Any programmers out there?

[Davin]

Decades ago, while playing Galac-Tac, I wrote a gaming assistant program to help me play.  This has morphed over the years to be quite a valuable tool with customizable and interactive color maps, turn history tracking, order entry and checking, empire analysis reports, and much more.  However, Midgard has never had any such thing available for players.  Since we'd all like to encourage more players to play, this would be a great thing to have available to everyone.

So, if you feel like a real programming and gaming challenge, I invite anyone to write their own Midgard "helper" program, either for desktop/laptop PCs or for phones/tablets.  Anyone who thinks they've come up with something useful is welcome to provide it for publication it on the Talisman Games web site for you so other players can download and use it.  All of the turn information is available in XML format so you don't have to do any interpretation of formatted HTML to get raw data into your system.

Be thinking about the possibilities and see what your imagination might be able to come up with!

[DreamWeaver]

Davin,

I am a Database Administrator (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres DBs), and a Cloud Solutions Architect. I had a lot of exposure to Zan's setup version of Midgard USA, and would be happy to help out where ever I might be able to help.

[Davin]

Davin,

I am a Database Administrator (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres DBs), and a Cloud Solutions Architect. I had a lot of exposure to Zan's setup version of Midgard USA, and would be happy to help out where ever I might be able to help.

I'm hoping to get someone to build an assistant themselves, in their own favorite language, as I'm going to be far too busy with the game itself to be able to work on it.

[DreamWeaver]

Are you talking about a APP that allows you to enter your orders and then saved into a file which is then uploaded to your website and thenused by your program t enter the turns into your system?

[Davin]

Yes, basically.  In my other game it also downloads each turn and records the information there for historical reference.  It then allows you to enter and pre-check orders before uploading them to the web site.

The idea there is that it can help you analyze your turn and decide what to do, like calculating movement points for you or finding the best route across country or remembering what you ran into last time you were in this area.  You might drag icons around on a map, or rearrange your unit composition on the screen, which could then generate the actions needed to do that in the game.  Maybe some analysis work might be available, such as combining market reports from cities in the areas and showing the best prices for things you want to trade.

Does that kind of thing make sense?

[DreamWeaver]

Ok sounds like you need a Developer type for that type of work, a little beyond my scope of abilities or experience. I would need to research how to actually do that type of work.

[DreamWeaver]

The original Midgard code was was written using Clipper:

Clipper is an xBase compiler, which is a computer programming language, that is used to create software programs that originally operated primarily under MS-DOS. Although it is a powerful general-purpose programming language, it was primarily used to create database/business programs.

Clipper was created by Nantucket Corporation, a company that was started in 1984 by Barry ReBell (management) and Brian Russell (technical). In 1992, the company was sold to Computer Associates for 190 million dollars and the product was renamed to CA-Clipper.

Clipper was created as a replacement programming language for Ashton Tate's dBASE III, a very popular database language at the time. The advantage of Clipper over dBASE was that it could be compiled and executed under MS-DOS as a standalone application. In the years between 1985 and 1992, millions of Clipper applications were built, typically for small businesses dealing with databases concerning many aspects of client management and inventory management. For many smaller businesses, having a Clipper application designed to their specific needs was their first experience with software development. Also a lot of applications for banking and insurance companies were developed, here especially in those cases where the application was considered too small to be developed and run on traditional mainframes. In these environments Clipper also served as a front end for existing mainframe applications.

As the product matured, it remained a DOS tool for many years, but added elements of the C programming language and Pascal programming language, as well as OOP, and the code-block data-type (hybridizing the concepts of dBase macros, or string-evaluation, and function pointers), to become far more powerful than the original. Nantucket's Aspen project later matured into the Windows native-code Visual Objects compiler.

Despite these efforts in the early nineties under its new ownership Clipper proved to be unable to make a smooth transition from the MS-DOS to the Microsoft Windows era. As a result, almost no new commercial applications were written in Clipper after 1995. Four of the more important languages that took over from Clipper were Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, Delphi and Powerbuilder. Some existing Clipper applications continued in use for ten or fifteen years, requiring regular maintenance, but around 2015 the number of Clipper applications that were still used commercially on a daily basis was very small.

A factor in Clipper's decline was also due in part to issues with the Clipper 5.0 product. Some applications developed in Clipper 5.0 crashed frequently and unpredictably. Nantucket didn't address the issue and some developers moved on to different products out of necessity to have stable applications. Nantucket seemed to be reluctant to even acknowledge there was an issue. The problem (memory leak?) was later fixed by Computer Associates. (No data for reference - I was active in the Clipper community and this was what I witnessed at the Clipper conferences.)

[Davin]

And as you might have gathered, we're trying to get out of the Clipper environment and rewrite it into another language with a fresh new database design.

But if anyone writes an app for player use, it can be in any language that's convenient.

[DreamWeaver]

Now it has been a long time since I last looked at this code, but as I remember it there were (4) processes that ran on DOS. They had to be run in order , and I believe it was Data Turn syntax entry, then movement, then clan upkeep, and then the 4th process. Now add to this Zan had a program written in I believe C that ran on Windows, and then that accessed the (4) processes on the DOS partition and ran the turn.

Now it was his plan to create a APP that players would upload to their PC, and then run it to enter their positions turns. Then it would create a process file jar, to be uploaded to Zan's Midgard USA server. Where they all would be processed and run through the cycle together. Zan had to enter each turn by hand separately. I think this is what Davin is talking about asking for help in writing.

[DreamWeaver]

Also I remember Zan purchased a Combat game engine that he used to run combat for the game. This program was not connected to the Clipper code, and there was a lot of manual keying to enter all the details and bonuses to support the combat simulation. Skills were part of this process and were used as bonuses within the combat process as well, along with factional perks.