Order Format

Note that this example assumes you are playing in a game named Apollo. See sample turns for a sample series of turns.

Please use a subject of: Apollo orders for racename
(use your race's name instead of racename) you may include a turn and/or revision number in the subject as well (note that my server ignores anything after the racename, this is for human tracking purposes). Ex:
Apollo orders for racename turn 5, revision 1

If you submit multiple sets of orders, especially within several minutes of each other, I strongly recommend that you use the latter format. Your first message may get here last. Note that I use the time that you send orders to determine which one to use. If you send from two machines, and their clocks are not in sync; unpleasant things could happen.

You must have the words Apollo and orders in your subject, otherwise, your orders will not be recognized, and I'll have to refile them manually. See "Preprocessor" below for why. The preprocessor is case sensitive on the subject line- "Apollo" is not "apollo", "orders" is not "Orders".

  The body of the mail message should look like (Note: do not put in
  leading spaces!)
      #Galaxy Apollo Iron_Empire
      ; whatever you are going to do
      #end
 
for example:
To: server @ site.edu
Subject: Apollo orders for Iron_Empire (turn 5)
#Galaxy Apollo Iron_Empire
M
T Strike_Eagle Eagle
P Germania CAP
P Macedonia SHIP Chariot
S 63 Balmung
S 65 Balmung 32
S 73 Rommye
#end

Note: you can use "GALAXY", "galaxy", "Galaxy", or "GaLaXy", as well as "end", "END", or "End". If a password is in use, the #galaxy line should have that as the fourth item:

#galaxy Hercules Iron_Empire mypassword

Order Checking

Since I tend to be a terrible typist, I've made the Blind code fairly picky about looking for stupid errors (typos, not attacking someone bigger than you (:-)).

Here is how I handle your orders:

About every 30 seconds minutes, the preprocessor checks for and handles any mail- messages get forwarded, and orders checked. Machines getting rebooted or large messages may take it out until I come in the next day though (this happens fairly rarely, however). See below for finding out about its status.

For each set of orders, a modified version of the code that I run the game with is used (the "forecaster" binary). It checks for all errors in your orders. If it can not find any orders, it will complain about a mistake on line 0. Bad/missing passwords generate similar errors.

If the #galaxy line is found, it will use your orders and flag get any problems, such as misspelled planets, non-existent groups, etc. If it says there is a problem, so will the main program.

If the are no complaints, you will get back an acknowledgment telling you that all your orders are fine (plus a forecast, if requested).

If there are any problems with them, you will get:

A Mistakes section, with the command (as seen by the program), its command number (i.e. the nth line in your orders, after the #galaxy line), and why it thinks that it won't work. Note that the PEDANTIC option can create WARNING lines. They are not wrong, only questionable. If these annoy you, turn the PEDANTIC option off.
In general the preprocessor doesn't get confused and mess up the rest of your orders unless something is really wrong with them. It also is usually right (especially if I haven't changed the code recently).
Your original message, including your orders.
If requested, a forecast of what the next turn report will look like (sans most information about other empires) will be in that message as well.

This server is MIME unaware. It expects text to be in ascii. Some types of MIME encoding will produce strange responses to your orders. Avoid so called "Quoted Printable" (more accurately "quoted unreadable"), as that will cause some rather garbled orders.

If any of your orders are flagged as being wrong, please take the time to correct them and resubmit your entire set of orders. While I will make reasonable attempts to fix things, I may guess wrong or be so pressed for time that I delete commands that don't work. Note than in established games, I generally don't fix anything at all.

For the curious, I process turns using a csh & sh script (which does all the ack. creation, feeds your orders through the the galaxy program itself, and allows me to test things manually before I run the turns). I've got a partial rewrite of that mess in perl which I hope to upgrade to at some point. All the code runs on a Sun Sparc 10 running Solaris 2.5.1.

Contacting other players

Initially you won't know the names of the other players in the game. While I can't & won't stop you from writing your friends to find out if they are playing, I find that it ruins part of the game if you try to find this information out outside of the game.

To establish contact with a race, you have to have a ship belonging to one player at the system of another, or 2 ships at the same system (one of which must have mass > 1.0 for a non drive component [i.e. a mass 2 drone doesn't work, but a mass 2 fighter would]). This must be the case at the end of the turn. If you bombed/blew them up, well, its hard to figure out where they came from when you only have debris to look at...

As an alternative, if you can contact two races, you may enable them to talk to each other.

Except in the case of third party forwards, this should be automatic (assuming I remember to manually run the command to update forwarding lists). Please check your forwarding list before asking me.

Forwarding messages

Send a message with a subject like this to server @ site.edu:

Subject: Apollo:FWD:your_race_name:race to forward to

To forward to multiple people at once:

Subject: Apollo:FWD:your_race_name:race1_to_forward_to race2_to_forward_to..

Examples:
Subject: Apollo:fwd:Myempire:GM
Subject: Apollo:fwd:Myempire:GM Myempire otherempire

The forwarder will strip out any mail headers, but leave the message body intact. Any signature your mailer adds will be kept, so keep that in mind if you don't wish to be exposed... The sending race will be identified in the forwarded message -
Subject: Apollo forwarded message from <racename>

You will receive an acknowlegement when your message is sent successfully.

Forwarding lists

It is possible to get a list of players to which you can forward. Send a message to server at site.edu with a subject:
Subject:gamename:forwardlist:racename
for example
Subject:Apollo:forwardlist:Iron_Empire

You will be sent a list of the empires that you can forward mail to.

Back to my Blind Galaxy Page

Last update: December 15, 1999