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How to determine a winner?
https://mail.black-squirrel.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=19435		 Page 1 of 2
Author:  Commander Data [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 5:53 am ]
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I understand different game types might have different methods, but in general how do you determine your game winners?
What methods/resources do you use to see who has what at the end of a game?
Thanks,
Commander Data
Author:  Zentock [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:05 am ]
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there are a few ways to determine the winner,
1 - sole survivor
2 - all other players capitulate ( admit defeat )
3 - have a specific win condition.
3a - " to win game x, the winning player must control
           the planets 2-20 and all must be level 6.
3b - " to win game x, the only planets in the game other
           then planet 1 must be to property of the winner"
3c - " to win game x, all players sans ( not including )
           the winner must be either "sd" ( ship destroyed)
           or in escape pods".

these are but a few of the possible conditions a Sysop can set that will determine who the winner is without haveing to tally assets.
Author:  Singularity [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:37 am ]
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Mostly it's the sole survivor thing, or when everyone else quits, or when there's 1 corp that dominates and everyone else is confined to fedsafe (dock, 1-10).

Occasionally there are points and stuff too. I've been in games where planets and figs and stuff were assigned points, but those don't always end well.

But ya usually it's it's pretty obvious when there's a corp or player that's won... nobody else can move, they're confined to a small area of space, probably have no base, have no real resources, etc. They might not be #SD# (because people can always log back in and sit in fed), but they aren't much better.

In most games you can't just base it on planet resources. I suppose if the game was setup w/ a points system that give resources certain points you could do that, but most games can't be finished that way. In that case the game would be declared a stalemate or just allowed to continue until a clear winner.

So ya, what zen said... but just to elaborate a bit.
Author:  Commander Data [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:05 am ]
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In the case of #3 or if using points, etc...
How can I determine what assets a player has, if he owns all planets etc?
 
Author:  Runaway Proton [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:47 am ]
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Data,
Most games just result in someone killing all the other players.  Assets asside, if you're dead, and don't return, your assets are worthless. 
Now if a player (1) is hiding behind assets, and player (2) can't get through them to kill him, then player (1) is a winner. 
There are a few exceptions but I determine wins by this...
1.  There's only one player standing in the scores and everyone else is SD.
2. There's no activity in the logs, so I post the highest scores as winners, and bang the game again.
3. And best! Someone icq's me and says game over,.. please bang it.  I then try to make sure the opposing team agrees cause it's not past a player to **SD** a possibly better player, and contact the sysop and say hey I killed him,.. game over.  Might not be so next day
4. What Zen said,.. spell out win conditions.  Such as All players must be **SD** and Alien planets captured, or something like that.
I just got through going through all my games and checking activity and scores, and determine what games need banged.  There's no clearcut way to determine it.  But you get a feel for it over time.  Just remain flexable if you get a message from a player disagreeing with your decision that game is over.  If they are interested enough to continue trying,.. let them play.
Author:  Xentropy [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:54 pm ]
Post subject: 
Commander Data wrote:
In the case of #3 or if using points, etc...
How can I determine what assets a player has, if he owns all planets etc?

Just give me a little time.  My stat graph program will be able to do just that.
Runaway Proton wrote:
Now if a player (1) is hiding behind assets, and player (2) can't get through them to kill him, then player (1) is a winner. 

Actually even that isn't cut and dried.  If player 2 has similar assets to hide behind, it might just be a stalemate.  It is quite possible for multiple teams to have impenetrable defenses (too many shielded H's to shuffle around in a large enough bubble for any reasonable number of moths to ever outmoth the ore production).  At that point the game would just be declared a stalemate.  Once I get the stats exporter online, it'll be possible for a sysop to turn a stalemate into a contest.  First team to amass some amount of credits in that case becomes considered the winner, say.  And of course there are dirty ways to "win", snatching up all the available ship #'s and trying to "starve" the enemy out.
There are a nearly infinite number of ways of winning TW, and CLV has nothing to do with any of them.  That's why I think a stat exporter could come in extreme handy.
Author:  the reverend [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 6:31 pm ]
Post subject: 
Commander Data wrote:
In the case of #3 or if using points, etc...
How can I determine what assets a player has, if he owns all planets etc?


to answer your question - you have to enter tedit for that game and at least browse through the planets and ships to see who owns them. also, read the V screen in game and see how many figs are in the game - the winner should have most of the figs in his possession on planets, ships, or in sectors. you can also browse through the sectors in tedit to see what figs are deployed and how many sectors each player controls.

needless to say, this is tedious.
Author:  Singularity [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 7:30 pm ]
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It's also prone to error since it's easy to miss something. Hence why most games end with the last corp standing.
Author:  Xentropy [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:56 pm ]
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Singularity wrote:
It's also prone to error since it's easy to miss something.

