         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

