Xen I am not the sharpest tool in the shed but what the fsck are you talking about?
If it takes a 2TPW ship 0.5 seconds to power up weapons does that mean a 4TPW ship take 1 second to power up weapons? Or is this some bulls*** you have come up with?
I am far from a knowledgable player but what does ship delay actually do?
I thought it was "universal" that EVERY ship had same delay so if your saying that if I have a high TPW ship then I will be affected worse than one with a low TPW ship? Or are you saying that people that have dialup are worse off than people having broadband.

Ship delay adds a small delay to ship movement and ship attacks, based on the ship's tpw. So yes, a 2 tpw ship can move faster and power up faster than a 4 tpw ship. Connection speed doesn't have anything to do with it, those delays are added server side.

Psion beat me to it, but yes. Connection speed will have some effect, of course, since if you're playing on 1200 baud it'll just take too long for the text to reach you regardless of delays.

But what ship delays DO allow is a buffer for both those without scripts to have time to type a response, those who do use scripts to react to the text before they might already be dead, those with slower connections to realize less effect from the lag, etc.

Case in point: pbusting at Stardock. Without any delays, it's completely up to connection speeds and how fast the text displays. As Traitor says above, you can easily be dead before the sector planetary listing even finishes display, since AY6000* *instantly* fires a wave of 6000 fighters at the first target in the sector. Let's say it takes 0.2 seconds for your particular connection to receive the planetary listing and react, but 0.1 seconds for an enemy sitting at dock waiting for you to see the "X has lifted off" and 0.05 more seconds to send ANNNY6000*. You're dead.

Now add ship delays. If your would-be murderer is in an ISS (4TPW) and ship delays are set to "QUARTER" (their lowest setting; there is also THIRD, HALF, NORMAL, and DOUBLE), movements between sectors and attack waves take 4TPW * 1/4 (delay setting) = 4 / 4 = 1 second to take effect.

Now that 0.2 second planetary listing is a moot point, since it'll take them 1.15 seconds to launch a wave at you anyway. You're already done busting all the planets and back on dock by then. The game becomes more about strategy and less about reaction speed. More about base invasions and less about ship-to-ship combat. Unfortunately, it also becomes more about pdrops, which is why rules against pdrop are necessary when ship delays are in use. It's also unfortunate IMHO that the delay doesn't apply to photon launches, making dock blockades even more effective (can't express away since you're stuck in the adjacent sector for a full second or so, generally).

Basically, it's a setting that I think is great because it removes a lot of the parts of the game I dislike, the expresshere, now expressthere, hurryhurrygetoutofsight stuff. However, it's a setting that has somewhat incomplete implementation, thus it has so many exploits associated with it (making pdrops and photon blockades extra-powerful). That is where the desire for more host settings stems from: They would allow for ship delays without the exploits.

Thanks to both of you for the clarifications.
And I apologize for sounding stupid (which I will freely admit I am, and also apologize for being slow at keys, unable to follow directions, and what ever anyone else wants to accuse me of.)
But one thing I will NOT be accused of is trying to improve myself. If that means making mistakes so be it. Sorry had a bad experience in a game that I didn't want to make mistakes in.

quote:Originally posted by Xentropy

Case in point: pbusting at Stardock. Without any delays, it's completely up to connection speeds and how fast the text displays. As Traitor says above, you can easily be dead before the sector planetary listing even finishes display, since AY6000* *instantly* fires a wave of 6000 fighters at the first target in the sector. Let's say it takes 0.2 seconds for your particular connection to receive the planetary listing and react, but 0.1 seconds for an enemy sitting at dock waiting for you to see the "X has lifted off" and 0.05 more seconds to send ANNNY6000*. You're dead.


Xen,
DO NOT take what I say out of the context it was posted in.

1) Usually the most planets you can p-bust in 1 second is 6. (The most planets I've been able to p-bust in 1 second was 8, and that was running locally. (with a ship that held 20 dets and gens) And I believe that was just dumb luck timing.) It is somewhat processor dependent, and I think that has to do with how long it takes TWGS to create the planet record and/or clear the record.
2) The most attacks you can launch in one second is 4, and it doesn't matter if you abort displays or not, and it doesn't matter what box you are running on or what TWGS is running on.
3) Even with ship move delay set to none, the most sectors you can move in a ship per second is 4. (again, this is processor independant, unless you have a SLOW box...heh)
4) I can send ~50 log announcements (Computer, Announce) of "anny9999" in one second (locally, with unlimited max commands per second set, and 1 sec proc interval, on a P4 2.8Ghz, varies between 45 and 58, but the average was right at 50.2)
5) I can pop off dock, send the following announcement "anny9999" and re-dock 15 times in one second on average.

