Back around Thanksgiving, Runaway Proton showed me a webpage for a defunct TWGS, Hunter's Evolution, that discussed some highly innovative server scripts, and I took it as a challenge. The result took several months, and the assistance of one of my players, Hacksaw, who modified the TWX source code, and the results are worth it.

Therefore, in the game banging tomorrow, Game E: Evolution, ICE9 will be running 5 new server side scripts.
1) Fighter Factory - A ship that will produce fighters every hour when occupied.
2) Shield Factory - A ship that will produce shields every hour when occupied.
3) B Class Planet - A planet that will produce approximately 4% interest per day, but cannot advance past level 1.
4) Cloaked Ship - A ship that will cloak within a few minutes of beaming in, and every few minutes ore is removed from the hold to fuel the cloak. When the ore runs out, the ship decloaks.
5) Terra Lactating - Adds 5 colonists to Terra every 5 seconds, in order to greatly improve the colonist regen rate.

Full details and game specs will be available tomorrow.

Looks interesting from a scripting standpoint. Questions on the cloaked ship: Will a photon remove the cloak and if so for how long? Can a cloaked ship attack or are you blind? Is the ship immobile when cloaked? I am assuming that the cloak can be removed by photon and all other normal features are intact - just cloaked.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

I have been doing a bit of research regarding this, and it appears as if the following is true
1) A photon can decloak the ship. The ship will recloak the next time that the script checks to see if it is occupied and has fuel ore,
so anywhere from 1 second to approx. 5 minutes the ship will recloak.
2) The ship is mobile, and interacts with deployed figs, mines, interdictors, and cannons like any ship can.
3) The ship can attack, but for the purposes of this game, I am giving the ship a very low fig and fig per attack count, making it useful more for scouting than anything else.
4) You cannot be attacked, or be towed.
5) If you transport out of the ship, it decloaks.
6) If you log off the game, it remains cloaked. However the script will still be checking for ore, so you can be decloaked once you leave. I made it so this ship cannot hold any cloaking devices, in order to prevent people from cloaking when logging off, and then getting decloaked by the script.
7) If you log in to the game, and are in a cloaked ship, it will decloak.

That is awesome. This is the sort of thing TW really needs. Innovation that doesn't destroy the game.

If the cloaked ship hits a fig or limpet or mine will it trigger the msg?

Yes it will. As a general rule of thumb, I have found that it acts like a normal ship does, except it cannot be seen in the sector by any other player in the sector or holoscan, it cannot be attacked, and it cannot be towed.

No, they are just like a player who is using a cloaking device when they log off. Only way you can tell they are there is the anomaly, or the message from hitting a mine or fig... or IG.

Does it cost a turn to cloak? =)

Nope

The script works by looking for a certain class of ship, then to see if it the occupied flag is set to Y, then it checks for ore, will remove 10 ore, and cloak, stay cloaked, or decloak as necessary.

The one downside is the only way to tell if you are cloaked is if fuel ore got depleted.

LOL, great gridding ship then... get photoned, they can just re-cloak and callsaveme, land and move on. By the time you get a chance to foton a 2nd time they'd be long gone.

It would be if it had more than 250 figs

But also remember there is no way to get it to cloak exactly when you want, you could be vulnerable for anywhere from 1 seconds to 5 minutes, depending on where you get decloaked in the script's cycle.

I agree.. very intresting from a scripters point of vies... curious as to what changes were made to your twx to use these new scripts.. and to when ones require the changes and which ones don't..

Also.. if like the alien ship in the old Star Trek tv show... does it uncloak when it attacks? If not I feel it should, but if its a server script, might be tricky.

I agree with you that it should decloak in order to attack, the problem is how to do it. Since essentially it is cycling through the active ships in the game looking for the ships that meet the cloaking conditions 1) Shadow Walker Class, 2) Occupied, and then based on the amount of ore the ship has, it either cloaks it or decloaks it. This cycle takes about 8 minutes, so having it decloak after an attack is something I have not figured out how to do. I could theoretically look for changes in fighter values, but that would not be an instant fix. That is the main reason I made the shadow walker such a crappy ship, so that it would be good for scouting, exploration, and gridding, but nothing else.

As for the changes to TWX, basically it is just the addition of more command line switches, one that selects the port, and one that autoconnects (it already had one that selected the database if I am not mistaken), so that the TWGS scheduler can kick off the scripts every hour at a specified time. There are really only three scripts that utilize it, the fighter factor, the shield factory, and the B Class Planet, although I did put BAT files in the startup folder that automatically bring all my server side scripts back up in the event of a system restart. The rest of the scripts just are constantly cycling. The only one that has not given me any problems is the Terra Lactating script, the rest have all had to be tweaked in order to reduce/eliminate unanticipated effects.