Merchant Empires
Merchant Empires is a multiplayer, web-based game of space exploration and economic competition. It is a game of strategy, role-playing, combat, and diplomacy. Merchant Empires is loosely based on both Trade Wars and Space Merchant.
History
There is currently no active Merchant Empires game. The code is not
actively developed. I ran a number of games during the years
2000 to 2001. The game at that time was fairly popular with as many as 500
active players. The time constraints imposed by getting a real job
and acquiring two lovely children forced me to close the game.
The Merchant Empires code stands as a dated but functional example of what is
required to write a multiplayer, web-based game, with all source code
provided. There aren't many examples of this on the
web. I welcome you to take the Merchant Empires code and create
your own game, or just look at the code as a learning tool. I wrote the game in
order to learn PHP, Python and web technologies.
It's quite ironic that a group of players took the source to the game,
created their own project labeled "Open Merchant Empires", and then proceeded,
after a short period of time, to not release any source or modifications to the original
source.
The latest versions of the code on Source Forge feature an XSLT based UI. If
you aren't interested in dealing with XSLT, I recommend getting older versions
of the code, which are purely PHP based, from Source Forge. Or if you aren't
interested in PHP, the Python based
turn processor could be adapted to any type of game.
I am writing a new web-based game called Battle for Tidestone. See the Source
Forge site here for more details:
Battle for Tidestone
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Technology behind Merchant Empires PHP PHPLIB Python PostgreSQL Apache |
This game was created by Bryan Brunton