From that you can infer that there are delays built into the game. JP has confirmed some of them. He has also confirmed where those delays are lacking, such as Planet Warping. Additionally, you have to factor in ping times, but there are a lot of misconceptions about how the ping times factor in.

I am telling you straight up that you can pop off dock and post an announcement about how much you hate scripters, and re-dock usually before the enemy even sees the message that you LEFT dock in the first place. But only IF you send the commands as a burst, so the commands arrive at the same time. Internet Lag and ping times, etc have NOTHING to do with how your commands get procesed if they all arrive at the server as a burst. Only the Processor speed of the TWGS server, and how busy it is at the moment your commands arrive determines how quickly your commands are processed. Lag and ping times only dictate how quickly someone else can react to the things you do on the server.

Xen, you might want to either ask or do research before you talk about things happening "instantly".

ok it's offical most TWars players are nerds <frowns>

Traitor, 1/4 second may as well be instant compared to ship delays turned on, even at the quarter setting (unless there's a 1TPW ship in the game). The POINT was that without ship delays you can safely pbust at dock without a script that took 50 hours to write. That's it. Not all of us are into the speed-demon style of play and the 0.25 seconds too late and you're dead style of play.

You'll note even in my example, in which I just pulled numbers out of the air, I translated "instant" to 0.05 seconds. "Instant" is subjective. "Instant" is ANYTHING without ship delays in my book. I don't care if certain things are limited to only 4 happening per second, that's still 2-10x faster than they happen in a ship delay game, and not everyone is interested in the adreneline kick of, "oh**** I got out JUST in time whew!"

So if 4 per second is the magic number for non ship delay games, given the quote from your other thread that you will be dead before the planetary display finishes, then my example is still not invalidated, just the exact numbers. So it takes the person 0.3 seconds to attack you instead of 0.15 (replace the 0.05 attack delay with 0.25), it must take 0.4 seconds instead of 0.2 to get the planetary display, else you wouldn't have posted that. My point is still valid, just change the numbers. I didn't load up TWGS and time all this stuff to get my numbers because in a ship delay game the timing isn't everything. I don't *like* the timing to be everything.

Also, I can write at least several thousand records per second with my 3.6Ghz processor directly to the files, so the 4 per second limitation is definitely hardcoded. The 50 announcements per second or 6 pbusts per second limitations are apparently a function of the characters per second your connection will handle, and even a local connection will have some TCP/IP overhead, unless for some reason the game itself adds a LOT of overhead to the file writes. Note that a "burst" is just sending all of the input data to the server at once; it is NOT guaranteed to go as one packet, so there could still be delays introduced between parts of the same burst input. (There won't be usually, but that is an undefined factor of the connection.) Also, the ping time will still affect when the burst starts taking effect after it is sent, and how long until you see the results of your burst. Something goes wrong with your burst and you're probably dead before you even realize it. I don't like that kind of factor in my strategy games.

So you may want to think about what my point is rather than nitpicking the details that don't affect my point. I don't need to research exactly how long instant is to back up my opinion. It's faster than with ship delays. It's fast enough, per your own post, to be dead before your screen can even display a planet scan. That's all that counts.

I am one of those "return to the game after 10 years and are immediately blasted by a script." people. So just to get the declarations out of the way.

1. I am not opposed to scripting.
2. I like scripts to do the tedious tasks of trading and colonizing.
3. I am now writing/modifying twproxy scripts.(wish I could figure out how to use the includes)
4. I am not against all offensive scripts.
5. I do not like being killed by an offensive script that someone would leave running unattended.
6. I do not like fig droppings all over the place.

The Tw game has gained much from scripting. It has made the game much more playable. However, contrary to a previous post, I beleive scripting has degraded the human element within TW. Should we not introduce scripting to the Alien Traders? We could have more intelligent adversaries, since they are scripted too.

So, if it's script play you want. You can show off your smoke and mirrors in ulimited games.
Unlimited games = run your scripts 24/7 and check on it regularly. Who in unlimited turn games constantly stare at the screen for hours making sure it's doing it's job. The learning curve is steep. In order to competively play in Unlimited games you must contain the know how to create or possess the great scripts in order to play. I have a disadvantage with these games, because I have a less time on my hand to learn the ins and outs of scripting.

I understand that TW has evolved, but not like other games. Without a doubt the object is to win. The method of the game has been changed. This, I would beleive, is the largest stumbling block that "old-timers" like me have to overcome and learn to embrace. So, if you are a player like me you are used to a universe that consists of 250-1000 turns per day and have to relearn the dynamics of the game. I am currently engaged in 2 5000 turn games. This keeps the script gods from going crazy and allows for us "old-timers" the chance to learn and burn...

-TComet

800-1200 turn games are still pretty popular actually. The Corporate Wars is a big tournament/training game running right now that is only 800 turns, but it drew 70 something people.

