State of Traveller, 2011...
- Thread starter Treebore
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alex_greene
Guest
*groans with the headache from the computer geek nostalgia hangover*
Anyone here got fond memories of Hollerith cards and paper tape or maybe Chinese abacuses? "In my day, we did chargen with knuckle bones from a goat and a slide rule." "You were lucky. We had dried deer skins for character sheets, red ochre for pens and lumps of freshly knapped flint for miniatures. We were so primitive that everybody smoked."
Anyone here got fond memories of Hollerith cards and paper tape or maybe Chinese abacuses? "In my day, we did chargen with knuckle bones from a goat and a slide rule." "You were lucky. We had dried deer skins for character sheets, red ochre for pens and lumps of freshly knapped flint for miniatures. We were so primitive that everybody smoked."
DFW said:
forth love if honk then
ok
Sooo much more fun and useful than BASIC. I wrote a bunch of FORTH traveller software (all lost to time) back in the day for my Apple// (MVP Forth I think - I switched to Laxen/Perry F83 when I finally got a DOS machine). I had a character generator called "men" which took a count and a career table and spit out that many generated NPCs. I had the same for planets and animals, but we mostly used Regina or Rhylanor subsectors and those didn't get as much play.
I actually still break out forth when I need to twist my brain around a little. I also taught my kid some forth, mostly so he could get a solid idea how computers work on the inside. There's nothing quite like ' (tick) SEE and DUMP to help a young kid understand pointers, memory, etc.
Thanks to a thread over on (I think) CoTI, I've been investigating Python. It gives me a lot of the same high-level fun factor (pun intended) that I get from SML or Haskell, but with the less "rigorously correct" feel of Forth and has so many useful modules that it's easy to do some pretty crazily advanced stuff. It's a nice break from all the C++ in my life at any rate.
far-trader
Mongoose
alex_greene said:
Ook agu lok..., sorry, modern language, reminiscing takes me back...
You mean you used magic to play and keep records? We had to look for signs in nature for random results and memorize everything to pass it on orally...
mmm, paper tape.
I spent a week end doing a restore on an old VAX mainframe that had its memory wiped in a lightning strike. Took all week end long. Rolls of scotch tape, razor blades and a cool old IBM tool for repunching holes that you had to tape over to fix a break.
The next quarter they got a Winchester HD and migrated the OS onto that and then some back up reel to reel drives.....The Winchester was the newest thing in the lab by almost 15 years, not counting the monitors.
Anyone remember those old Vaccum sealed Winchesters, and what happens the the bottle fails?
I spent a week end doing a restore on an old VAX mainframe that had its memory wiped in a lightning strike. Took all week end long. Rolls of scotch tape, razor blades and a cool old IBM tool for repunching holes that you had to tape over to fix a break.
The next quarter they got a Winchester HD and migrated the OS onto that and then some back up reel to reel drives.....The Winchester was the newest thing in the lab by almost 15 years, not counting the monitors.
Anyone remember those old Vaccum sealed Winchesters, and what happens the the bottle fails?
chrisboote
Mongoose
phavoc said:
Sorry YOU are wrong,. and let me tell you two reasons why you are wrong
Reason One
Not so long ago, Lotus 1-2-3 was the world's leading software package
I wrote all my Traveller Chargen, Sysgen, Ship Builder and Trade programs in it
It was 100% table driven, and could be modified on the fly, even in mid design if you didn't like the results you were getting
It could have been run on about 90% of the world's Office PCs (or PC ATs if you wanted speed)
Try to run it now. On anything
Can't be done
This WILL happen to any software written to perform any task. Without constant work, maintenance and support it will be come obsolete. And those things are expensive
You can't reply on one person to do it, you need a team, with continuity and handover procedures as people move on
Who pays for all that?
Bluntly, games companies go under. Who replaces your disk, or rewrites the software to include new ways of doing things? A book is always there, and needs no support
Reason two
I volunteer my holidays to work with a school in a South African village called Alicedale. This village has one laptop. Two when I am there
I play LOTS of games with them, and Traveller is one of them
For the dozen or so who like it, they LOVE it, playing at least once a week all year 'round
When I go over, I take them the latest Mongoose books, and we sit down and go through them, trying stuff out
If all of the tables were in a computer program, how would these lads (all boys, sadly, the girls just aren't interested in games) design a ship, a hovertank, a passenger sub, or roll up characters, a world, a subsector?
Software to do such things may be great to us, here on this board, but without PCs and education on how to use them, it is worthless
Books need no training (beyond literacy) and no maintenance
Let's keep using them
I think the idea yuo could get away with releasing the design system as software only is a total non-starter. Developing a software verison of the written system is a fine diea though.
