A couple months ago I posted that ICE9 will be closing. I want to update that, ICE9 will not be closing but rather It will be moving. The new sysop of ICE9 is a long time player on the board named V’ger. I feel he is a perfect choice as he understands the structure of the board and has the technical knowledge to create and maintain the tedit scripts required to run the building games. He is fair, honorable and honest and I think the board will be in good hands. The date of the change should be oct 1st. He will be taking over the web page at http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9 so you can find the needed telent info there after the change takes place.

Glad to see the sever is remaining. Hopefully the transition will be smooth for V'ger. Best of luck to you both.

Thats Awsome!!!!!
ICE9 has come to be one of my favorite places to play TW and now it will continue to be so!!!!
Good job on the Selection of V'Ger as SYSOP.
He is a Fair individual and i look forward to his mangement of your TWGS as it has become a springboard for returning veterns and a training ground for new players.  Awsome job on the building Games having ADMINscripts that enforced server rules about fig placement and other things has been a unique experience that i don't get often.  Cudos to you for staying up and Helping to keep Tradewars ALIVE !!!!!

Well, I for one am rather dissapointed to find out in this manor.  Thought we had an agreement.  I'm happy to see it's going to remain.
 
 

heh now any Ghost Hunters know where he's been hiding...laff... just messing with ya SG.. Good luck to the new sysop, wish u the best..

I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself to the rest of you.  I have been playing on ICE9 for about two years now, after a 10 year lull from Trade Wars, when I played on a local BBS.  I know I have some big shoes to fill, and I hope to keep the spirit that has made ICE9 so successful for our community, while at the same time putting my own twist on things.  I plan on banging a new building game on 10/1, and I plan on bringing back the ICE9 unregulated games as well. 
While it will be tough no longer being able to play on ICE9, I look forward to the challenge of creating and maintaining the games that have made our server so unique.

Im sorry, I thought I had talked to you about it a while back but I must have not communicated my intentions very well. I meant no disrespect.

It just took me by surprise.  I was excited about running those games, and was prepared to learn to do some scripting to make them work.  Had just been making plans for the games. 
I really am happy they're going to continue, and maybe someday I'll run simular games on my site anyway. 
I didn't mean to sound cross, so sorry for that.  Lets keep the games alive.  If you need help,. Let me know.
 

I would love to see more servers run games of this nature. I feel like the board has really been a great entry and re entry point for players and that can only be a good thing for the community as a whole. Thanks Space Ghost for the kind words btw. I have always felt that the teach them by killing them until they learn method is not the best way to build a player base. At least let them get a feel for the game and understanding of what getting podded is and how to avoid it to give them a fair chance. I think then more new players would stick around rather than get frustrated and quit before they get a chance to find out how fun the game can be.

The general way the building games at ICE9 works is that rather than just banging a game you bang two or more and merge them. The first one I made was called "The Badlands" had a 5k sector area and a 15k sector area. The 5k sector area is called federation regulated space and uses a tedit script to clean it of mines and figs. Some of the players called it the kiddie pool. It allowed a new player to start at any point in the game and while far into a game actually winning it was out of reach, you could at least play, and learn the basics of the game.

I introduced the first of these games a couple years ago and the response has been wonderful. There are players of all levels that play in them and the community has taken on a fun and friendly nature that also helps in its own growth. Many players are content to stick with this type of game but others have branched out into other games in the larger tradewars community. We have a great group of players playing in the bote and doing well.

I would be more than happy to share with anyone interested information on making such games.

Welcome to the Community. Glad to see the ICE9 TWGS is remaining. Best of luck and feel free to contact for any info or help.

I would really be interested in the type of games you have outlined to use for the TradeWars Academy OCS TWGS. I think it would be great to host these for players to learn from.

If there are TWA edits to utilize, I'd love to see them. I can be reached email at twgs@outpost-4.com.

I really am interested.  I have a space all set up for it. LOL I'll PM you my info if you care to share.
 

Ok Im not the best tutorial writer but here it is. Be happy to discuss any of it.

Building a building game:

This explanation assumes you are familiar with Excel (or some other spreadsheet); Tradewars 2002, TEDIT, have the ability to write simple scripts, and can connect to TEDIT with what ever program you use to run the scripts.

   For this example I will describe how to make a universe that has two areas. A 5k sector bubble and a 15k sector bubble that will connect to form a 20k sector universe.

