The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia
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The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia originated with a project to develop the ultimate killer Pacific War computer simulation. The software didn't get very far before the Encyclopedia took on a life of its own, but for your amusement I offer some of the software I have developed.
pwol-platforms.dtd: This
contains a document type definition for structured documents (suitable
for machine processing) describing the
various ships and aircraft that fought in the Pacific War.
A software bundle for reading
these files is also in the works and will be released as a tarball
when I feel it's ready. All this material is provided under the GNU
Lesser Public License, which is meant to make it freely available to
all wargamers without infringing excessively on the ability of any wargamer to market any
game he develops.
These files are meant to provide raw material for computer
simulations,
and I don't really expect them to be directly useful for wargaming. For
example, the ship descriptions include rather detailed descriptions of
armor protection schemes that will have to be processed and converted
to more abstract representations of resistance to damage before they
will be of much practical wargaming use.
Most ships of the Pacific War received periodic upgrades,
particularly to their antiaircraft batteries, directors, and radars.
These are a bit problematic for wargaming, particularly since the
modifications vary among units of a class (sometimes slightly,
sometimes to the point where classes almost have to be split into
subclasses) and since we don't know how classes wiped out early in the
war might later have been modified if they had survived (as can happen
in a war game.) I have therefore aimed at showing what was possible and
at about what time for each class, rather than attempting to encode a
lengthy and ultimately pointless (from a gaming perspective) historically complete description of all ship modifications.
pacific.tar.gz: This installs an executable, pacific, that puts up a map of the Pacific on 8:00 AM, 7 December 1942, with unit and installation locations and a fairly interesting interactive interface. I offer it as freeware with no warranty or any guarantee that it will even run on your machine. To the best of my knowledge it is virus-free. The executable runs on my Dell computer under the Ubuntu version 8.04 (Hardy Heron) operating system, but it has not been tested on any other Linux distribution. I don't have a Windows version and I have no plans to port to Windows, though I am not averse to letting others attempt to do so if they wish (email me your proposal.)
Note that the tarball is very large (almost half a gigabyte) because
of the extensive map data included. It takes about fifteen minutes to
download to my home computer via broadband. Be patient.
I may provide some of the source code for this program in the
future, for the benefit of game developers, but I haven't made a final
decision yet on what to offer and under what license terms.
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2010, 2012-2013 by Kent G. Budge. Index