Did anybody else here use HGS? That was one fine piece of software. I think it's been withdrawn from distribution though. Apparently it's Traveller license got revoked, even though it was freeware, but I'm not familiar with what happened.
The design system in the MGT core rules would be fairly simple to automate, adn in fact I had a go at it a while back. I got reasonably far with it but then has about 9 months when I couldn't work on it and moved on to other projects. I'd like to finish it off some time.
The system in High Guard is a bit more tricky. The small craft and mid-sized craft rules (just extending the core ssytem) are fine, but the rules for capital ships introduce several major revisions to the design sequence. In particular the rules on Ship Sections radicaly change the way you have to organise components.
I've not looked at the other vehicles supplements.
I've seen several vehicle design spreasheets. I suppose they could be useful, but they always seemed very complicated to use. Unless you actualy put a GUI on top of them such as with VBA, spreadsheets can be a bit lacking in the UI department for a consumer product.
Simon Hibbs
Did anybody else here use HGS? That was one fine piece of software. I think it's been withdrawn from distribution though. Apparently it's Traveller license got revoked, even though it was freeware, but I'm not familiar with what happened.
The design system in the MGT core rules would be fairly simple to automate, adn in fact I had a go at it a while back. I got reasonably far with it but then has about 9 months when I couldn't work on it and moved on to other projects. I'd like to finish it off some time.
The system in High Guard is a bit more tricky. The small craft and mid-sized craft rules (just extending the core ssytem) are fine, but the rules for capital ships introduce several major revisions to the design sequence. In particular the rules on Ship Sections radicaly change the way you have to organise components.
I've not looked at the other vehicles supplements.
I've seen several vehicle design spreasheets. I suppose they could be useful, but they always seemed very complicated to use. Unless you actualy put a GUI on top of them such as with VBA, spreadsheets can be a bit lacking in the UI department for a consumer product.
Simon Hibbs
chrisboote said:
Lol! Um, no, I'm not. Had you taken your Lotus 1-2-3 worksheets, you could have converted them to Quatro Pro, or Excel, or any other format. Lotus was the defacto standard at the time. Everybody had converters to read it.
Sure, if you got uber fancy in your lookups and everything else you might have some broken links (not everyone does formula's quite the same. They are annoying, but NOT earth-shattering for what needs to be done here).
I'm pretty sure if I wanted to spend the time I could find a program to pull that data out.
What I don't get is if you were sophisticated enough to do all that, how come you can't seem to grasp the concept of moving your work forward to newer versions? It's a pretty basic idea that's been around, for, umm, since they made the first real competitor to Lotus?
And while your point is correct about books being usable when there are no computers or electricity around, there are actually probably very few people who that applies to that are Traveller players (the proof would be the sales figures around the world and how many copies of the books are sold to countries where computers and electricity are the norm). And if you will carefully re-read my original posting, you'll note that my request was that the program be added "as part of the book".
So please check your facts first.
chrisboote said:
Of course back then the situation was worse because Lotus was a commercial package that not everyone could afford for home use. OpenOffice does improve the situation by being free and multi-platform, but platform obsolescence is still a risk and it doesn't solve cluncky spreadsheet syndrome.
There is a decent chance that within the next 5 years or so tablet devices like the iPad, or Android or Windows Mobile equivalents will replace desktop and notebook PCs for most people. There is no OpenOffice for these devices, and even if it is ported it's quite possible an alternative cheap or even open source productivity application, optimised for touch devices, will render it irrelevent. It's only 4 years since the first iPhone, and Android has only been viable for maybe 2 years. At the pace these devices are maturing and taking over computing niches, the home computing landscape could be unrecognisable in 5 years time. What will a 5th generation iPad or Galaxy Tab be like?
The MGT license has more than 5 years left to run.
That's not an argument for ignoring software, but it is an argument that putting all you eggs in one basket with a software-only product would be crazy.
Simon Hibbs
phavoc said:
Excel always had the best Lotus compatibility and it only supports Lotus macros up to 1-2-3 version 2.2. If you developed the spreadsheet in version 3.0 or 4.0 you're out of luck. And if you used any of the user interface elements in 3.0 to make the spreadsheet more usable, forget it.
What makes you think the guy doing the maintenance and version updates will necesserily be the one who orriginaly wrote it? There's no guarantee you'll be able to find another Traveller fan/developer prepared to work on such a low-paying project (compared to commercial IT work) who happen to have the same skills set? Even if you can, plain english text is a heck of a lot easier to revise and update than source code or spreadsheet macros. Especialy spreadsheet macros.
