Empire Classic (computer game)
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Empire originated under the name Civilization on an HP2000 minicomputer at Evergreen State College. It was written in interpreted BASIC, and involved extensions to the operating system. When the host computer was retired, the source code to Civilization was lost. Subsequently, two of the authors each independently wrote a new version of the game, both naming their versions Empire.
The game is turn-based, with players giving their orders at their convenience, and in some versions then being executed all at once by the game server, at set intervals ranging from a few hours to once per day. The world consists of "sectors" which may be designated as agricultural, industrial, etc, and there are dozens of types of units, requiring a variety of raw and manufactured materials for their creation. "Blitz" games may last a few hours, typical games a few months, and some larger games up to a year.
[edit] The Peter S. Langston Version
Peter S. Langston's version was developed while he was on staff at Harvard University. It was developed using Bell Labs UNIX in the C programming language on a PDP 11/45 computer.
Derivatives of this program include:
- Xerox Development Environment (XDE) Empire on Xerox workstations
- BSD Empire
- PSL Empire
- PC Empire by Gordon Storga for DOS
- Amiga Empire for the Commodore Amiga
- Wolfpack Empire
[edit] The Ben Norton Version
This version of the game was written from scratch in 1984 in Pascal on an HP3000 and released to the HP3000 Contributed Library. This version was enhanced by Ben until 2003, and (as of 2007) may still be played at http://hp3000.empireclassic.com/. It is also known as Empire Classic, alternatively known as HP Classic Empire and HP Empire Classic. New enhancements and bug fixes have been added by others after 2003 and a list of the changes are at: http://hp3000.empireclassic.com/rev_hist.txt
At some point, graphical clients were created. In 2003, the game was ported to the C++ programming language on the Linux operating system, and subsequently a Java client/server version was produced.