Exactly.  That's why I'm excited to get an automatic asset counter out there so sysops can see in one second what everyone's total everything is.  Should make these determinations much easier, though there are still so many ways a game can end I doubt a standard set of requirements could be determined.  If it were so simple, my program could go as far as to auto-rebang games that were determined by some set of parameters to be over.  But I doubt any parameters of that kind will be agreed upon.  Every game is different.
Author:  mrdon [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:28 pm ]
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How "hackable" is TWGS? Would it be possible to have a game where everyone gets a level 2 planet, 1000 figs, then the player is out of the game when their planet is captured? Would you have to write a program to script tedit or can the database be accessed directly by some other means?
Author:  Xentropy [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:34 pm ]
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For now, a tedit script would have to be used to do that.
In the future, I hope to provide a method to directly access the database.  I can already read from the full database; adding write ability would be the next big step and be required to do the sort of sysop scripting to which you refer.
The long term goal for me is to be able to provide a simple interface for sysops to add more complex automatic "rules" to their games like the one you propose.  With direct write access to the database, the sky's the limit (or nearly so).  You could add triggers to the game that would automatically cause an event to occur or a message to be sent to a player that entered a certain sector.  You could make shields regenerate automatically over time.  The only things you couldn't do are change the way the game treats the data available to it.  No way to change the 20:1 ratio of planetary shields or the 2:1/3:1 of planetary figs, no way to add a level 7 citadel for planetary cloaking, etc.  But if it's a piece of data and not a formula, it could be modified.
Author:  mrdon [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:16 pm ]
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Wow, that's some impressive work. I recently reverse engineered twxproxy's database, but I had the source code to help me. How long did it take you to decode that file?

The trick with "triggers" is they wouldn't be instantaneous, but rather, you'd have your program set to read the database every few seconds, and if it notices something that trips a trigger, it would modify the database (with the proper locking, of course). Still, I wonder how TWGS caches data internally, which would affect the ability to change the data directly.
Author:  Xentropy [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:22 pm ]
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Heh, took me about 12 hours to decode the most complex one, TWINDEX.DAT.  It's actually got a variably-sized record so it took a while.  I did get some help from JP on a few of the values I couldn't find the meanings of; most of them turned out to be unused variables or flags anyway, but it was nice to confirm my work with him.  I think total time to translate the records and write the library (including some pretty repetitive code to turn everything into composed classes) was about 40 hours.  Now I'm just looking for ways to USE the library.  And then it'll be time to add write access and make the whole thing release-worthy; at that point, anyone who knows C++ will be able to write programs to manipulate the TW databases.
As for caching, there isn't any.  At least,  nothing noticable.  I set up a quick test program to continually write random numbers of fighters to a certain sector and stood in the sector hitting D over and over.  The # of figs listed was different every time I looked.
Oh, and the databases already include locking flags that the game ITSELF uses when changing data, so once I add write access, I'll just trip the same flags, so someone doing something ingame at the same time as an update won't even confuse the tradewars executable itself.  Golden.
Author:  mrdon [ Wed Jun 06, 2007 11:16 pm ]
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Nice. One of my main complaints of TW is the lack of defined goals, as games seem to just drag on and on, making it difficult to start any but newly banged games. With access the the db, goal-based play would be easy to implement, leading to many new types of games. I think one reason Counterstrike is so successful, is it moved beyond just deathmatch and into more goal-based play.

An interesting application of your tool is you could manipulate the warps themselves. Imagine an assault-style game where it is red vs blue, each with their own 5k sector area with a DMZ area in the middle so that there are only 10 sectors connecting the two. Or a domination-style game where there were 10 key planets and the team that controlled them all won the game, and for every planet you controlled at extern, you got 10k more fighters. Or a capture the flag, where each team had a level 4 planet and got points everytime it brought it back to its controlled space. Interesting possibilities...
Author:  Cerne [ Thu Jun 07, 2007 12:17 am ]
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Xentropy wrote:
There are a nearly infinite number of ways of winning TW, and CLV has nothing to do with any of them.  That's why I think a stat exporter could come in extreme handy.


Assets don't matter much if you are #SD#

Cerne
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