Only now with smartphones and tablet computers are computers coming anywhere close to the portability and accessability of books, even for the technicaly sophisticated customer. However mobile device platforms are even more fragmented than desktop platforms, what to develop for, iPhone? Android? Windows Mobile? PDfs work fine on all of them. Go text!
Yes, I'd noticed how keen you were for other people to give away their work for free. Better yet - for free and with an extra packaging and distribution cost!
Simon Hibbs
IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
1. I believe that the OpenOffice (OOo) file formats are a matter of common knowledge.
2. Unlike the binary-only file formats of previous Office packages, the OOo files are compressed XML files (structured text files for ease of manipulation). All you need to do is point an OOo file at an unzip program (unzip on Linux, presumably WinZip or equivalent on Windows) and you can get at the underlying text pf the file.
As an example, I created an OO Calc spreadsheet and ran it through unzip (I'm using Linux) and I got this:-
ian@berners-lee:~/Documents$ unzip ExampleSpreadsheet.ods
Archive: ExampleSpreadsheet.ods
extracting: mimetype
creating: Configurations2/statusbar/
inflating: Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml
creating: Configurations2/floater/
creating: Configurations2/popupmenu/
creating: Configurations2/progressbar/
creating: Configurations2/menubar/
creating: Configurations2/toolbar/
creating: Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/
inflating: content.xml
inflating: styles.xml
extracting: meta.xml
inflating: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png
inflating: settings.xml
inflating: META-INF/manifest.xml
ian@berners-lee:~/Documents$
2. Unlike the binary-only file formats of previous Office packages, the OOo files are compressed XML files (structured text files for ease of manipulation). All you need to do is point an OOo file at an unzip program (unzip on Linux, presumably WinZip or equivalent on Windows) and you can get at the underlying text pf the file.
As an example, I created an OO Calc spreadsheet and ran it through unzip (I'm using Linux) and I got this:-
ian@berners-lee:~/Documents$ unzip ExampleSpreadsheet.ods
Archive: ExampleSpreadsheet.ods
extracting: mimetype
creating: Configurations2/statusbar/
inflating: Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml
creating: Configurations2/floater/
creating: Configurations2/popupmenu/
creating: Configurations2/progressbar/
creating: Configurations2/menubar/
creating: Configurations2/toolbar/
creating: Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/
inflating: content.xml
inflating: styles.xml
extracting: meta.xml
inflating: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png
inflating: settings.xml
inflating: META-INF/manifest.xml
ian@berners-lee:~/Documents$
simonh said:
See above. I did address that.
Again, re-read my message. I did mention multiple ways of doing this. And if you did it via spreadsheet (and used tables) everyone can update/convert their own versions. And there's almost always some enterprising person out there who sees this as an interesting challenge and will do it for the fun of it. Check out some of the ship-building spreadsheets that are out there already.
Only time will tell. But if the Netbooks issue tells us anything, its that people still want the versatility and screensize that comes with a laptop screen. I personally don't want to have to squint to slide all over a ship blueprint that I only get a 2" x 4" display. Tablets are interesting toys, but once the shinyness wears off, I don't see a lot of mobile professionals giving up keyboards for tapping on the tablet screen. I certainly can't replicate 70wpm on a tablet vs. a keyboard.
My original post said "add $5 to cost of the book to cover/help de-fray program costs". That was for MGT. The other option was for MGT to allow someone to use the OGL to develop a free spreadsheet. If you have read the forums you will notice there have been a few notes where people have wanted to do things, but were afraid of releasing software due to copyright/licensing issue. So sorry to burst your bubble there Simon, but there ARE people out there who are happy to share the fruits of their labor if allowed.
And I have no issue with paying money for a decent tool that works, and is maintainable (i.e. that whole table issue...). I have purchased a number of tools (GURPS Vehicle Designer, CC3, and others). I want a simple tool that lets me run the numbers (GVD ain't that tool), or doesn't have a huge learning curve (CC3). I want gaming aids that let me concentrate on the more fun aspects of the game.
And that's what this is all about right? Having fun gaming?
IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
To coin a word "No".simonh said:
However, there are some things I was hoping to imply. Here are some of them.
0. It can be difficult working out binary only files from Office programs.
1. Structured text files are easier to reverse-engineer than binary files.
2. Even if someone isn't capable of doing the conversion themself, they're more likely to get help doing the conversion if its a straight "XML conversion" job.
IanBruntlett said:
Ian, you have to understand, MANY people don't have an understanding of software. It's best to spell out tech explanations. That being said, I agree with your points regarding the material being in XML format. I still think doing it is OO Base is the best route.
