Ron Hiler's Plan File

March 26th, 2000

First of all, I promised a couple of Bandwagon songs, and here they are. There are two songs I'm going to post, both from a live album, called, imaginatively enough, "Bandwagon: Live at the Paradise Lounge". If you've ever been to the Paradise Lounge, in San Fransisco, we were on the main stage. It turned out to be one of our biggest shows, we had around 50 or 60 people there, which was pretty good for us.

In our reign, we recorded a couple of full length albums, some EPs, and any number of singles, none of which ever caught the interest of a record producer :). But in all that time, and all that recording, none of them captured Bandwagon the way this live show did, at least for me. It wasn't exactly one of our tightest shows, by any means. And because this is a live recording, the mixing isn't the best. The drums are a bit over the top, and the bass is buried more than it should be. But despite all that, this album remains my favorite Bandwagon recording, and it's the one I always put in when I get nostalgic for the band. And here are two of my favorite songs on the album.

The first song is called The Work Trilogy. I'm bitter, jaded, sarcastic, and angry! 'nuff said.

The second song is known as Down the Rabbit Hole. It's a story about a meeting between Don Quiote and Alice. Listen to the words. I can't take any credit, I had nothing to do with the writing of this one (except the drum part, I "wrote" all of our drum parts). Anyway, I think the lyrics are great. It is one of my favorite songs to listen to. I always hated doing it live, because it was exhausting to play. After playing this song, we always had to play a slow one next to give my arms a chance to recharge, heh.

Okay, what's going on with the game? Research is done. Let me delve into that just a bit deeper. You can set up your research queue (the order in which you want techs to be discovered) up to 50 deep. This is saved when you save the game. When the host generates a new turn, the program looks at this list and compares it with your current research point income. This list is then updated, and you may get a new tech or two. When you open your next turn, you will get a message for each new tech finished. Any items associated with that tech (such as a Unit Component like a broadsword) will now show up in the Unit Design screen.

With research now finished, I will continue on with the validation of unit designs, which is what lead me to research in the first place. It was difficult to validate a design when we didn't know what techs the player had. With that done, the validation should go a lot smoother. Once validation is done, I'll likely be moving on to dealing with units and fleets.

Off and on for the last year or so, I've been researching nueral nets in preparation for doing the Artificial Intellegence routines. I've recently begun studying them in a bit more detail, because we are fast approaching that part of the code. I will go over some of that in the next update. Stay tuned!

- Ron Hiler (Lead Programmer)