GAME MODERATION

[Nia]

I'm no expert, but it seems obvious to me that the moderation of this game will become more and more time-consuming as the game gets increasingly complex, because of the likelyhood of more new players arriving, together with the certainty that more will be going on within the game.
I would like to ask Eric whether his task is carried out "by hand", or is there a computer program that carrie out most of the donkeywork?
Nia

[Eric Moreau]

You are right, it will get time consuming as time goes by. I do most of the turn work by hand. I've written a bunch of tools to help me out since the start of the game. For instance, when the game first started I wrote a computer program to randomly generator resources for squares surveyed and enter those into a database. I then filled out the Survey Reports by hand. Which wasn't so bad at first, then the amount of surveying done by each player ballooned and it was very time consuming to fill in all those Survey Reports. So I expanded the resource generator to output the results to file that I then "printed" out into a .pdf file. No doubt some of the older players have noticed a slight change in the way the Survey Reports look now compared to how they did at the start of the game.

Another good example would be the total amount of resources used each turn. At the start of the game I had to check the manufacturing formulas for each item manufactured or built, add all those up. It got annoying, so I wrote some more code, now I enter the item name, click a button...the program fetches the manufacturing facility from a database and adds it to the counters of each resource. Very handy indeed!

I've still got a bunch of other tools I need to write, for one the code to deduct the mined resources from a deposit, (haven't gotten it to work yet. :-( ) and of course the big one of them all, the Battle Simulator.

Oh yeah and I'm still working on that software I said I was going to make available to help keep track of what resource exist in surveyed squares. I've got a rough build going and I am in the process of fishing out all the bugs before I put it up for download.

[Blackwill]

I have two MSPaint maps of my Homeworld at the moment (this turn should see me take possession of at least one other world), one shows me where each of my planetary installations, cities, defenses,etc are located, and the other shows me which resources are in each square, and the quality of those resources. It's a little unweildy, and I am working on a GIMP version of one map which shows these facilities/resources in seperate layers (kind of like an overlay). So, when I want to see the landscape, I'll click the landscape layer, and then I can toggle onto the resource layer if I need to know which resources are in a particular square.

Chris

[Blackwill]

Oh...I just figured out that I can also use this same technique to keep track of ship movements in the system/sector maps, as well.

Now, if I can only find a way to link these maps with my order entry spreadsheet, so it will automatically move the ships/installations on the map...

Chris