Loki Hack 1999: 48 hours with no sleep and no end of fun

The Loki Hack was a tremendous success for all the participants, which came from as far away as Germany. Setup as a contest, the hackers took a look at the hundreds of thousands of lines of code involved and figured out that helping each out was the only way that anything was going to be accomplished.

And a lot was achieved! Free binaries with the changes and modifications will be made available within a week or so. First, let us introduce you to some of the hacks that were successfully completed. Other hacks were worked on, but not necessarily done by the end of the 48 hour period. Let us introduce you to some of the hacks that were completed:

Christoper Yeoh, the winner

Three hacks: 1) Added the ability to Penetrate a city with a spy. Once penetration is achieved, the spy goes away, but you can get a detailed picture of the city when you click on it. 2) Added strategic elements, such as, when you lose your capitol, you lose all your cities. Also added count of combat units within a city. 3) Added land-based units, like APCs, wagons, cows ...

Andrew Henderson, first runner-up

Added stealth value to terrain and units based on type of unit, terrain and combat experience. This allows guerilla units, lookouts, etc.

Ryan Gordon, second runner-up

At the beginning of every turn, the state is dumped to a file and runs a command. That allows starting up games run when you're idle, updating a website with live update.

Chris Swiedler, third runner-up

Added civilization modifiers, so you can customize each civilization, make them more than just a name.

Joshua Shagam, fourth runner-up

Added a Fractal map generator. Also added a cool new splash screen. Added a new porcupine civilization.

Ian Nelson

Added the ability to allow the AI to take over your movement and production temporarily.

Rick Bischoff

"Ah! I'm not going to touch that" ... and worked on a text-based adventure game instead.

Nick Leipp

Added the "Don't Panic" button, which does a random action whenever you click it.

Daniel Vogel

Ported to the Clanlib gaming library.

John Hall

Added auto-explorer, so units can search the map by themselves.

Roberto Peon

Reduced the footprint of the installed game by 15MB. Unfinished hack: making things in space orbit ... they do, but then they disappear ...

Thomas Hudson

Created a wonder that when it is activated, then the lawyers become nukes.

Dennis Paine

Added a flat-world that doesn't wrap. The units don't heal, but when they stand-still, they reproduce. Added Aztec Civilization.

Brendan Tuck

Added a geometry argument so that you can specify a window size.

San Mehat

Added Networking fixes, so you can run multiple copies on a single machine.

Mark Coletti

Speeded up the compile, but it wasn't done until the very end. Reduced it from 1hr 9 min down to 33 minutes. "Thanks a lot!" commented the hackers who had to deal with the slow compile times during the hack.

Jon Taylor

Did the port to the GGI library, then ran it on a 3Dcube.

Roger Ward

Unfinished hacks.

Everyone had a great time. The code was so convoluted that the idea of competing with each other for the contest was quickly put aside in favor of working together. They helped each other out, learned from each other and got ideas from each other. "The hack was why we came." The energy was tremendously high. We also got a great picture of many of the team, which will be made available next week (due to technical difficulties). Many thanks to Jon Taylor for the loan of his camera.

An on-going result? A mailing list will be created to keep the participants in touch. Loki Hack 2000 is already being planned. Thanks go back to Loki Games and Activision for putting on this event.