I'm ramping up toward doing some major work on aliens. I put in a log file so I can get a better look at how aliens are interacting with players. That's active on the beta server right now, so if anyone wants to demonstrate some bugs or test some things out, that would really help. I'm not going to do any major changes until this version is live, but I've already made some changes. Aliens are actually completing their AI goals, for example, and they're able to move through sectors defended by figs, so they should be different than they were, whether or not that equates to "better".

I also fixed a bug that might have been causing games and aliens to stop receiving messages. The message system will ignore any message over 20 seconds old, so if something happens to cause one game to be out of synch with other sessions by more than 20 seconds, this can cause that game to stop processing current messages. A combination of two bugs created a situation where a game that's been online for awhile (especially alien servers) could easily get out of synch by more than 20 seconds. A loss of accuracy in the timer caused any game to lose time at a rate of a few ms per minute, which in and of itself isn't too bad. But then another bug caused any timing error to be doubled whenever a system "update time" event was sent, and that's something that can happen under a variety of circumstances. After awhile a small error can grow pretty large. So I'm hoping that this is the cause of the message problems we've seen from time to time.

John,

One of the things that always seemed backward is what happens when you upgrade a port.

Now:
Upgrade any S and the product appears instantly
Upgrade any B and it takes 24 hours before the port can buy 100% of the product.

So upgrading a sell product produces it out of thin air. I would think it should be reversed. ie upgrade an s product should take time to build up the product while upgrading a B product (essentially say we are willing to buy what you might have) should happen instantly

H

Why is that backward?

Because upgrading a port for selling something, the product materializes out of thin air for sale, but it takes time for the port to be able to buy something... But I think changing this behavior would result in breaking too many scripts.

This is because of the way the port system works. If you made this change, you'd break
every red cashing technique out there.

When you upgrade a port the upgrade happens immediately. The upgrade amount goes
"on dock." In a buying port, the level it buys is max minus on dock. So by upgrading
the buy port, you upgrade the max and the "on dock" increases, thus you see a %
increase but no increase in buying level. The amount "on dock" decays at the port
regen rate, so over time you get the max level.

When a seller is upgraded, the same thing happens. Except a seller sells from it's dock
and not from it's max. So by upgrading the port, the amount is reflected immediately.

Now what happens if you SDT, SST, or SSM? First the port is upgraded 26 units, that
adds 255 to the "on dock" amount. Now that amount can be stolen. So, when you go
to steal, you have something to steal. If you reverse the way the "on dock" works,
you'd eliminate SDT, and make SST and SSM a PITA.

Cool

Good explanation, Singularity.

I vaguely remember dealing with that years ago. I went and had a look and here's the note I put in that function:

"Made this change because if I'm going to increase the product I should do it consistently between BUY and SELL. To not increase product at this point would penalize Evil players"

You increase the capacity of the port to buy or sell, and the way the system was designed way back, it results in the behavior that you see. Maybe it's not particularly realistic, but it's how the game works and it shouldn't change unless there's a very good reason.

Nod. And this is one part of the game where things function very well. If a
sysop doesn't want reds to be able to do traditional SSM/SST/SDT tactics
they can just turn off the "steal from buy port" option.

If the goal is to balance sellers, then the on-dock shouldn't increase with
upgrades. That would change some first day tactics, specifically megarob
strategies, but it could be done as an option in the new mode if it's really
seen as a big problem.