Blind galaxy FAQ Sections: I) Differences II) Obtaining the Rules and Source III) Mailing lists IV) Resources Differences The more obvious differences between standard Galaxy v3 and Blind Galaxy are 0) Groups with a mass of one (a single mass 1 probe) do not generate incoming reports. 1) Blind galaxy supports different options that standard galaxy- Standard: twocol, namecase, underscores Blind:smartmap, map, fullreport, unknown, battlesum, longbattle, fulltype, unsafebreak, battlemass, techs, forecast, showopts, techplus, upgradecost, twospace, sortplanets, longforecast, unsafemax, showopts, xcenter, ycenter, shortint, bombsum, techprod, stats, sorttype, sysmass, showfrom, cartesian, pedantic Common: sortgroups, autounload, production 2) Blind galaxy allows you to be at guard (only shoot at someone over your planets), in addition to peace and war. 3) Blind galaxy supports a selective planet defense (K command) which allows you to override war/peace/guard on a planet by planet basis at systems you own. 4) Blind's production occurs after routes & population growth. 5) Blind industrial growth is ~80% faster. 6) Blind galaxy supports 2 names for planets. A non-changing #, and a player setable name. 7) Blind galaxy has "Full Reports" for systems, which include all the information found elsewhere in the report, grouped by planet. [I.e. groups, fleets, routes, alien groups, incoming reports, etc are listed under a "Full Report on system xxx" section] 8) Blind galaxy has a more diverse planet mixture than standard galaxy including size 0 words, and worlds larger than homeworlds. 9) Blind galaxy does not support spaces in names, or quoted strings (a later release may do so) 10) Blind galaxy reports are generally incompatible with standard galaxy analysis tools. 11) Blind galaxy battles can (with the correct option) give you a blow by blow account of the battle so that you can analyze ship performance (such a program exists at the ftp site), as well as give you the total masses involved for both sides. 12) Blind galaxy has wraparound maps. 13) Blind galaxy does not support sending messages through the game (the @ command). 14) Blind galaxy does not support the player lookup command 'F'. 15) Blind galaxy does not have a built in way of maintaining player's orders (that is, if you submit 15 sets of orders, the GM or a program has to remove the 14 old sets) 16) Blind galaxy doesn't keep track of players. The GM needs to provide an outside mechanism for doing this. (See 15 above). Some of the support tools help with this. 17) Blind galaxy has a tendency to have more bugs, and is presently evolving faster than standard galaxy. 18) Blind galaxy has an integrated, stable forecaster. Standard galaxy's forecaster/order checker are separate programs, and at the present not 100% accurate. 19) Standard galaxy has been ported to more systems (Microsoft products in particular), and will compile out of the box with non ansi C compilers. Blind requires an Ansi C compiler, and may not compile out of the box without gcc. 20) Blind galaxy comes complete with an example server which supports anonymous message forwarding and order checking/forecasts. 21) Blind galaxy supports "Partial Techs" - the ability to build and upgrade ships to levels below your current levels. 22) Blind galaxy allows the GM to get a omnipitent view of the galaxy without having to grot through everyone's turn reports. 23) Blind galaxy has documentation for the GM, as well as the Rules, and has been actively supported by the same person for more than 6 years. Obtaining the Rules and Source The complete documentation and the source code for the current release are available via ftp from cs.utk.edu /pub/bampton/Blind Rob Novak (rnovak@nyx.cs.du.edu) runs a mail server which has the rules and source. Howard Bampton (bampton@cs.utk.edu) also can send the code if you don't have any other way to get it. Please specify either tar & compressed or zip'ed format. Mailing lists There is a mailing list for discussing the all variants of galaxy: galaxy-request@indyramp.com Resources 1) What is the minimum hardware you can get away with ? Especially, how much disk space does a game take up ? Assuming that the machine is dedicated to Blind galaxy, just about anything that the code can be ported to will do. On a lightly loaded Sparc-10, running SunOS 4.1.4, a "worst case" forecast/order check takes roughly 1 minute (this is for a player with 70,000+ Ind, and generating "Long forecasts" on 1500 lines of orders). Turns for that game took ~10 minutes to run (most of which was spent waiting for the inefficient disk IO bound report writing, and datafile read/writes). A more reasonable number is ~30seconds for forecasts, and 5 minutes for a turn (possibly less if the code is compiled with optimization turned on). Several people are running games on 486's running Linux. I did most of my development work and testing on a Sun IPX, Sparc 5, or Sparc 2- very low end boxes by today's standards. Disk space for a 400 planet galaxy, 20 initial players. typical worst case- datafile will on occasion reach 600K, execuatables ~300K each for Blind and blind.dbg (~600K with debuging symbols turned on), reports ~900K each (if there is a major battle, everone is there, all have long forecasts on, etc) to 1000K [I've seen this happen maybe once per game]. average case- datafile 100K/300K/450K (early, mid, and late game), reports 100K each (but you don't need to have them around after you mail them out). pathalogical worst case- In the endgame of a 80 turn or longer game, battles between huge forces can consume more. In this case, reports can grow to several megabytes do to all the shots being fired. The blindrc file can get similarily bloated. Run time memory use in this one case was ~80M. As battles involving ships with 0.01% or so chances to hit are fairly rare, I wouldn't concern myself with this. I save 5 turns of back reports, all forwarded messages and orders, all blindrc files (1 per turn). Using zip (or some other good compression program [gzip, zoo, not Unix compress]), a game takes up less than 10M between turns, and uses an extra 4-5M while a turn is in progress. A disk starved GM could get away with 2-3M if they did one report at a time (<2M if they write reports to stdout, which they pipe to mail directly). My longest running game topped out around 12M due to more than 100 blindrc files. 2) How much Email can a GM expect to have to deal with ? This depends on a lot of factors. If one has automatic forwarding of messages (or disallows them), less than 5 messages per week over and above orders once the game is running [say, past turn 10]. Things occasionaly break (or change) when new releases (or bugfixes) are installed. This can generate a few more questions from your players. Player experience levels, and mail/system stability/accessibility also contribute. Having Howard in your games generates an occasional message too, as he updates you with his newest set of bugs (err, code) and otherwise pounds on your server. 3) What tools are useful ? I know procmail does the job but are there any others ? MH's slocal is also of use and can do most of the same stuff as procmail. The blind source comes with a server (but the less said about that piece of dung, the better) built around MH (but not using slocal for various reasons). 4) Has anyone got the turn checker right yet ;-) ? Blind galaxy has had a order checker since V2.00 (November 1992), and a sometimes stable forecaster since V2.33 (August 1993). The features added in a given realease of it sometimes take until the next release to get working 100% right, but if all you want is sanity checking on your orders, it works right 99.9% of the time. Since the code for the forecaster and the main program are both compiled from the same souce code, it is pretty much the case that what the forecaster says will happen, is what will happen (provided no one else submits orders (:-) )