Far Horizons: The Awakening

I could sit here until the end of time bemoaning the decline of PBM, or I could do something about it. As GrimFinger said, "What play by mail needs is new games. Build them, and they will come." This is my contribution. While I lack the game design aptitude and imagination to create a completely fresh game (as you can tell from the crappy fiction lore above), I do have the technical skill to create a game. So, I am reviving Rick Morneau's popular PB(e)M Far Horizons. Why Far Horizons? For two reasons: 1. The complete source code is available (and still works!), 2. after reading the rules, I really like the game.

What is Far Horizons? The one sentence blurb is: "Far Horizons is a strategic role-playing game of galactic exploration, trade, diplomacy, and conquest." See the links below for a much longer explanation.

Instead of starting a game of Far Horizons immediately, I plan to bring this 90s era game into the current decade with modern amenities such as: GUI turn viewer/order creator, fancy website with game/player statistics and messaging portal, and other things I haven't thought of yet! Importantly, I do not plan to change the spirit of the game. It will stay a fundamentally slow moving turn based game with support for PBM and PBEM mediums.

With these goals in mind I have created a wiki where the design and development of this new version of Far Horizons will take place. For now it is hosted as a subdomain of my main website. Eventually I plan to come up with a catchy name (feel free to suggest one!) and buy a real domain.

Current Games:

• Galaxy Alpha - Game started

Main Website: http://fh.binaryelysium.com/
Game Manual/Rulebook: http://fh.binaryelysium.com/index.php?title=Game_Manual
Game Engine Source Code: https://github.com/Ramblurr/Far-Horizons
Game Client Source Code: https://github.com/Ramblurr/Far-Horizons-Client

I'll be posting updates here as they come.

Edit: (2011/03/11) Added game client source code link.
Edit: (2011/03/11) Added Galaxy Alpha game

Alright!
Looking good Ramblurr

What a great thread! I gave it a rating of five stars.

Why? Because, it is new content of substance for our site, here. It is subject matter of primary interest for gamers of the PBM genre. The names Far Horizons and Rick Morneau both ring a bell somewhere in the back of my head, although I can't lay my finger on anything more specific, right now.

You say that Far Horizons was popular, Ramblurr. What are you going by for that statement? What made it popular?

Some of your goals for the development of this game conjure up memories of past attempts by PBM companies (GUI turn viewer/order creator, fancy website with game/player statistics and messaging portal). I encounter far more bad graphic user interfaces than I do good ones. Also, statistics can be fun, at times, but they can also be detrimental to at least some games. Players tend to accumulate data. Take the encounters for Middle-earth PBM, for instance. In time, they become known. Players track down the correct solution, rather than players thinking and interacting with the dragon, creature, etc..

Here are a few other far Horizons links that I managed to track down.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.pbm/browse_thread/thread/5ec7d1fc14639730

http://www.cetnerowski.com/farhorizons/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/descriptions/1181605212.6837.html

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/descriptions/1250678576.7769.html

[quote='GrimFinger' pid='193' dateline='1299833818']
Here are a few other far Horizons links that I managed to track down.

[/quote]

Indeed.. these are recent links, all updated within the past couple years. It looks like at least two groups of people have recently tried to bring Far Horizons back, yet nothing seems to have come of it.

One of my goals is to keep all all news and development public, so if I do let it lapse (lets hope not!) others can easily pick up where I left off, instead of starting over.

By "popular" I was referring to the number of hits I saw in old usenet postings. Also the game we have with us today alleges to be the 7th edition, so it must have had some sort of following to progress that far. It probably wasn't as popular as many other PBMs you old timers might be familiar with ;-) I sure am not in a position to make that judgment.

---

Project Updates

After several days of putting the site together and converting the game manual from a .txt to a .pdf, I've finally banged out some code.

1. The game engine can now produce galaxy maps in an XML format.
2. The beginnings of a turn viewer are progressing.

Right now the turn viewer is a shell that loads the XML galaxy file produced by the engine and displays the map in 2 dimensions. See screenshot of map viewer. It's not particularly pretty yet, but that will come. Grimfinger is right, a GUI doesn't add anything to a piece of software if it is ugly and unusable. What you see here is merely a proof of concept.

I have added a Beginners Guide and Strategy Guide to the documentation section. These aren't original articles, I found them in an old usenet posting. I have attributed them to their original authors when possible.

Also I updated the page layout to something more sci-fi themed, yet still functional. If you have any comments on the guides or layout change, don't hold back!

I have added several new articles to the Getting Started section, courtesy of Dewey, an old FH player from the 90s who will be joining us in Galaxy Alpha. He kindly provided me with the new articles, as well as an updated version of his Strategy Guide, and a handy excel spreadsheet which I will post soon.

http://code.google.com/p/farhorizons-web-ui/

[quote='Ramblurr' pid='200' dateline='1299891718']
I have added a Beginners Guide and Strategy Guide to the documentation section. These aren't original articles, I found them in an old usenet posting. I have attributed them to their original authors when possible.

