Heh, I just did a search on CIM and I got this thread. I'll try what you suggest and see if that helps.

And yes, it did in fact, work. I will give you the warp data and R gives you the port data. Thanks for the help.

Xen, I just wanted you to know I'm really looking forward to these utilities. I'd love an editor even more, but I'll be happy with a viewer. An editor might make for some interesting game ideas. I can do that now with twx and t-edit, but it can take hours to get a game setup. A lot of the script testing I do relies on having a semi-active game, with dense fig grids already established, and it's a pain to set that up manually. Anyway, keep at it. Once you are satisfied with it, I'll glady host a copy of it on my site.

Traitor:

I'm sure what I release won't disappoint! It may take me a good month or two to get write access added and thoroughly tested, though, so please be patient. I'm going to completely write a reader before I go back and implement write capabilities. Once I have the basic classes set up it'll just be a matter of adding Set functions where I currently only have Gets.

I have written a test program or two to make sure the files can be written to while the server is running, and so far the results have been very encouraging. One program ran in an endless loop, picking a random sector, placing fighters in it if there weren't any and removing them if there were. Keep in mind at this point it had no timers, so it was modifying sectors tens of thousands of times per second. Then I logged into the game and flew around. Sure enough, I ran into fighters pretty much randomly, and when I'd redisplay the sector, chances are the data would be different each time I refreshed. No corruption, no errors, just data changing constantly all around me. Very good to see that test work, since without it I might have to get creative with my access routines, and given even constant access didn't crash anything, and how quickly access is performed, the chances of users even running into odd data mid-refresh in an ongoing game are minimal.

Contrary to how it may seem, I *do* have other obligations, so I can't spend all of my time on this, or I might already have more. But really I've been working on this for only about a week, and I think I've made great progress in that time. So please be patient. I hope to at least have a program that proves my viewing routines work correctly very soon. I will then continue to iterate the class set until I have something I can document and release.

I ran into a minor setback as I found a discrepency in the structures I was using and JP realized he had sent me an older version of the record format, but luckily the changes were minimal. It still means I have a little work to do to correct the classes, but nothing major.

To address your particular usage concern, once I do have a read/write library, implementing a function to, say, create a fighter cloud centered at sector x and encompassing every sector within y warps of sector x, would be trivial. And it'd take an insignificant portion of a second to perform the function. Certainly beats tedit, eh? [;)]

quote:To address your particular usage concern, once I do have a read/write library, implementing a function to, say, create a fighter cloud centered at sector x and encompassing every sector within y warps of sector x, would be trivial. And it'd take an insignificant portion of a second to perform the function. Certainly beats tedit, eh?
Yes it does! Gimmie! Now! [:D]

Seriously, I can wait.

Sorry I haven't updated in a few days. I honestly haven't done any work on it lately. Kinda burned myself out after working on it 4-8 hours a day for a while there and then having to redo some stuff. I'll get'er done, though; no worries. [:)] You guys went years without file access, another couple of months won't kill you. [;)]

Xentropy, glad to see you are making progress! You deserve a break! I still need to converse with you some night and give you some examples of my java parser for the dat files. We have done only some similar work as far as data extraction goes. My RGTWCompanion interface is finally being tested in a public game and so far, no real hiccups. I refresh the data every 30 minutes for the web pages that are displayed to the players. You are going way deeper with the API and such and I look forward to using your tool as well. I have recently added a shipdesigner and shipbuilder function to my interface, but it is not active in the public game yet. It will be interesting to see how well it works when multiple players are submitting ship build requests to their "shipyards".

I too, plan to share my tools once they are more refined. I have some areas that have hard coded values that need to be switched to be property file driven, etc. Anyhow best of luck man and I may pop in here once in a while to update on my effort as well. Again, my scope is much smaller than Xentropys!

I have the data records in pascal for all of the data files and TWINDEX.NDX except for TWMAIL.DAT and TWSMF.DAT I do believe. TWINDEX file is sort of difficult as it depends on the number of sectors in the game for its byte-length series. Reading it is pretty simple, writing in the correct spaces is a little more difficult as Pascal only allows 64k (65520) bytes of data in the program. As an alternative to block-writing, one can store a word(0-65535) size variable to hold the current sector/player/ship/alien/planet currently being viewed/edited and then simple replace that part of the record then block-write the whole record with that one simple record changed OR setup a array of boolean then write data to those which have truely been edited.

Just my two cents.