express warp - when used in a hostile (ie, non-truce, non-noob game) game it also has the same meaning as "death wish".

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I have only been paying attention to Tradewars 2002 for the past year or so. Before that, I took a 13+ year sabbatical away from tradewars. Here are observations and ramblings from a relative newcomer.

1) The supply of servers outweighs the demand. This must become discouraging for sysops who have relatively empty boards. Perhaps the solution is, unfortunately for some sysops, market based.

2) There are very few friendly training games with people hanging around. I know there are a few exceptions, such as the building game on Ice9. Sysops should put time into creating a constructive environment for new players, or should direct them to boards where they will be welcomed and nursed along.

3) TWXProxy. It is an amazing tool, but it is written in Delphi 5. Is there a free Delphi 5 compiler out there? Last time I checked, it runs around $500. Were this app ported to C or to some other language with a free compiler (please not java), I bet you'd see a huge influx of able programmers contributing to the project. The publicity would draw more players . . . nerdy, programming players, but players nonetheless.

4) Tradewars 2002 development. One of you already mentioned this. Were I the creator of such a cool (cult?) classic like tradewars, I sure wouldn't open-source it. One of its strengths is that it doesn't have fifteen new forks every year (I think those days are over). Heavy and frequent modification would make helpers, at best, a pain and, at worse, useless. However, how does the adage go? If a piece of software is not under development, it is dead. All that is left for some of you is an AI controller to use your scripts to play the *entire* game for you. Just press return and watch it go. While I would praise any endeavor to write a self-contained program to play tradewars for you (setting bots against each other), the fact that such a concept is possible means that the game can (and has) been mastered by many of you. With nothing new or exciting on the telnet-based tradewars horizon, I suspect the satisfaction of whipping some n0obs into shape will follow the law of diminishing returns. During the first nasty fight I got in after returning to the TradeWars 2002 world, I took a crash course in twxproxy and wrote some fairly efficient scripts to probe the galaxy, adjacent and 2-hop twarp/pwarp photon, and kill other players as fast as possible. Playing a building game, I wrote a script to ptrade all my organics and equipment on all my planets, and another to pwarp one planet around doing buydowns, selloffs, megarobs, etc. I even wrote some perl scripts to parse output from publicly available ztm traffic generators / mappers and tell me where the enemy might be hiding. The point is, if you've been around this game for a few years, and if you program, you've written scripts like these to solve your problems. It didn't take me too long, and I'm not that great of a programmer. If you don't program, most of you have, at the least, mastered the publicly available scripts and can do some serious damage in any game out there. I don't have time to program much more than I have, and you guys probably all have your own limits too. I completely understand Promethius's sentiment of hitting a wall. Maybe we need a little development, or maybe we've just had too much of a good thing and need to limit our TradeWars time so we don't burn out.

-karl

1) I agree

2) Don't know anything about this

3) I know Kylix is available for non-commercial use, it is the succesor of Delphi (which is the succcesor of Pascal). It might require some updating of the code? I have no idea. I'd bet bottom dollar it does, tho.

4) I wouldn't open source TradeWars, either, and I'm a big Linux nerd. This community wouldn't survive a fork or two.

I agree with you about the development of TWX, if there was some organization it could be a great growing program with more and more improvements instead of a few people working on it AND MAYBE getting a new version. That is a real interesting idea to make TWX more of an open source project to bring new programmers and new players onboard. Of course idea's are just that, and it takes a little more support from the TW community to make things like that happen. We have some really great programmers out here and Im sure some that don't even play are bored and would love a project to possibly work on!

Just my .02 on the subject.

-mobby

I have an entire Dollar opinion, as opposed to the politically correct 2 cent demurr (grin).

Scripters and JP have changed the game - it is now a spectrum - at one end, low turns, low T/L; to unlim no T/L. They are "cousin games" at the extremes.


I like the low end. No problem with scripters or those who like unlim, or in between.

I use whatever seems appropriate, even write some in an arcane language similar to C.

It's really a matter of what interests you.


To Farnsworth:

It is GREAT that you have returned after a 13 year absence. Welcome back Bro! Stay a while longer! Lotsa decent people here, most seldom if ever post.

laff, thats all I can afford with my experience Kav..

Just to educate the board here. Delphi 5 is a product from Borland's Professional Delphi line. They now have a free line known as the Turbo Explorer Series (also available in pro versions). I suggest the free versions of Delphi and or C++ from this link if anyone is interested:
http://www.codegear.com/products/turbo

The one catch is that the free versions don't allow loading components which I think TWX has a few. This could easily be worked around however. Also don't get hung up on the different SKUs of Delphi or C++ Builder as most are just service packs of each other. Source is usually compatible between versions.

I would love to see someone make a wxWidgets C++ version but the work would be great. This is why most Tradewars related programs use GUI generating products from Borland.

Huh. What is a "component" to Delphi? A shared object/library? By working around, does that mean grabbing the source to those objects and shoehorning it in? I haven't programed in pascal since . . . high school, and I have never programmed using delphi.

-karl

A Delphi component, as I have used it in this context, is referring to libraries that are visible on the Delphi Menu Bar (called the component bar I think). They allow you to visually drag and drop functionality into your application. They reside on a form and are not visible at runtime (unless they are visual components providing visual functionality).

The work-around is to just create a .pas file and instantiate the object dynamically instead of having Delphi manage the linking into your application so to speak.

Ive been hosting Tradewars games for a small group of friends and complete TW newbies for years now.

Id like to chime in on this, coming from someone whos never been a "hardcore" player, and has always hosted a "newbie friendly" game.