Also I updated the page layout to something more sci-fi themed, yet still functional. If you have any comments on the guides or layout change, don't hold back!
[/quote]

I like the look and the feel of the site, but liked it when I first stopped by a week or so ago.

for what its worth, the "Screenshot of a Galaxy Map loaded from XML" appears to link to a 404 and to be slightly cut off or the right side. (Im using Chrome on Win7)

I think the direction you are going with the supplemental material is good, but I would suggest you don't spend too much time supplementing the email interface.

One possible mod you might make would be to allow for some standing orders (I couldn't find any mention of them but if they're there, my bad.)

[quote='Ramblurr' pid='194' dateline='1299835414']
One of my goals is to keep all all news and development public, so if I do let it lapse (lets hope not!) others can easily pick up where I left off, instead of starting over.[/quote]

Since Ramblurr has apparently deleted his defunct Far Horizons site, it would appear that anyone who might want to follow in his tracks will have to back track to where he started, rather than benefit from his own efforts in resurrecting this old Play By Mail game.

Would anyone here be interested in starting it up again? I volunteer to run it as game-master if we can scare up enough players. How many people here would like to sign up?

I can probably get at least 2-3 of my friends to do it. It would be ideal if we can hit 10 players, I think. I can download the old FH code and then maybe do a round of updates...

I'd give it a shot...

Okay - I will round up as many of my old gaming friends as possible, and anyone here who's interested.

I'll download the code this weekend and see if it compiles. Might want to make some rule changes. Someone on here had posted some interesting ideas about making long hyperjumps more difficult.

[quote='ixnay' pid='1663' dateline='1328203585']I'll download the code this weekend and see if it compiles.[/quote]

Now, that's a long weekend.

I, too, would be interested.

[quote='ixnay' pid='1663' dateline='1328203585']
Okay - I will round up as many of my old gaming friends as possible, and anyone here who's interested.

I'll download the code this weekend and see if it compiles. Might want to make some rule changes. Someone on here had posted some interesting ideas about making long hyperjumps more difficult.
[/quote]

And did it compile?

When I got around to downloading the source code, the archive was gone. I googled around, but have not found anything. If anyone is interested and happens to know where I might find the code, please let me know and I'll restart this project forthwith.

Or we could set up a project to recreate FH or a reasonable facsimile. It didn't look overly complicated...

is this of any use?

https://github.com/Ramblurr/Far-Horizons

Rules:

http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/fhui/doc/FH_Rules.txt

holy frack, you found the source code!

looks like it's all in C (which is fine), made to run on Unix (which I do not have). I will either need to get access to a unix machine or server, or modify the code to run on windows. I'll look into it this weekend...

[quote='ixnay' pid='2176' dateline='1371182362']
holy frack, you found the source code!

looks like it's all in C (which is fine), made to run on Unix (which I do not have). I will either need to get access to a unix machine or server, or modify the code to run on windows. I'll look into it this weekend...
[/quote]

I hope that you modify it to run on Windows.

This is going to take a back-seat to my Even Horizon game project. I will use the FH code as a wellspring of ideas, mechanical constructs, and a shining example of a (somewhat) finished game. But it's not worth it to invest so many hours into an ancient code-base for a game that will likely only be played by a dozen of us forum users.

I thank you for finding the code, and hopefully I can put it to good use in my new project.

I was able to download the whole source code from the GitHub link in first post of this thread. I am using a Windows laptop, but the code compiles without error with the latest version of Cygwin (I only installed GCC and some version of MAKE).

I was even able to create a PDF version of the rules after installing TeX Live and all its additional packages (see attached file).

The game seems to run well at first sight. At least I was able to create a galaxy and homes, and list the corresponding map.

So all in all, the whole project seems to be in relatively good shape! :)

Hey guys!

Back from the dead here.

Glad you found the source code! (For posterity here it is: https://github.com/Ramblurr/Far-Horizons). The documentation source is is doc/, and is built with LaTeX as kwll discovered.

Back in 2011 I did a bit of work modernizing the code so it compiles on modern systems, so I'm glad that's still the case!

I don't recall the specifics, but while everything seems to run ok at first, in practice I ran into bugs upon every turn submission. Nearly every turn required manually editing of the data or the code. It was a real PITA. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics, just that the brittleness of the whole codebase inspired me to start from scratch.

Moroever, I think a new version written in Python or another more accessible language would be a huge improvement.

I haven't had the chance to actually look at the code yet, but how easy is it to tinker with it? Is there any kind of design documentation about it?

It's obtuse to say the least.

There isn't any game design documentation nor API/coding documentation to speak of. Aside from the rules, there is a small file explaining to the GM how to process turns.

The codebase is reasonably well architectured, as well as an old C codebase can be. It is fairly highly coupled, lacking inline documentation, which makes refactoring quite difficult. As someone who had never played the game, and therefore was quite unfamiliar with the rules (I should have played as well as GMed), tinkering was difficult.

One improvement that could definitely be made is to automate the turn processing, but there are bugs (unfortunately I don't remember the details) that make turn processing an error prone process that requires manual intervention

If people enjoyed the FH rules, that is the game itself, and think its worth improving (bug fixing, modernizing the UI, etc), I'd be willing to help do so. But there would have to be some interest in doing so :) Personally, I'd love to see an active, open source, sci-fi themed, PBEM.