                        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, centerx, centery, shortint
   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',
   the quit command 'Q', passwords (yet) 'Y', or changing one's 
   e-mail address 'Z'. All these features are done by the GM.

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 14 & 15 above)

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, and will compile
   out of the box with non ansi C compilers.

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 5 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 4.1.3, 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 DOS or Linux. I did most of my development work and testing on 
  a Sun IPX (now I use a Sparc 5, and ran turns on a Sun4/1xx [i.e. a
  10 MIPS or so machine] for several years, now it has been replaced
  with an IPX).


  Disk space: 
    typical worst case- datafile will on occasion reach 600K, execuatables
                ~300K each for Blind and blind.dbg, 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.

    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).
    
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).
 
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 (:-) )
