Welcome to the Wormhole Project Homepage !

An SF strategy game and universal game engine approach for LINUX Other language versions of this page (these are out of date!)

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Huh, Wormhole? What is it anyway?

Wormhole is a (sorry, I mean in the far future it'll be) science fiction strategy game similar to Master of Orion or The Ascendancy . Like these games Wormhole plays in the far future, where several interstellar empires compete for the control of the whole galaxy. The task you've to perform is to build new colonies, research advanced technologies, fight against the other empires and - of course - to win!!!. But that's not all. We'll take an very generic approach in the game design, so in the future wormhole can serve as a base for virtually any strategy game who want to play!

What's hot and what's not (and what's new)...

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Check out the Wormhole Mailing List Archive, here
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For more information you can also see the wormhole discussion group at:
http://parsimony.net/forum/forum1216/

What we use to program Wormhole

The operating system: Linux

We use linux simply because we want to create a complex game with a good concept, not with good 3DFX graphics. At this point of time there's nobody in the team with an exceptional (or even basic) talent in creating computer graphics. On linux, we've a base platform without such "Mega-Games", and it also offers perfect options for developing stable and/or network based applications.

The programming language: C++

It's obvious that the complex game concepts designed for Wormhole could be implemented more easily in an object oriented language as in an procedural language. So we decided to use C++. Though the similarity to C we can also use most of the system calls and library functions that are avaiable under linux. We've got some discussions if we should use JAVA instead of C++, but several people do not agree with this. Since we strictly divide the game in game server and interface clients, the clients could be written in virtually any language on any OS, as long as it supports TCP/IP networking.

Visualisation concepts

Due to the open design of Wormhole, many different client interfaces are possible. There'll be definetly an X-Window interface realised with the Qt-Toolkit from TrollTech, but other implementations like an ASCII-Client, GTK+ -Clients, and even clients for other OS, e.g. Windows, are possible.

Game concepts

Basic concepts (the results of our brainstorming face in aug/sep 98

• Game is event-based. You cannot control your units dircetly, but give orders to the several commanders. Though to this, the game could be "real-time", but won't create such hectic as other games of this genre.

• Basic actions for the player: Build and move ships, build and extend colonies, diplomacy with other players, buy and sell resources to empires who need them. The player should also be able to build deep space stations to bridge large areas of empty space.

• Research different technologies (Much the same way as in other strategy games)

• Each planet has a certain amount of biological and mineral resources. Bio resources are needed to feed your colonists, mineral resources are needed to build buildings and ships.

• The communication problem: At game start, your communication speed is very limited. Like your ships, communication data travels only with the speed of light, so you'll have to plan into the future to succeed. Due to this your colonies and space ships must have a certain amount of artificial intelligence, to act up on they're own. You should also be able to give them instructions to tell them what to do in certain situations.

• Starchart: The starchart is made by a randomized key to save some space. No limits for the number of stars in the starchart. There are stars, nebulars, and black holes in the starchart. Limited communication speed.
• Sol systems: Sol systems can contain more than one planet. Each sol system has it's own technology levels (in main areas).
• Planets: Each planet has a certain amount of biological and mineral resources. Planets can have a star base (to build, fuel and rapair ships..)
• Technology: Several main areas (like energy, construction, computers..). The technology tree should be freely expandable (no FUTURE TECHNOLGY XX). Scientist must be trained and are very valuable.
• Starships: Starships are containers which can contain an amount of features.
• Playing: The game is packed based (the host is contacted by client, email, disc..) a) A turn based game. Each player makes his moves before end of the turn. b) An event based game. Players make their moves when they feel for it. You can give order lists for sereval years.
• Diplomacy: Communication is handled by messages.
• A.I.: An intelligent A.I. for ship captains and colonial governors, so they could act even if they don't get any orders from the player.
• Unlimited number of players: A game mode where paople can join to the game while playing. The new players are placed far away from the best races where they can develop in peace (or they can take an old race or a part of large one). The game must limit the number of the colonies one can keep (not directly but if you send a message to a distant star and it is there after a week real time).. Would it be nice to hide someone to keep everything in order?-)

Differences to other SF-Strategicals

• No megalomaniac fleets: Only small groups of space ships should travel trough the wormhole universe, although there should be no limitation on how many ships a player may control.

• Trade, diplomacy and spionage should play a greater rule in wormhole than in other strategy games. Although you could win through pure military power, you also should have a chance to win with other 'tools'.

• A certain amount of astronomical and physical reality should be preserved (e.g. the comm problem, see above).

Programming concepts

Though the use of C++ as the implementation language, the whole code is strictly object oriented.

The client/server concept of Wormhole (The new concept)

Wormhole is played with one game server and several game clients. These modules communicate via TCP/IP sockets, so they can be located all on a single computer (via the loopback device) or on different workstations in a LAN.

The client is the interface to a specific player, while the server collects all player data and runs all other aspects of the game. The final goal is to develop a server application that can handle as many clients as possible (= only limited by the system resources and network speed).

The General public license

The whole game will be distributed under the protection of the GPL, so everyone can access the sources and contribute something to the project. If you use linux, you also should have a copy of the General Public License, so I don't put it in here.

Download the sources

Sorry, there are no sources avaiable at this point.

Wanna play a part in the wormhole project?

Simply send an E-Mail to The Wormhole Project
IMPORTANT: Please leave any other project related messages at the discussion forum or the mailing list, so everyone interested in wormhole could read them.

What's urgent

• Define a message protocol
• Start to code same basic routines

Who's already in there (The wormhole project development team)

*: since we're still in a pre-development stage, there are no other tasks then game-designing and pre-program-designing.

Last modified: Tue Sep 29 19:49:34 CEST 1998 
Next updating of this page will occur in the far future ;-)