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galacticmilieu

Free Open Source tools used together to provide access to a multiverse no one of the tools alone can properly represent or manipulate.

The Milieu assumes that some kind of diaspora or something (Anthropology tech might some day figure out what) must be behind the huge number of worlds on which civilisation seems to have begun on or about 4000 Before the Common Era.

(Freeciv defaults to having the game begin in 4000 BC, resulting in an ever growing supply of such worlds.)

Included in the Galactic Ruleset is a "Wonder" akin to Sun Tsu's but applying to flying units. The historic rationale one can point at is the Battle of Britain. Thus this Milieu also assumes that by the time of the Battle of Britain people from this Milieu had reached Earth and provided Earthlings with the tech to create that Wonder.

UFO encounters around that period of history were not limited to the British; another Wonder is postulated as the basis for various myths, legends, or secret histories associated with Area 51.

So far three GNU clients have been put to use as tools for accessing the Galactic Milieu. They are Freeciv, Crossfire and Battle for Wesnoth.

To access the CrossCiv server using a Crossfire client (version 1.11 or newer) you should be able to simply pick that server from the list presented by the metaserver. Or you can explicitly tell the client to connect to:

CrossCiv.no-IP.org

There are various technical challenges involved when one tries to apply different tools all to the same multiverse. For example stock Freeciv assumes the game ends when you get to another planet, instead of that being just the start of the interstellar stage of the development of your civilisation. Stock Battle for Wesnoth at the time that Wesnoth was selected as a potential client for this project assumed that the player could not actually steer the course of history; failure to cause history to proceed in its predetermined path resulted in the player losing the game. The objective in Wesnoth campaigns was typically to re-enact history. Thus as I write this paragraph Wesnoth has been used more as a kind of computer aided instruction tool showing some of the history of some of the planets of the Galactic Milieu rather than as a means for players to actually play the milieu in the sense of having a hand in steering the course of history.

Speaking of steering the course of history, you might have noticed that Hollywood, or whoever it is that puts out future-history propaganda in the form of popular television shows, seems to be planning to have a major devastation on Earth prior to our discovery of Hyperdrive or Warp Drive or whatever one wants to call it and our so called First Contact with the elves, or pointy-eared aliens or whatever one wants to call them.

In the Galactic Milieu, various agents and agencies are militating against that devastation. In Wesnoth terms one might suggest that we the players would lose the game were Earth to suffer such devastation (which according to some sources is scheduled to occur prior to 2063 of the common era).

Certain undercover operatives, believed by some to be associated with one or more Institutes of Chronodynamics, are running an operation involving the creation deployment and use of Grand Nexual Uberplan (GNU for short) software.

The idea behind this operation is twofold. Even a planet that has not yet developed holobarracks can nonetheless begin developing potential holobarrack-programmers, and disguising one's operations as fiction might help keep some people from figuring out what one is up to.

The vast majority of the civilisations in the Galactic Milieu based their cultures on a common myth, the myth that somewhere, sometime, someplace there existed, did exist, or will someday exist a planet where all human civilisations all existed. Typically this mythical planet is known as Earth, or, sometimes, Heaven.

Obviously such a myth is preposterous, as simple observation of the behaviour of the human civilisations on thousands or millions of planets throughout the Milieu shows clearly that if humans had ever all lived on the same planet they would long since have wiped themselves out... Nonetheless one does still encounter people who believe the world known as Earth does actually exist, and some of those people do try to work against various factions whose plans, predictions, plots, conspiracies, stories, tales or myths involve harm to the planet known as Earth or to the inhabitants of that planet.

Already there are so many worlds detailed out in Freeciv format that a dedicated server is needed if a number of worlds are to be made accessible online all at the same time. However it has been suggested that it might be useful to use an approach whereby players first log on to an outer firewall or lobby kind of thing which will try to ensure each player only connects to one world at a time (or a number of worlds determined by donation level or something if it turns out that people would like to connect to more than one world at one time). Such a system could help level the playing field for warclient users online 24/7 versus users of other clients and/or users who cannot leave a client / bot / greasemonkey connected 24/7. It would also take care of only firing up worlds when people are actually about to connect to those worlds, so we don't have to have all worlds all sitting around all the time waiting for connections.

Already there are also several "campaigns" for use with the Battle for Wesnoth engine, available through that engine's built-in add-ons system.

Also there is already a "CrossCiv" server online at CrossCiv.no-IP.org accessible by telling your version 1.51 or better Crossfire client (or the Java client) to connect to CrossCiv.no-IP.org ... note though that if you create a fantasy-type character it will be sent to a fantasy-type world instead of to the Galactic Milieu. You need to create a mundane character (such as a human that does not use magic nor prayers) in order to find your way to the Galactic Milieu.

Lately a couple of web-based script systems have been set up that look like they might prove to be useful alternate views into the Milieu. Check them out at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ and http://villages.mygamesonline.org