Wolfpack Empire

"This should be easy to code"

Empire is an evolving game. Throughout its entire history, it has built itself upon the ideas of programmers and players alike. Throughout that time, player input has always been encouraged. Wolfpack continues that tradition. We strongly encourage players to make suggestions on how the game might be improved, be it bug reports, feature requests or patches. None of the following should be construed as any attempt to quell player input. WE WANT THE INPUT! Really. Honestly. No kidding!

Countless times through Empire's history, players have made suggestions about how to improve the game. Somewhere on the order of countless/2 times, the comments have been followed by a variant of "This should be easy to code".

Generally speaking, it isn't.

Empire is a complex program. There are more than 60,000 lines of code. It has been coded by literally dozens of people over a span of four decades. As a result, there are often rather unintended consequences to changing one aspect of the code to meet a request. In fact, working on the code at all, even if not changing it, can be a very daunting task. The following conversation happened on rec.games.empire in February of 2004:

  > >Yes, that means some poor chap^W^Wvolunteer has to grep through the
  > >source. No, that won't be me ;-}
  >
  > I just discovered why you said that.  UGH!
  >

  Welcome to the swamp.  Nevermind the alligators; they only want to
  play :)

As a deity, you should keep in mind the consequences of making custom modifications to the code to meet your desires for an Empire game you are going to run. This doesn't mean you shouldn't make them. Just be careful. If you want help in modifying the code for your game, ask us. We can often provide insight based on years of brute force code management that could save you hours of frustration in trying to setup your game. That doesn't mean we're going to do the coding for you; just that we may be able to give you some verbal help to assist you in making the modifications.

Wolfpack continues work to bring the code up to modern software engineering standards. This too is a huge task, and will take a long time to accomplish.