Solar Empire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Solar Empire is a space combat themed massively multiplayer online game played through a browser. Solar Empire was created by Bryan Livingston in 1999 and hosted on the solarempire.com domain. The source code is available under an open source license.
In the game players can create and manage ships, planets and alliances with the objective of competing against non-allied or enemy players. The primary source of game "Credits" is from mining solar systems and processing raw materials on planets, which can then be sold in ports scattered across the game map.
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[edit] Origins
The game was originally created by Bryan Livingston in 1999 and was originally written in the PHP and Perl programming languages. In December 2000 the game's source code was released under the GNU General Public License on the Sourceforge.net site and has since been developed and expanded by numerous contributing developers. In May 2001 Bryan Livingston relicensed the Solar Empire code-base and placed it within the Public Domain, effectively removing all license restrictions. Two months later Bryan officially resigned from the project, leaving it in the hands of the open-source developers who had been contributing to it for the past year and a half.
The retirement of Bryan Livingston marked the beginning of a fragmentation of the codebase, as individual groups of developers differed on the future direction of the project. Solar Empire has since birthed many forked projects of both open source and proprietary natures. All forks have however largely maintained the original core gameplay which is unique to Solar Empire.
[edit] Open Source projects
The game has seen several open source forks develop over the years as individual developers have sought to improve and expand the original game, with the current count standing at four, with two being actively developed.
Generic Solar Empire - The original codebase following its evolution over the years, has now been abandoned to newer projects with its final release dating back to April 2004.
Purely SE - Development began in June 2002 on this closed-source fork of Generic. It was unique as a Solar Empire fork in that its development ran in parallel with Generic, releasing many of its lesser improvements back directly into Generics codebase. Finally in March 2005 in was released under the GPL. It is now occasionally patched to resolve any bugs, but general development has ceased on it.
Quantum Star SE was one of the earliest open source forks from Solar Empire, established by Pádraic Brady in 2003. Quantum Star SE has seen two discrete periods of development. The first which ranged from late 2003 to mid 2004 was marked by regular releases whose source code was primarily extended from the then current Solar Empire Generic releases. These versions have been hosted by Tradelair.com since 2003. The second period started in September 2005 and is currently ongoing. This second period of development, Quantum Star SE Evolved, is intended to discard the original source code, and rewrite the entire game from scratch in accordance with the principles of Object Oriented Design, utilising the Model-View-Controller application design pattern. Also included in the design goals are the need to improve application security, increase performance for shared hosting servers, and expand upon the original Solar Empire concept. The project is currently managed by Pádraic Brady and Lee Conlin and the source code is licensed under the Affero General Public License.
System Wars is the most recent open source fork, developed by Michael J.A. Clark in 2005 and is based off the last release of the Generic Code Base. It is actively maintained at the games' Sourceforge.net project account. System Wars has been steadily improving and expanding upon the original Generic source code, and aims to supersede the dormant Generic project. The project's next milestone is to be reached by overhauling the user interface, increasing performance and security, and adding extensibility. It aims to utilise the Savant 2 PHP template engine to provide alternative methods of output including XML for other interfaces. XHTML output is the primary focus at present.
[edit] Closed Source variants
Besides the open source forks, Solar Empire's source code has also been forked into numerous closed source variants. As these variants are proprietary versions typically developed from the Public Domain releases, none of their source code is publicly released. One of these closed sourced variants, Endless War, has recently contributed to the System Wars open source project under the care of Michael J.A. Clark. No other closed source servers have current intentions to release their variants to open source.
Some of the primary closed source variants include:
There also exist several closed source variants of Quantum Star SE dating to 2003 or later, including:
[edit] Dormant or abandoned projects
In addition to the active open source and proprietary project forks, there have existed other forks which are no longer actively maintained. These include Solar Empire M1 (Milestone 1), Solar Empire 2, Solar Empire: Generations (also called Xibit SE), among others. No source code for any of these inactive projects is currently archived publicly.
[edit] Conclusion
The development of Solar Empire has taken place over a period of almost seven years, making it one of the oldest open source PHP game projects still in existence. During that time the project has seen numerous evolutions, forks and the gradual formation of a core community of developers. Although in more recent years the developer community has declined in numbers, the state of affairs in Solar Empire suggests work on the game, in its many forks, is at its highest point in many years. System Wars has been making regular releases since late 2005, and in early 2006 Quantum Star SE released early pre-alpha's of its source code which encompasses a simplified PHP Application Framework to drive development.
The next generation of Solar Empire gaming is alive and thriving.