As for games with a more reasonable number of players, low turn games normally have good draws. I basically never play above 1500 turns unless I'm doing a friend a favor, heh. And the scripts can get pretty vicious if you don't know what you're doing (and sometimes even if you do, heh) in the low turn games too.

TW is a pretty flexible game and theres a game style out there that suits most people, whether you like low turn, mid turn, unlimited, ship delay, stock, or any kind of funky edit. It just takes some noodling around to find a game type you like and a couple good servers that host those types of games.

Oh, and Traitor has a short example script up on http://www.tw-cabal.com that shows you the basics of using includes WB and have fun!

quote:Originally posted by Xentropy

Traitor, 1/4 second may as well be instant compared to ship delays turned on, even at the quarter setting (unless there's a 1TPW ship in the game). The POINT was that without ship delays you can safely pbust at dock without a script that took 50 hours to write. That's it. Not all of us are into the speed-demon style of play and the 0.25 seconds too late and you're dead style of play.


You could just use the macros that took all of about 20 min to come up with. (roughly the time spent busting up to 5250 exp by hand) The script just automates it all. Even with ship delay turned on, I would recommend you use macros, just so you don't fat finger something. I assume that people are still going to take shots at you even in a rate limited game. #SD#'ing someone gets you both a tactical advantage and a strategic one, so to not take the shot when the opportunity presents itself is foolish. Therefore, you still want to p-bust as quickly as possible.

quote:
You'll note even in my example, in which I just pulled numbers out of the air, I translated "instant" to 0.05 seconds. "Instant" is subjective. "Instant" is ANYTHING without ship delays in my book. I don't care if certain things are limited to only 4 happening per second, that's still 2-10x faster than they happen in a ship delay game, and not everyone is interested in the adreneline kick of, "oh**** I got out JUST in time whew!"


Fine. You can pull numbers out of your Butt for all I care when you are talking about ship delays. But to those of us who play without ship delays, those numbers are important.

quote:
So if 4 per second is the magic number for non ship delay games, given the quote from your other thread that you will be dead before the planetary display finishes, then my example is still not invalidated, just the exact numbers.


Yes it is. Because you won't be dead if you had sent a properly designed macro. See below.

quote:
So it takes the person 0.3 seconds to attack you instead of 0.15 (replace the 0.05 attack delay with 0.25), it must take 0.4 seconds instead of 0.2 to get the planetary display, else you wouldn't have posted that. My point is still valid, just change the numbers. I didn't load up TWGS and time all this stuff to get my numbers because in a ship delay game the timing isn't everything. I don't *like* the timing to be everything.


Timing is still king in a ship delay game. If you are playing against someone who does pay attention to timing in a ship delay game, then they will have the same advantage over you that people in a non ship delay game do. To think otherwise is just kidding yourself.

quote:
Also, I can write at least several thousand records per second with my 3.6Ghz processor directly to the files, so the 4 per second limitation is definitely hardcoded. The 50 announcements per second or 6 pbusts per second limitations are apparently a function of the characters per second your connection will handle, and even a local connection will have some TCP/IP overhead, unless for some reason the game itself adds a LOT of overhead to the file writes. Note that a "burst" is just sending all of the input data to the server at once; it is NOT guaranteed to go as one packet, so there could still be delays introduced between parts of the same burst input. (There won't be usually, but that is an undefined factor of the connection.) Also, the ping time will still affect when the burst starts taking effect after it is sent, and how long until you see the results of your burst. Something goes wrong with your burst and you're probably dead before you even realize it. I don't like that kind of factor in my strategy games.


Ok, first, it's mostly TWGS overhead. Secondly, yes, TCP does allow for ANY packet to get fragmented, but... Go read up on Nagle's algorithm. Then understand that TCP telnet packets are very tiny, and fragmenting them will only increase overhead. The internet would be hell if small packets got so easily fragmented. Unless you are living in Imaloserstan, on dialup, with early '90's routers at your ISP, in an electrical storm, at the height of the sunspot cycle, it won't get fragmented. Also, when sending a burst from within TWX, either manually ($b), or by using the "send" command, it sends it all as ONE packet. That is how it was DESIGNED. Unless you have a broken NIC, or a noisy connection, it'll get to the server as one packet. It might have to get resent a few times due to internet conjestion (i.e. retransmits), but it won't arrive fragmented unless there is a big problem.

One more thought. Ever think about how Abort Displays works? CN9? I'll let you ponder that one.

