MORE ABOUT COLONIAL CONQUEST II The following text has been written for all those people who specially enjoyed the game and want to know more about Colonial Conquest. Most of it is totally useless for the understanding of the game, but like many other useless things in the world, it might be fun to read it anyway. THE BEGINNING I have started to write Colonial Conquest in summer 1993 during the preparation of my final exams at the university. As it was impossible to sit at home the whole day and learn physics (that's what I've studied) I thought it might be fun to have something creative and constructive beside this tedious learning activity. As I have always enjoyed playing strategy games very much and as I believed that these were the easiest games to write - specially in a not-too-fast programing language like AMOS - I started right away and finished a first playable version within a few weeks. It then took at least two months to debug it and make it more comfortable to use. 80% of the development time was really invested in details which was frustrating at times. As soon as Colonial Conquest was out on Aminet, first bug reports smashed my illusions to have programed a bug-free game. Worse, the bugs were so bad that I felt that it was necessary to release a new version very soon. At the end of 1993, Colonial Conquest v1.05 was transferred to Aminet. Since then, more bug reports have come, but also thousands of suggestions that - if followed - would have led to the most incredible ultimate 20MB strategy game for 68040+ processors only with animated 24bit graphics, sampled speech, neural network based artificial intelligence, options for 3D-glasses and cyberspace helmets. Well, honestly, I couldn't do it. Some of the suggestions however were realizable without loosing my job, and I couldn't resist the temptation to make Colonial Conquest better and better until it became such a monster of a program that I wasn't really sure if it was much better. BUGS Bugs? What's that? Ok, ok, I remember... ah, well, they never show up when I'm playing. They know that it would be suicidal to do so. Maybe they are not even that intelligent. It could be that it's only an instinct and those who didn't have it were treated without mercy by natural selection. No, honestly, bugs are still there probably, but this time they are not so bad anymore as an internal routine will be activated as soon as an AMOS error occurs. It will inform you that an error has happened (what a shame!) and it will give you the error number that you should write down and communicate me if possible. You will then have the possibility to save the game before the program tries to continue the game. I would say that the program will not crash after trying this most of the times, but strange results may occur. Of all bugs I have already removed I would pretend that none would have led to a crash. MUSIC I used to sing nicely when I was a kid. One day however, I realized that people were fleeing from me as soon as I started to sing. The same thing happened when I was whistling or making any other noise that was intended to be music. I concluded that I was not a musician and stopped all my ambitions with this respect. I'm still not a musician. If I had tried to make music for Colonial Conquest II, you would have turned down the volume of your monitor after three seconds if not a natural survival reflex had made your fist smash the speakers of your monitor after one second. Fortunately, one day a nice and very talented musician - Carl Wooltorton - knocked at my door (well, he wrote me an e-mail actually) and asked if I was interested in having something made for CCII. I wanted something uncommon, dark and strange and a few weeks later he sent me an incredible masterpiece that fitted EXACTLY to the game and to what it should express. As I thought that it was a little bit too long for a game music, we had long discussions about artistic integrity and music in general. We finally agreed on a compromise: The music included in the game is a cut down (i.e. "remixed") version of the original soundtrack. This fact is explicitly stated in one of the title screens of CCII. Carl will release the original soundtrack on Aminet (as "co.powerplay" in "mod/pro") on the same time and all real fans of CCII should try to get it and listen to it. It has the big advantage of being a real Protracker module which makes possible some effects that have been discarded when I have converted it to the AMOS music format. If you own AMOS, you will even be able to make the conversion yourself with the original soundtrack and save it as "Gamemusic" in your CC directory. As the game just loads the music file "Gamemusic" (if it exists), it doesn't matter WHAT music you put in. THE PLANET EDITOR I have programmed a little planet editor that allows to design new planet surfaces for the game. It is not included in the Colonial Conquest II disk and it is not freely distributable. It's a present I have ready for all people who write me their comments and thoughts about CCII through e-mail. The uuencoded file will be sent to those persons directly through e-mail as well as the original "Final Copy II"-version of the manual. Through normal mail, everything gets more complicated as the sending of a disk is coupled with work and money. I do not want to spend my evenings copying disks for no money and on the other hand I do not want to make money with a kind of shareware service. Therefore, I will only send such a disk to people who send me a donation of 10DM or more. Note that the money is still a GIFT to me FOR THE GAME and the disk is a present in return. It may not be a big difference for you, but it is one for me. Depending on my work-load, it may take quite a few weeks before you get an answer by normal mail. Be patient, please. THE FUTURE Will there be a Colonial Conquest III? No, I don't think so. I know that there are still thousands of possibilities to make the game better, but I believe that even if I make it a lot better, people who have played CCI or CCII will get bored very quickly as all the basic principles would stay the same. Provided I find enough spare time during my Ph.D. thesis, I will work on a new project or continue an old one that has never been finished. In any case it will be something in the field of strategy or RPG games. Christian Mumenthaler, 23. August 1994