After careful consideration I have decided to close ICE9. All games except N are now closed. N will close when someone wins or on 9/30/07 which ever comes first. I thank all the players for your constant support and wish you well. Its been a long time since I have had interest in the game and feel its time to move on. I hope you understand and will respect my decision.

With my decision to shut down Ice9 there have been some questions as to weather I would post the game files from the unique building games so that other servers could run them. I most certainly have no issues with other servers running the games but because the universes are edited after being banged the files would really do no good. So instead I will attempt describe the process here of how these game are created.

Most of the building games are made up of sub universes within the same game. The badlands for example had a 5k sub universe and a 15k sub universe to make a 20k universe game. To make this game I banged the 5k and 15k universe then used AccurateZTM to get a map for each. I then imported the map into swath and exported it using a plain text format that I could get into excel. The 5K Map file is fine as is as that file represents sectors 1 – 5000 but the 15K sector needs to have 5000 added to every cel to make it 5001 – 20000. After the sector numbering is correct Its important that any blanks are replaced by zeros when a sector has less than 6 adjoining sectors. Now its simply a matter of cutting and pasting the 15k universe spreadsheet into the 5k leaving me with one large 20k sector spreadsheet. I then save it as coma delimitated. Then I banged a 20k sector game. At this point I’m not sure how much help I’ll be because I use my own scripts that I wrote for qmodem pro to remap the 20k sector game using the coma delimitated file. Its not a very complicated script is simply uses a loop to edit each sector, reading the coma delimitated file line by line and breaking the lines down into the sector and 6 adjoining sectors. After the universe is refitted to the file you will need to poke some holes in it to join the two.

Most of the building games have some type of “federation Space” that is kept clean of mines, fighters, and navehaz using another tedit script that constantly runs on the server. Game X for example had a Tedit script that logs onto the server and sweeps sector 1 – 5000 continuously. In this game it would sweep 100 sectors than sweep some special sectors such as the sectors next to Sd and the first 10 sectors (5001 – 5010) of the badlands. This had the effect of cleaning each regular sector in sectors 1 – 5000 about once an hour and each special sector about once a minute.

Best of luck on your endeavors. Thanks for the games and time you have put into this.

had some good battles in the Moo2 game back in the day on your server.. good luck

Some of your players have approached me about putting up simular games.  If I can figure out your magic, I might give it a try.
Sorry to see you go though. 

Currently playing game N there.....
Great server....Will surely be missed.
I find the concept refreshing and i hope another Sysop considers taking on such games in the near future.

On the issues on the games being edited after bang, all you have to do is make the bang, edit the game, then make a TWA of the changes, then make a instruction to it on notepad, then put all in a zip file and label the document readme, or something, then set it for download, it isn't hard, I have a few games like that myself, and have to manually set them after bang, it would be nice if bang would remember the edit changes and keep them. laff

Also sorry to hear you are shutting down, I hope you drop in from time to time to let all know you are alright and to rib some here as well.

Vulcan

Can you drop me an email at ice9@uci.net

Done,  thanks.
 

Let me know how it worked out RP? Perhaps I could use this idea and tailor it to fit the TradeWars Academy OCS TWGS under the "scenario" game.

Go away for a while, come back, servers are going away, players are going away, yikes!