--------------------GEV List Thingy, Mar 5th-------------------- From: Kerry Harrison Subject: Winchell Chung OGRE sketches To: Henry Cobb There are now two GIFs available of some early Winchell Chung OGRE sketches on io.com:/pub/usr/kerry/Ogre: ogre1.gif - Sketch of a Paneuropean Fencer cybertank and a Combine Ogre Mk VI. ogre2.gif - Rough sketches from 1976 of a Combine Ogre Mk V. Enjoy. Kerry ___ [Please respect the copywrites of this items and use them for personal use only. I haven't come up with a good "fair usage" document for my lists, mostly due to the nature of the items. I suspect that the forthcomming official Ogre mailing list will handle this much better. -HJC] ___ From: Kerry Harrison Subject: Re: GEV List Thingy, March 1st To: "Henry J. Cobb" > I realize that you sent this letter quite a while ago, but I am interested > in finding out more about the multi-player game. It sounds quite intriging. > I suspect that it would be run the way I want to run the large scale game. > I prefer the idea of a group of minor commanders fighting one another, ala > miniatures. In fact, if I could get my act together, I would run this at > Origins in SJ... But that's probably a pipe dream. The online game will attempt to recreate the current miniatures game (and the boardgame) on the computer - i.e. it will let you play just about any scenario you can dream up without have to setup the minis and terrain (or board and counters) and trying to get all the players in one place. The gaem will provide DOS and Windows frontends initially and eventually X-Windows and mac (any mabye some other OSes later). It will only be available to Illuminati Online (io.com) members. Expect the initial playtest in about 5 to 7 months. There will also be an email version playable by anyone with an email address that will use the same frontends but will be a bit different (mainly in the turn sequence - I anyone has any ideas on a turn sequence that will allow all of the players to go at once and not seriously change the game I'd be very interested in hearing about it). > Personally I think the hackers for this project should take a look > at the netrek sources, it's the most robust Client-Server code I've ever > seen. -HJC] I'll have them take a look at it. Thanks. Kerry ___ [If I was you, I'd just do the MS-WOS version and just write to Winsock (Interneting from the MS products is so difficult that its best to manage the damage.) The "critter that ate Soybeans" and "Movie Monsters" are games that spring from the same premise, but use the underlying technologies to define their game play. I suspect that you would have much better results with a N-way multiplayer game if you made it "real time". Take the standard Ogre turn and turn it into about 30 seconds of wall clock time. (I.e. a GEV would move a "inch" about every 2 seconds, and an Ogre would be able to fire each of its weapons twice a minute.) Give each player a mark-V and send them up against the computer controlled horde of little units (and each other). This would deal very nicely with stragglers. If you will not do the real-time version then (at least for large multi-player online) have each player plot his turn (against a two minute clock) and run the results all at once. (Waiting 30 minutes because one of the players got distracted gets very old, very quick). -HJC] Henry J. Cobb hcobb@fly2.berkeley.edu, SFB Tyrant-for-life "Better yet, don't use Motif at all. It's an absolute pig." - Joe English