Eh, exit-enter is fine. Back to the "secure your sector" thing.

Right now the planet updates whenever you land. It's MUCH cheaper to land-lift-land-lift and
force an update flood than it would be to exit-enter and update. You simply can't burst as many
exit-enters as you can lift-lands. The macro on the lift-land is shorter and can be aborted.
Compared to the current scenario, it would be much more efficient. If you then added the
colonist filter, you'd never have a problem.

You don't need to prevent rapid exit-enter in the game for this to work. It'd be better in all
accounts. Just make sure you update the planet being landed on before the landing occurs,
too. Otherwise there's a possible gap there.

I ran into an issue with TWGS during the last tourney. I banged the game and had it ready, I had the Startup Mode set for Online, then I closed TWGS. I had a scheduled task start TWGS at the appointed time. There were about 20 people trying to login, so as soon as the server started, it was bombarded with connection attempts, which caused it to crash... repeatedly. If the server is up, and you toggle it from Inactive to Active, there is no issue with the heavy connection attempts.

I've worked around this by just using a script to login to remote admin, and toggle active/inactive, but you should be aware that there is an underlying issue with TWGS accepting connection attempts before it is really ready to handle them.

Thanks, EP, that should be easy to track down.

"It seems to me that the exit/enter tactic goes against the game design anyway since it makes it possible to clear 255 limpets or drain a cannon without using any turns."

I agree with that, Scrat. Any tactic that clearly undermines a feature in the game (like paying to have limpets removed at SD) is an exploit.

Sing, you're right, the underlying problem of heavy planet update processing needs to be addressed irrespective of how that's happening. I need to take a deep look at the code there, but I hope it's possible to fix that problem. Planet processing is a pretty messy thing in this code.

You might want to fix the getting Photon'd in an UNLIM 'Exploit' --circumventing the 5min Delay.

As an aside, I think the Galactic Bank could use a makeover.. lots of room to grow there.

Oh. One more thing. Ship IG should have a 'Failure Percentile', imo.

One other thing I noticed, and this is piddly, but an easy fix I hope. Sometimes when the planet list (TL) is run, it will round figs (and maybe cash) up to 1000T instead of 1M.

I like easy

Another thought is to the closed games. When a player accesses a closed game, they receive the message that "this is a closed game; you must request a player account...". It would be nice to be able to have a contact e-mail address or web link to be displayed for this occasion.

[EDIT]

Another thought was the TW2002 commands, specifically the Stats and Rank. Although they currently will be put into a text file when utilized, would it be possible to have these commands output to an HTML file instead? Also have the ability to configure the output colors, or perhaps have a default set, just as if you pressed CLV for the ranks as an example.

At one time I actually had TWGS functioning as a web server, so you could connect to it with a browser and it would generate a page of data. I never went anywhere with that, but that's something that could be done, perhaps. Kind of a fluff thing, but I can put it on the "wish" list.

Also, something to keep in mind is now that I've built the Museum, it would be easy for me to take the game site registry one step further and start having TWGSs posting data to their pages so they have updated info about games running, player counts, etc. So part of that could be having html reports for any active TWGS as part of the site's page. If I have an opportunity to get to that here, I'll post about it and we can discuss the pros and cons of various implementations.

You know what would really be cool?

A way to integrate something like this:
http://javassh.org/space/start

Into the TW museum page for a server. That way a person could login and
play via the web.

It runs client side, and I bet the data could be separated from the logic (if
it isn't already) meaning it wouldn't put any additional stress on the web
server.

I really like this:

http://www.flashterm.com/index.html

And I'd like to put together some docs and resources to assist gameops who want to provide a web-based terminal for their games. Thrawn is doing it. But I won't be able to do that as part of the TW website because I don't have a hosting package that will support that. I may be able to do it with the twgs.21-6.com server, but that's "on loan" from the 21-6 guys. Don't know how long I'll have that.

Of course, these are very light telnet clients. No script support, even macros. If the game starts to provide for some of the basic automation need, then a light telnet client might be all people need to explore the game a bit. And that's what I really want, to make it easy as possible for someone to jump into a game and see what it's about.

We love the FlashTerm idea. It is a nice addition to the site and TWGS. I told you before if you wanted to do something similar, I run a Flash Policy server here as well and can set you up on it. Same goes for other Ops that need a Flash Policy server to configure their FlashTerm. We're more than happy to provide other Sysops access to it.

Would it be possible to add an option to the CN commands to toggle off/on alien fig hit messages? I've been in unlims where it is constant message after message from the aliens. Granted, sometimes I need the messages, but there is a point when they are just a pain. The alien sector enter w/o killing the sector fighter become useless information unless alien capping.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Yeah, I'm definitely aware that the aliens are a bit spammy.

The biggest problem appears to be when they enter a sector, see a fig, then retreat. They can easily get stuck in this situation, generating one email every time they attempt to move. Over time, that really adds up. So.... What if I change the alien behavior so they don't send redundant emails like this. Once you get one "entered and retreated" message for a sector, you don't need the next 5,000. I'll have to look into how feasible that is, but it seems like a good solution to this problem. I've already done something like this in the past, so aliens only send the first Interdictor message rather than one message for every interdicted move.

I know lots of scripters may not have noticed this fact yet, but since Windows 7 the default ANSI.SYS file no longer exists. What this means is that if you use Windows 7 and open a command window to connect and play, the ANSI graphics are no longer fully compatable with the codebase utilised by the TW telnet server. Lots of graphics characters get blanked. They are now only using the unicode version of ANSI instead of the ANSI.SYS codebase. This could of course be remidied any number of ways, such as connecting through a third-party client such as PuTTY and adjusting the config files. Personally I think a good web-based flash or java client is likely to be the best solution, although this solution may cause problems with compatablility for those who enjoy playing with scripts.

Also, when using a cmd window from Windows 7 there are a good number of points where responses from the server are not correctly recieved. For example, 9 times out of 10 when you land on a planet it will not display the planet information or the next command prompt. Hitting a space will usually get you the prompt back.

One nice thing about TW was always that you could run it perfectly from a stock computer configuration without any need to download or install any add-ins. Telnet now comes disabled, but it is trivial to enable it unless your sysadmin has blocked that option. With both this and the loss of the ANSI.SYS file it does not appear as if this is possible any longer for Windows 7 and forward machines unless a web-based solution is implemented. Additionally, there is no ANSI.SYS file available that will run on any x64 windows machine in native mode.

That would make it hard for people capping aliens, but not impossible. Typically I hit aliens as soon as they enter a sector, but I also have hits while capping that would not appear again. The toggle would allow me to choose when and if I want those types of messages to appear.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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