As a TWGS host, I occasionally play in closed games with my friends (with their full knowledge the sysop is playing that particular game). In the last game we were playing, I ran into a buddy of mine at stardock. I was docked and he was in orbit. I have a quick-attack script that I executed by lifting off from SD and hitting CTRL-A in SWATH. He was running a script that was coded to see me lift off and immediately attack. We were in equal ships and yet, I attacked him 3 times while he only got one punch in. We are both programmers and work together so we compared notes and it turns out our attack scripts were very similar.

My question is, does a person playing on the same LAN of the TWGS server actually have an advantage over those playing over the web? I am guessing it is possible, but I thought the max commands per cycle and the way that TWGS functions in general made that sort of advantage unlikely. Or, am I totally wrong about that?

Basically I want to play a fair match against my friends and I am wondering if it is even possible if I am directly on the LAN with the server.

If not, anyone want to host a closed game for me and my buddies?

short answer: no

It's all about latency. Usually expressed in ping times. You have a ping of near zero, while your poor buddy has a ping time probably in the 100's of MS. He won't see that you lifted nearly as fast as you see that he's sitting above dock. His script probably doesn't do anything till it sees the message that you lifted. And it probably waits for the results before attacking again, at least from the sounds of it. So that's even more delays. His script should fire off multiple attacks before checking. That would help even things out somewhat. But the reality is you will always beat him where speed matters.

Using the exact same script for attack, I will win every time when playing from my LAN and someone else playing from the web. As Traitor said, the ping times in these situations will be the deciding factor when the game elements are equal.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

That is what I was afraid of... thanks guys.

quote:Originally posted by rgorion

As a TWGS host, I occasionally play in closed games with my friends (with their full knowledge the sysop is playing that particular game). In the last game we were playing, I ran into a buddy of mine at stardock. I was docked and he was in orbit. I have a quick-attack script that I executed by lifting off from SD and hitting CTRL-A in SWATH. He was running a script that was coded to see me lift off and immediately attack. We were in equal ships and yet, I attacked him 3 times while he only got one punch in. We are both programmers and work together so we compared notes and it turns out our attack scripts were very similar.

My question is, does a person playing on the same LAN of the TWGS server actually have an advantage over those playing over the web? I am guessing it is possible, but I thought the max commands per cycle and the way that TWGS functions in general made that sort of advantage unlikely. Or, am I totally wrong about that?

Basically I want to play a fair match against my friends and I am wondering if it is even possible if I am directly on the LAN with the server.

If not, anyone want to host a closed game for me and my buddies?



I host private games... let me know what you are looking for in an edit and you can be playing tonight.

Well attack takes 250ms, so he should've been able to see your lift and power-up atleast unless his ping is just horrible. Get _ck_ping.cts from grimy and find out.

If you do something like...
q q q z n a y n q z 10000^M p s s

You might even be able to get an attack off before they could respond. Still, it all depends on your script. If it does an A N... N... N... Y, fig amount, enter... type approach then his latency will be so bad that you could probably do it by hand.

Did you manually lift? Or use a macro?

But no, in short it isn't a fair game... laff. Not even close.