The good players beat the snot out of everyone before they had a chance for blues to out-cash reds. It was far from slow and definitely more challenging that today's bot wars.

Sing refers to game-in-a-box and that’s exactly what I see when I look at your games today. I just went in to pester Helix again this evening, and at least 4 times his bot put him in the same sector as I was, but not once did it attack. Your scripts and bots CANNOT think or react to situations they’re not programmed do. They are simple little macros strung together to play the game for you while you’re off doing whatever.

I want a mode where planets move slower than ships, and if that’s too slow of a game for you then there are plenty of others for you to choose from.

Hmmm. So the old school wasn't really easier for new players to get started in, but it was easier for a red (yourself) to win the game by beating the snot out of blues? So you could care less if new players can get started or compete as long as YOU aren't the one getting the snot beat out of you.

ROTFLOL. I remember those games, you had some guy sit on a plock prompt for
3 hours to get a kill. Or a twarp mow-kill when some guy slowly hits a fig. Yeh,
real challenging.



You've never played our style of game, you don't even know what you're talking
about.



My scripts can react to situations quite well, they're not crap. But that said, yes
running AFK scripts brings about some serious risk. In a real game, a script like
that would've gotten him killed. Which is why today's games require actual skill,
hence debunking your entire argument earlier about "game in a box."

A "game in a box" is a game where the designer defines accepted tactics, and
disallows unacceptable tactics. The opposite of that is a game with tactics shaped
by it's players. We have the latter.



Which is the dumbest idea in the world. People will shift from grid defense to
aggressive gridding, taking out stuff even faster than before. You won't even
get a chance to play in a game like that.

Of course, her entire argument is self-serving. She's not concerned about new players,
or any other players. She's concerned entirely about her self, and that's as far as she
can see.

In her world, she's the only one that matters. She is willing to twist the game to fit her
demented philosophy, to hell with anyone else. The rest is just a convenient facade to
sell her ideas to anyone gullible enough to listen.

Why… I just don’t get why you are even trying to carry on your arguments here. Yet again you have proved only 1 thing.

YOU DON’T Know this game…..

And after hearing some info from “OLD School” players that did play with you(Cruncher) back in the day I’m kind of starting to understand a bit of it at least. Rumors have it that the only games you would play were game you had T-Edit accesses to…odd but seem like it fits you.

Just think with all the time and energy you have put into coming up with you Ridiculous ways to imbalance the game you could have learned at least 10 new scripts allowing you to compete just a little bit more. But then again you would probably get into an argument with your own bot… Tell the truth, that the real reason you don’t like bot’s. They can argue better then you… Derp Derp no Derp Yes D,d,d,d,,ddd,,dd,,d,,d,d,dDerp?

Thats what I meant when I said we used use ZTM way back. A full zero turn map showing all the warps. I think I did it first in '92 but it could have been earlier. You can do it without using CIM btw.

No no, you're misreading me.

A ztm and a cim aren't the same thing. A CIM shows the warps and ports of
sectors you've visited. A ztm shows you the warps, not ports, of sectors you
have not visited. You can get the CIM data from the computer just the same,
but a ZTM requires a more complex DB. A ztm, as the name suggests, requires
no turns.

CIM has been around for a long time, in one form or another, but ZTMs weren't
popular until Rev's helper, and then later TWXproxy. There were a few helpers
that could do a basic ZTM, but you had to pay for them and they weren't very
accurate. Today, you can get a 99.99% accurate ZTM very easily, for free, and
scripts built to take advantage of it for free too. That proliferation of mapping
database technology has made stuff like ptorp, pdrop, etc, much easier. Before
hand, pdrops were out there... but not very common. Today, everyone has them.
I can write one in 10 minutes given today's tools.

I remember, back in the early 90s, using telemate for macros and basic scripts,
and drawing sector maps by hand. As technology has advanced, that stuff is
no longer needed.

I don't know what it is between you and me Sing, but we seem to be forever talking at crosspurposes, no offense. I'll try to spell it out in simple english.

I am aware that CIM means computer interrogation mode and is not to be confused with ztm. It is possible to use the cim course plotter to get a ztm however, and this used be the most common way to get a ztm. I have been using twassist to ztm on and off since 1992 (I checked). It is approx 99.5% accurate (against an observer map) and takes around 50 minutes for 5K, which is the largest universe it can handle.
Attached is an example of the graphic map it produces. Bear in mind, we are talking 1992, OK?

