Aurora Thoughts

[SteveAlt (OP)]

There is also the outfit I use for Astra Imperia, Lulu.com. No upfront costs, they publish anything and you get 80% of the post-printing costs. Buy an ISBN for $99 US, and it will show up in amazon.com and the like.

On a side note, I recently purchased an ISBN for Astra Imperia, so by this summer in addition to buying a PDF from my site, or hard copy from Lulu, you should be able to find it on Amazon.com and through special orders from a local brick & mortar outlet.

That sounds like a great idea. What is the quality like?

Steve

[SteveAlt (OP)]

I tend to interpret open ended stories such as the Rigellian papers as promise rather than loose ends because If you can pull of a campaign on the Rigellian scale and intensity with the techno-strategy blend of Gen Sir Hackette's work, then you should leave strong expansion capacity kind of like Weber's Harrington saga. Why garrote the Fabergé laying goose anyway ?  If possible make it international rather than amero-western centric, there is a whole world out there. Hopefully we will see the campaign line branching out under some very talented writers on this forum.
P.s Add that special pinch of madnesss that Napoleon Fuchida and Mushashi had, because the very best were always slightly mad.

What I meant was that each book would have a definite start and end point. I wouldn't just leave it hanging in mid-air. Depending on the success of the undertaking, I hope I would be able to create additional books. In fact, even if it isn't very successful I probably would anyway . I am doing this as much for my own satisfaction as any potential monetary reward.

I plan to make it more international in flavour. By having more but smaller starting countries, nations like Brazil, South Africa or Taiwan might play a significant role, depending on how the early game goes. I may well play out the first few years to get several countries into space and only start the book at a point where colonies have already been established. The first few years of any campaign are relatively uneventful, which wouldn't be the best way to get readers interested.

Steve

[Erik L]

There is also the outfit I use for Astra Imperia, Lulu.com. No upfront costs, they publish anything and you get 80% of the post-printing costs. Buy an ISBN for $99 US, and it will show up in amazon.com and the like.

On a side note, I recently purchased an ISBN for Astra Imperia, so by this summer in addition to buying a PDF from my site, or hard copy from Lulu, you should be able to find it on Amazon.com and through special orders from a local brick & mortar outlet.

That sounds like a great idea. What is the quality like?

Steve

Quite excellent actually. The hardbound copy I'm holding has sturdy covers, the print quality is excellent (any errors are mine), the cover graphic is rich and vibrant in coloration. The perfect bound I gave away as a con prize, was of similar quality. They both look like something you'd see at a game store published by one of the "big names".

[Randy]

Sounds like a great idea, but for a game that size, you might not be all that happy using Access as the database.

  You might want to do some early estimates of size (based on any of your larger campaigns) to get an idea of how big the database will get.

  You need to consider number of systems, colonies, ships, designs, events, etc. You have a limit of 2 GB for everything... and with all the new commercial stuff and NPR activity, things will grow at a fairly rapid pace.

  It'd really suck to have a great storyline going and then slam into the 2 GB wall.

[Steve Walmsley]

Sounds like a great idea, but for a game that size, you might not be all that happy using Access as the database.

  You might want to do some early estimates of size (based on any of your larger campaigns) to get an idea of how big the database will get.

  You need to consider number of systems, colonies, ships, designs, events, etc. You have a limit of 2 GB for everything... and with all the new commercial stuff and NPR activity, things will grow at a fairly rapid pace.

  It'd really suck to have a great storyline going and then slam into the 2 GB wall.

I don't think it will be a problem with regular compression. The Commonwealth campaign database is only about 40 MB and there is more scope for removing old records. I don't think I have much of a choice anyway. Changing the database would be a massive undertaking and would likely take several months and cause a lot of disruption to the program.

Steve

[mavikfelna]

I don't think it will be a problem with regular compression. The Commonwealth campaign database is only about 40 MB and there is more scope for removing old records. I don't think I have much of a choice anyway. Changing the database would be a massive undertaking and would likely take several months and cause a lot of disruption to the program.

Steve

Well, you could look at it as the opportunity to rebuild on a new platform and make it multiplayer friendly.

--Mav

[cjblack]

Well, you could look at it as the opportunity to rebuild on a new platform and make it multiplayer friendly.

And/or multi-platform so that those of us who use Macs could also play.

[Steve Walmsley]

Well, you could look at it as the opportunity to rebuild on a new platform and make it multiplayer friendly.

And/or multi-platform so that those of us who use Macs could also play.

The problem for me is that I wouldn't benefit from either of those and I can't see me selling the game so there is no real incentive for me to do either. I would rather spend the considerable amount of time it would take to add new features that I would be able to use.

Steve

[Randy]

I wasn't suggesting to change the database - I know its way too much work at this point.