{"id":5011,"date":"2013-08-23T00:19:08","date_gmt":"2013-08-23T04:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5011"},"modified":"2014-03-06T04:09:02","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T09:09:02","slug":"vms-empire-1-10-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5011","title":{"rendered":"vms-empire 1.10 released"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore\/expand\/exploit\/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion.<\/p>\n<p>Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games?  It was Walter Bright&#8217;s game &#8220;Empire&#8221; from the early 1970s.  You can read about it at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.classicempire.com\/\">his page on Classic Empire<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Since 1994 I&#8217;ve maintained an early Empire workalike written by Chuck Simmons in 1987 to run under the now-extinct VMS operating system; it was ported to Unix immediately, and remains to my best of knowledge the only open-source version or variant of Empire available.<\/p>\n<p>Walter Bright does not acknowledge this version&#8217;s existence on his Empire page, which is fair because he didn&#8217;t write it and probably doesn&#8217;t consider it to be &#8220;Empire&#8221; at all.  But it is close in gameplay and style to the earliest of Bright&#8217;s versions, except for being able to display its crude character-cell maps in color (I added that back when color terminals were cutting-edge technology).<\/p>\n<p>If you love Civ or MOO, try this out for a look at what the computer 4X game was like before pixel graphics.  The display and command interface are primitive by today&#8217;s standards, but the AI and general gameplay have held up surprisingly well. It&#8217;s instructive to see how many of the core tropes of later 4X games are already present in this one.<\/p>\n<p>You can get version 1.10 of VMS-Empire <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/vms-empire\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore\/expand\/exploit\/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion. Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games? It was Walter Bright&#8217;s game &#8220;Empire&#8221;&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5011\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">vms-empire 1.10 released<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-on-my-website","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5011"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5306,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5011\/revisions\/5306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}