I first played TW back in the BBS days, and enjoyed it immensely. For the longest time as I got more interested in computers as I got older, I lamented that there wasnt a video game like this old classic that I vaguely remembered. What got me back into TW was pure luck, and in my opinion the best way to get new folks playing.

Bash.org one day hosted a Tradewars game, and had it on the news on their site. The name rang a bell for me, and I tried it out. Suddenly I realized this was the same game I loved so much back in the early 90's. I got a bunch of friends to play on the bash.org server and they loved it too, most of them had never played the game before.

Then after a few days of building up our amateur little corp, we got mercilessly annihilated.

I looked into TWGS, and promptly registered the software in full, and hosted a private game for me and the friends that had loved the game, and invited everyone in a large Paintball interest forum I moderate to come play.

When I created the game, I made it quite prominent that I expected the players not to use scripts and helper programs. I viewed this as an extreme detriment to getting new people playing and enjoying the game.

Now, I absolutely agree with my earlier convictions, and Ill put it in a few succinct statements.

Tradewars as a game is great, it has a learning curve like a flying brick though, and can only get new players ENJOYING the game by people helping them to learn, and getting them to prosper in the game. Theres nothing newbies are discouraged by more than barely knowing what theyre doing when someone with 10,000 figs comes along and blows them out of the sky for giggles.

The problem is, this is complicated immensely by scripts and helper programs. A relatively experienced player equipped with one of these is DEVASTATING to a casual newbie friendly game. The problem is a duality of technology, an old-school time-expensive game turned into a practically hands-off engine of destruction by programs and helpers.

I think this is the root of the reason TW hasnt seen much growth at all. I think if you look back at your game servers, even the newbie-friendly ones, you would see alot of absolutely new people playing for the first time discouraged by the overpowering advantage of running helpers and scripts. I understand that these new players could learn from that and say "Well I better download these things too, or I dont stand a chance", but the majority of them I think just say "Hell with this" and never come back.

I admit Im biased against these programs, I dont see automation as any sort of a game at all. Its definately a skilfull combat, but its hands-off, and to me that isnt the way either a game should be, or what Tradewars is. But I really do believe that this factor is what makes many people trying the game for the first time to give up and never consider coming back.

I dont believe that a newbie-friendly game can ever exist without technical ways to prevent people from scripting and automating things. Dont get me wrong, I dont have anything against basic macros for repetitive tasks, but taking decisions and tactics out of the hands of the player creates a situation where an absolute newbie can NEVER stand a chance.

And I dont believe that Tradewars can ever gain any real popularity until a newbie-friendly or casual game like this can be implemented.

You are correct in that scripts in the hands of someone who knows how to use them can wipe out someone who is new to the game, but when it comes to an advanced player vs new player there is still no contest. I normally don't corp, but have been in games where helping the newer players is more important than blowing them up - this is not what happens in a competitive game however.

Somewhat as you alluded to, a quiet game is good for the returning/new player. They do not learn a lot about combat, but in the beginning they need the basics (one of which can be argued is how not to get blown up).

Now the automation of the game requires skill by the scripter and even more so when they release something that is public. I learned a lot about the game by scripting, having my script get me killed, and figuring out ways to prevent my demise. It doesn't take detailed knowledge to run a script, but you have to know when and what (in general terms) the script does.

I do know that if it wasn't for the scripting aspect of Trade Wars, I would not be involved in the game. The challenge to me is writing a script on-the-fly to counter an enemy - sometimes I succeed, sometimes I get to wait until the next day to play.

We do have some nice sites that run noobie friendly games - Thrawn has a very good setup on his server just for that purpose. I believe Data and Sage also have noobie games. Thrawn's site seems more developed in regard to coaching the players at this time. Still, scripts are in use, but most likely not of the more advanced private ones that some of the better players keep close in hand.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

the cool thing is that anyone can buy the game codes and set up their own private server on a cheap ol' home PC.

that's the place for quiet, no helper games. there Needs to be a place to play it to the max. and that place is the public game servers. there are several that have rules aplenty to protect the inexperienced.

Want more game time? STOP PLAYING UNLIMS!

Anyway...

Linky:
http://www.navhaz.com/dny_tw_tutorial.txt

My returnee tutorial. Read it.

The #1 skill a new player needs to learn is how to choose the best games for their skill set. You simply can't get far in a game with advanced players, they have a vested interest in not letting you run thru their grid. There are less competitive games out there tho. Most games are a mixture of these... find a good high turns game (5k to 50k) and play that.

Avoid unlims, unlims are scriptfests and you cannot compete there.

Hrmf. I think you should try venturing out from under your little server/rock and play the game in the real world. Not meant as 'smack'. What you've described, to me, is tantamount to playing chess with only the Pawns because the Tactics and game Dynamics are much simpler.

The only thing hurting this game is the almost complete lack of attention and development by its creator. If he would get off his posterior and promote the game, create actual manuals/tutorials, and script packs the game would take off.. imo.

I've digressed. This game, like Chess, has limitless possibilities for tactics. If contiune playing your little 25 dollar Gary Kasparov Chess trainer, then I think it's ludicrous to think that you stand a chance in a 'Real' game. This comming from someone who is mediore at best at the game, and is looking forward to learning news ways of discovering mediocrity.

Perhaps you should try reading my post before lambasting me for not playing on a "real" game. I was writing my post in response to the topic of how to get more totally-new players playing the game. Im pretty sure that was a topic discussed in this thread, and thats what I was tossing in my 2 bits on.