The idea of a energy-related simulation game originated as an interesting, creative way to allow users to deal with a potential crisis situation in a hands-on way. Before it was implemented on the Internet, a C++ program was written as a means of determining the way the game would work.

Then, this program needed to be converted to put the game on the World Wide Web. Since users' game data must be saved, log-in and registration scripts were created using Perl. It was still not clear, however, whether Perl would be used for the game itself, and thus options such as Java and CGI using C++ were looked into. After visiting Design Paradise, an award-winning game simulating city planning, it was finally decided that the game would be coded with C++ and CGI.

Since C++ is not the most popular way to work with CGI (Perl is), there were great difficulties involved in finding a suitable CGI library to read user commands. After several unsuccessful tries, we finally had success with Tom Boutell's CGIC library.

For each user, there are two files that save all of the data used for the game. The first, read by the Perl scripts, saves information about the user registration information. The second, read by the C++, saves all of the data used in the game, such as the initial cost of building a hydroelectric dam.

Much time was spent making sure that everything in the game worked as it should. However, if you encounter a problem, please tell us about it at 20331@advanced.org.