Re: What to do with Xconq

[EastnFront at aol dot com]

Hi Stan,

<<Hey, it's important to have users to tell us programmers whether we're
doing the right things or not!>

Thanks for taking the time to respond.
 
 <One of their problems is that all the implementation costs them way more
 than they can expect to get in return.  Historical wargames are a rather
 narrow niche, which is OK - there are fewer generals than privates too,
 and everybody thinks that's a good thing :-) - but in the commercial arena
 it means that a lot of cool ideas will never be implemented. >

For some titles I think you are right. But, one of the more ironic things 
is that many new wargames do have all sorts of complexity and what I 
would call fluff and no substance. Counting every man, vehicle and gun. 
And, having many other governing factors to control them. But, then do 
a lot of silly things, like making no allowance for attrition like breakdowns 
or even immobilization's. Or, if they do, the return rates are the same for 
all nationalities and for all units equally.

 
 <Did you ever look at earth-50km.g?  At 800x320, it stresses Xconq in many
 places, but you can play on it, and IMHO it looks pretty awesome...>

Sorry, I hadn't. I will have to check it out. While I personally prefer
operational-level games 5km. to 15km. it still might give me some 
ideas. In that area, I think I remember seeing a Crusader game
about 6 months ago? It seemed to have graphic problems from
what little I remember of it.


 <Unfortunately, TOAW is better than Xconq in quite a few different ways,
 so I was mentioning it as a competitor to catch up with!  But with
 TOAW, Talonsoft has that cold market reality to deal with, which I
 believe will eventually force them to stop work on TOAW.  Meanwhile,
 Xconq will continue to grow.>

They could have reached a lot more serious gamers if their attitude was
a lot different. I wrote an article for the Wargamer about a year ago that
caused quite a stir. When it shouldn't have, had Talonsoft had made more
of an effort to the hard-core gaming community. Well, that is old news 
and off the subject.

I do see many of TOAW's features as you say as something to shoot 
for. One of TOAW's biggest downfalls was that while you could edit 
many things. You couldn't edit the terrain movement costs or combat 
effects or even make new ones. There was ahistorically too low of unit/
equipment stacking. This fixed number was based on the hex size (and, 
it couldn't be edited). And, again TOAW treated all countries the same
in this regard. Though, I doesn't sound like Xconq has any of those 
problems?

 
 < (Heh, WaW is a poster child for the fate of proprietary computer
 wargames - try and get one of them nowadays...) >

Well, I still have many of them for both Mac and Win. I never got rid 
of them. But, I rarely play them either. Velikiye Luki about a year ago. 
Believe me, I have tried hacking on all those games many times to no 
avail. I have heard that the engine is still for sale for something like a 
half a million bucks...Gee, I wonder why there haven't been any takers? ;-)
 
 Yes, Xconq can be the engine.  One of its goals is to support the
 construction of interesting historical wargames.  This turns out
 to be a very ambitious goal, but hey, Asteroids has already been
 done. :-)  So although Xconq is closer to the goal than any other
 open-source project, our progress still isn't as fast as I would
 like - if you have any programmer friends to sucke^H^H^H^H^Hentice
 into working on Xconq, send them along!
 
 Another key thing to do is to work on the library.  As others have
 commented here, most of the library games are incomplete.  In some
 cases, supporting C code is still needed, but most of the time it's
 simply that the game rules haven't been filled out completely.  So
 it's also valuable to act as a "level designer", just using Xconq as
 it stands.  While I have some knowledge of the historical situations,
 there are other people who really know the OBs and the odds and all
 that detail, and they're the right people to do the actual game designs. >>

OK, well I will have to look at this, after I get done with work for one 
of those commercial wargaming companies that I am complaining
about. ;-) To see if there is something that I am interested in helping 
out with? Well, OoB/ToE work is especially my forte. And, infact that 
is what I am doing for this company.

Regards,

Greg Allen