Some differences I (think I) remember between HVS and twgs:

Mixed corp in HVS, everyone went to zero exp at extern. That is why we had megacorps, with the attendant nuisance of two corps sharing a bubble. Megacorping for the purpose of ganging up on opponents as opposed to red/blue convenience was not uncommon either, and was not frowned upon as it is today.

Self pod only dropped 10% exp, not 1/3.

There was a problem if you went below 1K align, as far as I remember you couldnt reapply for a commish unless you went below 500 and got back to 500. Between 500 and 1k, you had to get your way back up the usual ways.

If the CEO quit the corp, the corp assets went rogue.

Timberwolf tabulated the differences but I cant find it anywhere. Todd?

I can remember back in the day (can't quote the years, too many brain cells left behind for that), my GF (at the time) and I used TWAR, and a few other different programs, that had ZTM function. The maps looked a lot like the one Shown in that DOSBox. We also used the large 3'x5', 1/10" ruled graph paper to draw larger maps on. At one point, we even tried an experiment with toothpicks, dowel rods and styrofoam balls to make a 3D "map" hanging from the ceiling lamp. We had about 1,000 sectors mapped out before one of our cats "discovered" this new toy. Talk about 2 pi$$'d players.......

Yes, I'm aware of this.

1. 99.5% isn't very accurate.
2. It's only a 5k
3. TWassist cost money originally
4. It doesn't feed into a scripting engine
5. It wasn't very common

And of course nodes weren't as interactive as they are today.



See above. Now compare to today and my last post.



LOL. And that styrofoam map automatically fed into a scripting engine?

1. 99.5% misses just over 50 warps out of the typical 11,000 and was adequate for my purposes.
2. I did mention the 5k limit, worked for me as that was all I played.
3. Unregistered was free and it gave the ztm course plots.
4. This shell command from telix would use it to write 1,000 course plots to the file swam.cim, using the database swam.dat, with twassist in the directory c:\downld\temp:
c:\downld\temp\twassist c:\downld\temp\swam /a rm,1000. The command f = fopen("c:\downld\temp\swam.cim", "r"); made this available to the script to send the plots to the game. There were many other automode commands for exporting data files.
5. Not common? Your point is?

Game not interactive? What has that got to do with zero turn mapping? For that matter, the last few years before twgs the game was interactive.

1. Ok
2. Ok
3. Was it playable as unregistered?
4. Sure you can write the file to a CIM, then you have to write a script to parse it. Most people didn't do that.
5. Because that's the entire discussion
6. RE interactivity: Mapping is critical to stuff like adjpdrop, so is interactivity.

There's a theme here in this thread that w/ the right settings, the game can be
turned back a decade. One of my arguments is that it can't, technology has
evolved too far for that.

It is almost fully functional unregistered, the only (useful) things missing are a graphic display along a route, the bubble finder, and a nearest fig finder.
I agree most couldnt write the script to use it, same is true for the other mappers - even more so, all I had to write was the interrogation of the database, the parsing, and the updating of the data, nothing hard and no data manipulation needed, twassist did all the heavy work.

I'm afraid am inclined to agree with your premise that script writers can probably work around any changes. I also agree that it is likely to give unfair advantages to script writers. I found it hard to believe that trivial changes to the game dialog recently was causing people such handwringing. Good god it couldnt take more than a few seconds to change the script trigger(s)? Then I realised the import of what you had been saying.

Hehe, it sounds like you did a lot more than TWassist did. A ztm is not hard to write,
it's just a simple pattern of plotting around and recording the data. The problem is
the database required to do all the fancy scripting stuff, and I don't think most people
had access to that level of scripting until, well, rev helper. Even then, compared to
today it's just "botname ztm" and "botname qfot on" and we're good to go.



Yeh. The problem is that most people using scripts are not script writers, so small
changes cause a lot of trouble downstream. It's not hard at all to fix little changes
like that, the trick is making the changes work in both the new and the old version.
But that's not really tough.

I just think that technology has changed so much that there's a fundamental shift
in the way the game has to be played. I'm sure there are ways to get the game
closer, but I suspect it'll be one or two elegant changes rather than a bunch of tiny
little things. The whole "less is more" thing. So far, I haven't seen anything close.