quote:
The problem is, v4 isn't intended to replace v3. The players who like the game as it is now (many, many) would be able to play v3 games on a server right alongside (hopefully) a broader audience of players using v4.

Really, I think the only way to pull off any major changes such as this would be with an entirely new release of the game. Doing anything else would be like changing the rules of professional football during halftime of the SuperBowl.


I suppose I'm forced to somewhat agree, even if I don't entirely agree with the analogy ;>

Mostly I'd just like to see these changes sooner rather than later, and with v4 not even confirmed to be ever STARTED yet, I can't realistically plan on seeing it while Bush is still serving his first term.

So many v3 features have been "planned eventualities" for a year or more now and still not seen the light of day, such as Jumpgate, a Linux port, gold race custom formulae, gold race AI scripts, and more, leading me to believe a v4 will take multiple years to even reach an alpha state from the time it's finally begun. Maybe (hopefully) I'm getting a much worse impression than I should of how slowly things get done around here from reading forum archives. ;>

quote:
I suppose I'm forced to somewhat agree, even if I don't entirely agree with the analogy ;>

Mostly I'd just like to see these changes sooner rather than later, and with v4 not even confirmed to be ever STARTED yet, I can't realistically plan on seeing it while Bush is still serving his first term.

So many v3 features have been "planned eventualities" for a year or more now and still not seen the light of day, such as Jumpgate, a Linux port, gold race custom formulae, gold race AI scripts, and more, leading me to believe a v4 will take multiple years to even reach an alpha state from the time it's finally begun. Maybe (hopefully) I'm getting a much worse impression than I should of how slowly things get done around here from reading forum archives. ;>



Jumpgate is not a v3 feature, it is its own beast the rest of what you mentioned are v4 "eventualities" as you called them. No more New features will be added to v3, a final stable version of the game play you see now in .55 must be released before you can see development begin on a new version. The reason that these and other features that have been discussed in the last year or so in these forums seem to have such a long life cycle from concept to implementation is because the decsion was made to complete v3 as it is and start a fresh game with these and other features from the ground up.




Rick Mead
Project Manager teamEIS

quote:
Jumpgate is not a v3 feature, it is its own beast the rest of what you mentioned are v4 "eventualities" as you called them. No more New features will be added to v3, a final stable version of the game play you see now in .55 must be released before you can see development begin on a new version. The reason that these and other features that have been discussed in the last year or so in these forums seem to have such a long life cycle from concept to implementation is because the decsion was made to complete v3 as it is and start a fresh game with these and other features from the ground up.


Cool, no problem, it sounds like a good way to go as long as v4 DOES happen. It's the "if" Rave always sees fit to add to the "when" when she mentions v4 that most bothers me ;> When you say "decision was made", v4 sounds a lot more like a, well, "eventuality" than a "possibility", which helps my frame of mind a lot.. The first sign I see of work on v4 beginning is going to elicit a huge sigh of relief. And I know it'll be quite a while out, but when I finally get my hands on it, I'll be quite happy :>

I know I'm sounding overly critical of how slowly you guys are getting things done in some of my posts, and just want to disclaim it by saying I love the job everyone at EIS has done so far, and thank you for keeping TradeWars alive. Just keeping a decades-old game around in ANY form is an incredible service (at least to us nostalgic types ;>).

Keep up the good work!

quote:
Cool, no problem, it sounds like a good way to go as long as v4 DOES happen. It's the "if" Rave always sees fit to add to the "when" when she mentions v4 that most bothers me ;> When you say "decision was made", v4 sounds a lot more like a, well, "eventuality" than a "possibility", which helps my frame of mind a lot.. The first sign I see of work on v4 beginning is going to elicit a huge sigh of relief. And I know it'll be quite a while out, but when I finally get my hands on it, I'll be quite happy :>

I know I'm sounding overly critical of how slowly you guys are getting things done in some of my posts, and just want to disclaim it by saying I love the job everyone at EIS has done so far, and thank you for keeping TradeWars alive. Just keeping a decades-old game around in ANY form is an incredible service (at least to us nostalgic types ;>).

Keep up the good work!


It's probably as much my fault as anyone's that Lisa always puts the disclaimer of "if" in when she discusses v4 (which really may not be version 4 at all, but is what we are calling it now), she is just trying to stay as "politically correct" as possible while giving out some information as to not keep everyone completely in the dark but at the same time she/we don't want to make promises that can't be kept.

I will try and be as honest with you here as I can, and please realize that these times are NOT firm, but to try and pacify your and others genuine interest in the development of the game what we are shooting for is this: by the end of the 2002 v3 as we know it will be a final release (would be nice if we could use TWcon as release party). Now for those nostalgic TW old schoolers around who have followed the evolution of TW since its birth it has always been a "beta in work" and while I don't see the alpha of the next project released to the public, history tells us that TW progression worked well under this beta development. I would expect to see the next project follow a very similar lifeline.

Rest assured work has begun on the next project discussions have been taken place for well over a year and as long as there continues to be community involvement and support I see no reason, barring some disaster, that we will not see a released beta version of the next project some time late next year or early 2004.

