About Empire
Empire is a multi-player network computer game orginally written by college students for the Unix platform in the 1970's. It has been constantly maintained and improved ever since by a dedicated group of faithful players and programmers. The result is the most complex and entertaining computer game available. Empire is totally non-commercial. There are no entry fees or turned based fees. Games are run and the Empire code is maintained entirely by volunteer enthusiasts.If you are not familiar with Empire, read Mithrilien's What is Empire for a quick overview, and uesugi's Empire FAQ for more detail. If that sparks a serious interest, then visit the Wolfpack Home Page. Wolfpack is the current "keeper of the flame" for maintaining and improving Empire. Warning - Empire is highly complex, and highly addictive, and can consume increadable amounts of your "free" time, if you let it.
About WinACE
In order to play Empire over a network, you use an Empire client to communicate to the Empire server. The client allows you to submit commands and recieve feedback. There are many clients available for Empire, for a number of different host platforms and operating systems. Unix clients are most abundent, since Empire itself is run on a unix platform. WinACE was developed because the author became frustrated with the clients available for the Window's platforms, and undertook the challange to try to design something a little bit better.
WinACE is a GUI client, meaning that it features a scrollable map, and most (if not all) commands are submitted to the server by selecting options off menus, clicking on the map, and filling in prompt boxes. A command line is available as a backup. WinACE uses a local MS Access database with sector and unit information that it automatically updates after commands are executed. It also stores and displays enemy information coming in from intelligence gathering commands like look, spy, recon, etc. Currently, version 1.0 is short on tools, although it does have a quick exploration tool, a blitz setup tool, a scripting recorder/editor, and a tool that graphically shows ship navigation ranges. There are also several available "shortcuts", like setting thresholds when you designate a sector, loading all commodities on a ship at once, and multi-fire options for forts and ships. More tools will probably follow.Minimum Hardware Configuration
WinACE was developed on a Pentium II 233 w/32 MB RAM, but I would expect it would run well on any Pentium machine. I ran a test on a 486-66 with 16MB RAM, and the program was slow but acceptable once you got past the initial load time. The program directory is small (about 3-5MB), but the install routine could add several standard Microsoft DLL’s to your Windows system library.To Download and Install WinACE executable
Go to our installation page.Source Code
WinACE is written in Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 I will make the source code available as soon as I can get everything organized into one package, probably about the same time I have version 1.1 ready.What's New
Below are a summary of the latest developments with relation to WinACE.05/01/98
- WinACE version 1.00 is made available from the Wolfpack ftp site.