Re: Software Projects

Hi all,

I've been reading these messages regarding an FT campaign helper, & 
wanted to delurk to let people know what I've been working on in this
area.

I was inspired by a recent article in "Minature Wargames" about a solo 
campaign system for DBM/DBR. At the heart of it was an essentially 
random diplomacy model where the various nations involved more between 
war and peace over the course of the turns. It was very simplistic (no 
map, for example, just cities for each player which could be taken by 
siege), but it struck me as a place to start...particularly to build a 
simple campaign system for FT. I'd like to take it further, however, 
particular by having some form of map around which forces move.....

I've started to code this up as a Java program (well, I actually started

it in C++, but switched to Java when I realised I wanted a GUI rather 
than doing it all on the command line ;-) ). If I get far enough along 
with it, I plan to use the FTJava syntax to save the state of the fleets

involved (in the C++ version I'd planned to use a TeX-like language I 
already have a parser for, but then realised this was a little silly as 
there already existed an excellent format for defining ships :-) ) plus 
some extra XML gubbins for the state of the campaign.

At present, a turn has 5 phases. A turn is imagined to last around 3
months:
i) determine who fights whom (based on the current diplomatic situation)
ii) fight those battles (done off-line as an FT-game)
iii) record results (victors take one of the losers planets), record 
damage to ships etc
iv) spend funds (replace expended missiles, repair damage, pay 
maintenance etc)
v) determine the diplomatic situation for next turn

If there is a move towards writing some kind of FT Campaign program, I'd

love to help out......

Cheers,

Nick

> ...or to generate an FTJava scenario file. :-) I've been thinking
about
> something like this...
> 
> Roger (in my copious free time)
> 

> 
> Yes, I agree.  A campaign-strategic game that would generate
encounters
> and fire them off to the FTJava server in an automated way.
> 
> Jon