Now once again please don't try and hold my feet to the coals on this, it certainly isn't an official announcement. But I have received numerous contacts from people with the same concerns you have expressed about our guarded speak of "v4" and I just want to set the record as straight as possible for all the loyal members of the Trade Wars family



Rick Mead
Project Manager teamEIS

quote:
quote:
That's half my point though. v4 may or may not happen, and I tried to make suggestions that could be easily added to v3 in future revs, as well. i.e. things I'd like to see sometime in the next two years, not just within the next two decades :

The problem is, v4 isn't intended to replace v3. The players who like the game as it is now (many, many) would be able to play v3 games on a server right alongside (hopefully) a broader audience of players using v4.

Really, I think the only way to pull off any major changes such as this would be with an entirely new release of the game. Doing anything else would be like changing the rules of professional football during halftime of the SuperBowl.

Lisa M. Wilson
aka Rave

I've been following this post ..
And have to agree , changing the game in mid play is unfair .. but here we have it ..
v3.11.35 I believe was the first major change to a defence stratagy some players use to use .
Example .. you come to take my base ..you kill me , but all my assests were on the (non pod) scout maurader in max carbo's >:)
Well you take my base but not my $$ , cause you cant take those scouts (carbo traps).
Low and behold the change .. now ships with no man can be captured ..and my carbo's with it to be sold ..
Did anyone else notice this change ?? I lost tons of stored carbos (cash).

So as you can see ..I can go with the change , but why did I have too ..
Oh ya I know ..the guy who wanted my buble couldnt get my ships out of sector so he asked for this change [>:)]

Well I'm asking for this change BACK !!
It was a part of Trade Wars in the begining 5 versions ..till about 3.11.25-35 somewhere in there.

And as for the mention of accumalated turns , sounds good but how much of your dailie turns or accumalated turns will vanish with my photons ?

[url="http://geocities.com/videotees/twars.html"]Vid's World on Guam[/url]
telnet://vidsworld.no-ip.org:2002

just my $.02

I think the Ultimate game would be a mix of these:
Tradewars classic
X-2 The Threat newer
Starflight 2 old

Combine the trading empire/ship builing of all three with more of the first person ship flying of x-2 with some sort of getting out of the ship when landed on a planet to get in a vehicle or on foot to "hunt" or gather trade materials....animals, etc. Then make that run on a dedicated personal servers or a mmorpg type server....or both. Am I smoking something or would that rock!!!!?!??!

quote:Originally posted by csg

There was once a graphical interface for TW I think it was called TWTerm or something like that.. I never used it so I dont know exactly what it did.


There was indeed a graphic interface for twars years back, I ran it for about a month! It might have been called TWTerm I don't really remember but that sounds familiar. What it did in a nut shell was take every message you got from the game and translate it into either a sound file or a graphic file. (At least that's what the docs said).

I found the sound files to be nothing short of annoying. The graphics slowed the game down so bad you felt like you were back to logging on with a 300 baud modem. (Ok, so I only had a 14,4 modem anyway on a 386).

Anyway, I always thought that the people who created this were on the right track! The game play was the same, and nothing had to be reprogrammed, it simply was a "helper" style platform that would translate the ascii text into something more complicated.

If someone would come up with a telnet style helper that threw in graphics, and didn't slow down game play, and had all the best "advanced" scripts, I think they would be sitting on a Gold mine, but that's just my simple minded opinion, I could be full of it

I read this entire post and I'm going to respond to numerous other posts in this one post, so bear with me if you will or not, it's up to you.

1. The "Tradewars.com" site I've been to numerous times, it doesn't look anything like tradewars to me, it looks more like a graphical fantasy mud style role playing game shrug. Maybe it's just their choice of pictures on the opening page.

2. I've seen all kinds of graphic style games attempting to mimmick Twars 2002 (like JP said) including one that was and "empire" style graphic game but it wasn't based in space but based in "colonial america" but I tell you all the basics were there including trading, colonizing etc. None of them stack up to Tradewars. Tradewars is like Chess. You look at the board and it looks like the most simplest game you'd ever play, however, once you learn the rules, you find how how difficult it is to play and play well!

3. JP I suggested this to you once before, but I'm going to suggest it again in public forum. I believe a good way for you to make a bit of cash without accepting charity is to offer "registered game names." What this means is that a player can "purchase" his game handle. It's hard coded right into the game at that point, so that in any game, on any server, if a person attempts to use the name "Sgo" the game asks for a pre hard coded "password" for that particular name. If the person doesn't know it the game says "sorry, you aren't SGO you can't use that game name!"

I would pay 500.00 to secure SGO as a hard and fast reserved game name, so that no one can use it in any game but me!

As to the tradewars.com site, note that this thread is 2-3 years old. They decided that the game they were making wasn't going to be trade wars after all at some point in the time between this thread and now.

The current TW can stay as it is, and a graphical client can be made to send telnet commands back to the server after a user clicks on an icon to do something. As the client reads the telnet data from the server it can update the GUI to reflect the changes.

Just drag and drop a fig on a player's name and enter the number of figs to use and it will launch an attack on that player. Drag and drop a ptorp to an adjacent sector on the local map and it will launch a ptorp. Every GUI action would launch a script or macro to do something.

In theory it can be done and the server end can stay Text/ANSI based. It would bring a whole new set of players to Tradewars.

Sound like a good idea or a bad one?

A point and click interface would really slow down reactions.