Start by banging 3 games. A 5k, 15k and 20k sector game.
Next you will need a map of the 5k and 15k sector game.
I use AccurateZTM (posted at http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/AccurateZTM.exe) (Case sensitive) to export a map of each of the two universes then I suck them into swath and re export them in a CSV (comma delaminated) format. It does not really matter how you do it, you just need maps in a format you can get into excel. I then import the two CSV files into excel.

Now you have 2 excel files. One that contains your 5k sector map and one that contains your 15k sector map. The first thing you need to do here is add 5000 to every cell on your 15k sector map. So now instead of the first line showing sector 1 leading to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 (if that’s what it shows) it shows sector 5000 leading to sector 5002, 5003, 5004, 5005, 5006 and 5007

Next copy and paste the 15k sector map into the excel window that has the 5k sector map. You should now have one large spread sheet with 20,000 sectors.

So you have a spreadsheet with 20k rows and 7 columns. Column 1 is the sector and column 2 thru 7 are the warps for column 1’s sector. Most of the sectors do not have 6 warps so some of the cells are blank. You need to replace these blanks with 0’s.
Goto cell h1 and use the formula =IF(B1 = "",0,B1) . Then copy h1 and select a 20k x 6 cell area starting with h1 (click h1 then hold down the shift key and click m20,000 is an easy way to select them) then paste. You should now see the same map but with all the 0’s filled in. Highlight the new map again (h1 thru m20,000) and choose copy then from the top drop down menu choose edit/paste special and click the values radio button in the window that pops up and click ok. What this does is replaces =if formulas in all those cells with hard numbers. Now you can delete columns b thru g and you should be left with a perfect map of your soon to be 20k sector universe that shows all the warps.
Save the spreadsheet in an CSV format.

Now you need a script that you can run while in tedit. Goto the 20k sector game and write a script that will loop 20,000 times and replace all the warps with the values from your csv file. I cant really tell you how to do this as I used an old qmodem pro script and odds are you will use something else.

Once your done you have a universe with two exclusive areas, meaning you cant get from one to the other so you need to use tedit to punch a hole between the two. I punched my hole from sector 10 to sector 5000. because sector 5k-20k was once its own universe sectors 5001 to 5010 look a whole lot like fed space. That make 5001 a perfect entrance. I also wrote a script to change the sector description from unexplored space or what ever to Federation Regulated Space in sectors 11-5000 and something like Federation neutral zone in sectors 5001-5010

So that’s how to build the game, lets move onto settings and maintenance. The first thing I would do is punch a hole from sector 10 to SD so you always have access from fed space. Next I would punch a few one ways from the 15k universe to SD to make the bad guys who have to post a fig to get to SD happy. Now you need a script to keep your 5k sector universe clean of fighters and mines. This script will run constantly on the twgs server. The one I used would loop through sector 1 to 5000 and set fighter and mines to 0 and remove navhaz. It also would go into a sub script every 100 sectors and clean the sectors around SD and sectors 5000-5010. I did this by talking the current sector and dividing it by 100 and checking to see if there was a remainder or if it divided evenly. If it divided evenly I would run the sub script. This had the effect of giving a fighter in any sector up to a 1 hour life span and a fighter around Sd or sectors 5000-5010 about a 1 minute life span. This worked our really well as a lot of the regular players would sell off planets to the ports so they could co drop figs and move a planet in most of the time before the fig was eaten by the script.
The reason I clean 5000-5010 is to keep someone from trying to lock up the 15k sector universe. The script would also make a beacon that said something like all mines and ftrs removed without notice.

So that’s basically it. You can use the same ideas to build all kinds of custom universes. The last one a wrote was called the neutral zone and had 7 universes combined. FRS was cut to 2k sectors and I had a Klingon, Romulan and ferrengi empire. Though I had to do some fancy foot work to keep the buggeres in their own space but that’s a subject for another time

Thanks for posting the steps. Ran a test on the OCS TWGS and it worked great.

The issue of keeping aliens in their own space, I had a question on that. Would you set it up were you can move into their space from an adjacent sector, but to get out you would need to transwarp out? For an example, say an alien's sector is 7500 and you can access sector 7500 from sector 6347. To get out, you could have a Sxx port and purchase fuel to transwarp out. This would keep the aliens contained in their own space and make their sectors connected to one another only.

Otherwise, most impressive. I'm going to test my game out and if successful, I would make part of the building game for the TradWars Academy OCS TWGS.

Appreciate your time on this.

Anyone interested in writing the above scripts in TWX and making them public?  I'm not a scripter.  I can fumble my way through, but I can't write from scratch.  I'm learning.
If such a person exists, I'd really appreciate your time and effort.