Let me clarify my statement about ping time. If you are safely on dock, it doesn't matter when your burst arrives, since there is nothing an enemy player can do to hurt you short of blowing dock (and you will still be on dock even after it's blown. It's just when you try to port there again after busting that you have problems. heh) SO, Once your burst arrives at the server, the first character of your burst gets processed immeadiately, and the server sends out replies to all nodes that might get messages. The reply to you and the reply to your enemy (the message that you have lifted off the stardock) work their way back to you guys. However, the server doesn't wait around for you to ack the message, instead, it processes the next command. And sends out more messages if they are needed. The server will continue to process your packet. It is likely that the server will be done processing your commands before the first message it sent out about the effect of those commands arrives at your enemies terminal. Even if the enemy does see the message before you are finished, he still has to respond with his own burst of information, and THAT is where ping matters. Cause it will take half of whatever his ping time is for his response to arrive at the server. Then the server has to process his commands. If you have written your macro properly, you can process all the late incoming messages at your liesure from the safety of dock.

quote:
So you may want to think about what my point is rather than nitpicking the details that don't affect my point. I don't need to research exactly how long instant is to back up my opinion. It's faster than with ship delays. It's fast enough, per your own post, to be dead before your screen can even display a planet scan. That's all that counts.


Fine. You can pull points out of your Butt for all I care when you are talking about ship delays. But to those of us who play without ship delays, nitpicking is important. I know I'm just as good in ship delay games as I am in non-delay games, scripts or not.

The specific issue you brought up was with pbusting with a ship with a planet scanner. The real solution is not to pbust in a ship with a planet scanner, but what is the properly designed macro to not get confused and either send you warping or possibly leave you stranded in sector if:
A) You have a planet scanner, and someone else creates a new planet while you're doing your thing, thus changing the planet # you're creating.
B) You have no planet scanner, but someone creates a new planet at dock in the middle of what you're doing, so now you're creating a 2nd planet in sector and get an unexpected planet listing anyway.

If it were a normal or double ship delay game, you'd have plenty of time to receive the text, notice you're stuck at the wrong prompt, quickly quit and dock. Safely. In a no delay game, you're definitely screwed using a macro instead of a script you spent 50 hours to write, and in a quarter delay game, there's a decent chance you're screwed as well. If you really think there's no difference between the advantage of doing something in 2.1 vs 2.2 seconds and doing something in 0.35 vs 0.45 seconds, you're dreaming. Add to that the fact that even if you get caught in a bad enough position to get attacked once, the chances of an enemy getting multiple waves out are almost nil in delay. In non-delay, multiwave attacks are frequent and deadly.

And this is something as fundamental and basic as pbusting. If something this simple needs 50 hours of work to perfect, well...that's why I prefer to play on long delay servers. The last thing I need is to be going "whew!" after some close call every 30 seconds. That just leads to a lot of "goddamnit!" after the call was a little more than just close, and isn't even fun when you DO get away, as it leaves you sweating and irritable. Adrenal responses are unfun for a reason. And I certainly don't have time to give script-writing equal hours to my day job for the next six months to finally have a set of basic scripts completed so I can *start* playing. (As you say, public scripts aren't worth your or any other *good* script-writer's time, so I'd have to make my own.)

Xen, smart macros can be written such that in case people are playing tricks with the planets the character string will land you back on dock. Once you're safely landed, the messages can be analyzed and a new macro chosen to fit the circumstances.

As to the time that Traitor spent on this script, you're blowing it out of proportion. He spent 50 hours because it slices, dices, even frappes, plus is documented out the wazoo. Its not a simple bust up script by any means. You have programming experience, so I'm sure you know the time investment involved in transforming a functional application into an idiot proof (or as near as possible) production application. Very very time consuming. And the exploit that was used against it would realistically probably never have been discovered if Traitor had not released the script as open source. If he had made it .cts, it would have been much safer simply because people wouldn't have had the ability to directly examine the code.

And for the umpteenth time, there are lots and lots of very good public scripts available. Some open source, some closed. Sure, Traitor might spend hours working on a private version that squeezes out an extra 3% performance, but its relatively rare that the private scripts drastically overpower the public ones. A great many players play entirely using public scripts and have no scripting ability whatsoever yet are very competitive players.

Not to get off the subject, but regarding the .CTS format; I read somewhere awhile back that there was a decompiler program. I have always wondered if this was true and the program is kept as a guarded secret or if this was just a lame rumor.

I've never heard of one. Wabbit did release a .CTS upgrader to convert TWX 2.02 scripts to be compatible with TWX 2.03. Maybe thats what you heard about?

Decompiler? Doubt it. Wasn't wabbits converter discontinued?

I would think, and I'm just tossing this out here... wouldn't
this be the point of scripted macros? Run a /, parse for PlScn
and then select the approprate macro from there? Otherwise
you're just guessing.

I don't know why anyone would say there aren't good public
scripts. The Ck and SupG scripts have worked wonders for me.
Not to mention many many others. Heck, there are some awesome
public scripts out there.