I know this might be a topic that should be posted in the Sysops room but I also would like input from players as well.

I think it can already be done manually but I think an addition to the TWGS experience that would allow the following would be a very good thing.

Many players can only devote one or two nights a week to a good game of TW. I would like to be able to set a game schedule that would allow the game to only be open on certain days at certain times.

In other words, my 'Weekend warrior' game would only be open from 7pm Friday night till 6pm Sun night. The rest of the time, it would lock users out.

I know I can do it now with the Activate and Deactivate feature in TWGS manually but would love to have a fully featured game 'scheduler' that would allow me to set access times any way I want. What do you all think of this?

I think JP already added a scheduler feature for that ability. There was some discussion about it a month back. Take a look at the beta?

LOL, I guess I better get off my duff and go look at it eh?

There is a feature for scheduling access on a daily basis, but not weekly. So you can say "the game is open from 7 pm - midnight every day", but not "it's open friday to sunday". I would like to extend the new access feature to allow what you request down the road, but there are limits to the game today that preclude me from doing that. Basically, the game "lives" in realtime, so even if a game is closed for several days, ports are updating, construction is progressing, etc. Even if the game is physically offline, many things are done based on the clock, so when the game runs next, it catches up to realtime. There are some events that occur during extern, and if extern doesn't run, they won't happen. But that's a problem in and of itself, because the game is aging in realtime, but certain events will only occur on schedule when extern is running nightly.

What I'd like to do is change the clock so that it can run in a cumulative mode rather than in realtime. So if the game is running 24/7, it will be realtime. But if the game is offline, because of an access mode, for several hours, the clock won't be advancing. When the game comes back online, the clock would continue where it was. There are a lot of things to consider in making this work. I'd like to explore it, but for now, the daily access limits are all we have. Even if you can use activate/deactivate with scripts, you'll have the same problem I'm describing. Players can't enter, but the game continues to age.

Thats cool but actually speaking, if I know I'm going to limit access, I can make adjustments to the things that 'grow' so they don't outgrow the game. IO personally would think it's kind of cool to come in after being gone 5 days and see what's changed. Spend Sunday getting planets ready and know that when you login on Fri, everything is upgraded and ready for the next level.

Ok, well, if it looks like the game aging issue isn't a problem, I could probably extend this access mode feature to include a weekly cycle. But let's just start with the daily cycle for now.

Sounds like campus party to me... isn't that where Subzero edit orginated from?

A daily cycle might also be nice to allow more time on weekends, when players might have more time, or perhaps less time on weekends when players are playing with their real life friends.

There is another way to limit access to the game.
Most routers have a way of limiting internet access to a PC according to a schedule you set up. If you wanted to go that route, just check your router configuration. My Linksys has that ability, and my son doesn't like it much hehe.

Yea but anyone left on will usually still keep their connection. Last person on would have a huge advantage.

I was just thinking the same thing....

If done properly, it will kill internet connectivity to the PC hosting TWGS.
Anyone who was on when the time is up will be disconnected.
The router itself will stop serving packets to or from the internet to that PC.

Those settings control a computers's ability to access the internet. I think the port you opened under "applications and gaming" would be uneffected.

I suppose that would depend on the level of sophistication of your router.
IIRC (at work so I cannot check) it also would block services I set up in the router. So for example I set up a TWGS service in the router to forward all traffic on port 2002 to my TWGS PC, I can say that the TWGS service is only available Friday to Monday midnight to midnight. So any traffic that his port 2002 outside of that window goes nowhere, and so my server would only be available for the specified time period.

I wouldn't think a Linksys would be that sophisticated