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-07-2020, 06:15 PM by wraith.
Edit Reason: wordsmithing
)
Do you have a link to that project forum?
I started writing a server based on the original rulebook (and the errata that I've uncovered), along with a browser client to post orders. I've been scraping the posts from the two web sites, along with the updated manuals. (I've noticed that Darth Pedro posted PDFs of the rules here, but I can't find any attachments in the forums.)
Two things stopped me - the initial setup and Vern/Jay own the intellectual property. The IP is a pretty hard stop. The initial setup (seeding the cluster) makes it "easy" to create a cluster with 100 systems according to the printed rules. What's missing is the details. How did Vern set up the distances between systems, allocate between empty orbits, habitable planets, gas giants, asteroid belts, etc? Stuff like that has a big impact on the feel of the game.
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I’ll email Jay to see if he will extend permission to recreate the game. I believe he bought the IP (and source code) specifically to get the game up and running again somehow - he had been funding Vern’s efforts to this end, I believe.
Did you see the hochler forum?
As for universe creation - Vern’s parameters were that each player should have a number of stars in his local mini-cluster, reachable with Hyper Engine - 1 tech, and each mini-cluster would be isolated from the others, and the central mini-cluster, by a distance requiring tech 3 to cross. Further, each mini-cluster was in one of the 8 “corners” of the 30-LY overall cluster, if viewed as a cube in space. And each mini-cluster would have the same number of habitable worlds, but the bulk of the HAB was going to be found in the middle.
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Marc Hochler has the source code and was working on recoding early this year.
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Any updates from Jay or Marc Hochler?
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No. I will ping Marc tonight!
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Any updates from Jay or Marc Hochler?
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Yes. I have a bit to check out. Then I will have an update here.
