Personally, I don't care for ship movement delays myself, and I agree that ship delays for at the keys players vs auto attack scripts, the ship delay will hurt the very players you are trying to attract.

This is why I use the emulation delays. Input 56k modem, output 1mb (fastest). No one can type faster than 56k input allows, but that will help slow auto attack scripts.

Both of these are assuming you will have players online going head-to-head battles.

Or - another setting you may want to try out is the single player limit options. Check those out, you can set the game to have times of multiplayer - usually in the evenings when most people play, then divide the rest of the day into single player, or single corp times to play.

Bottom line, your edit isn't going to get much play unless you loosen up a little so players will want to try it. Maybe entice them with a ship edit or two. We're trying to help, we really want to help you to realize your vision.

I like movement delays because, first of all, I don't really notice them. I haggle when I trade, and that accounts for most of the time it takes to run PPT. Movement delays mainly affect blue cashing, not red. There is no delay set for transporting.

I also like the idea that theoretically "faster" ships are actually faster. I like to think that ships like scouts and merfs can escape combat by fleeing. But I guess the delay wouldn't protect them much against scripted attacks, because a big ship will just one-shot them. I could put in a power-up delay, but I'm sure that would be even more unpopular.

The critically important thing about movement delays is they protect people from surround scripts. You might get podded, but at least you won't get #SD# faster than you can type. Given a choice between a movement delay and a drop/take fighter delay, I prefer the movement delay.




I want to avoid that. I like the possibility of real time PvP. I just wish it were more fair to at-the-keys players. I'm still hoping JP puts in that hybrid delay mode where delays only kick in when two players are in the same sector.



I appreciate it.

Ship edits are in the works, but I think planet edits have far more impact on the building vs. cashing/hunting balance, and I wanted to test them in isolation. The ship edits won't be major, either; no overpowered 1tpw super-battleships that put the ISS to shame. But Ferrengi (and maybe aliens) will be flying some ships designed to entice reds to hunt them.

Cruncher, did the HVS version force ship movement delay? I know I modeled the options for normal, half, third, fourth and twice movement delays on the HVS ship delay options. But I also added the "no delay", which eventually was changed to 250 ms delay because a true zero delay was too fast for the system to handle. As far as I know, the HVS version didn't have that. And that was a very popular version.

I personally think if you're running third or quarter delays, that's fast enough for most people. Does that mean that this audience will go for it? Probably not, just like they tend not to go for limited turn games when they could be playing unlimited. That's the audience. I know there are players out there who would appreciate the kind of game you're putting together, but I don't know how you can reach them.

I will say that part of the problem with move delays is that most people played without them. When TW was non-interactive, movement was as fast as the system could handle. Once it became interactive (HVS version), it became necessary to use pacing, and the HVS version introduced that, but it never really went far enough with it. Then when TWv3 came out and was interactive, it introduced the same movement delays that the HVS version had, and the response was "this new version is sluggish!" People just didn't seem to get the need for different ship movement speeds.

Personally, I think if you want balance, you need either non-interactive play OR delays. But in today's game, there really isn't a great desire for balance. Unlimited turns, unlimited time, no delays, that's just a very different game than it was. And that's what today's active players prefer. That doesn't mean that other approaches won't appeal to the right people, and I think it's great to experiment the way you are. Just don't be discouraged if these players doesn't get what you're going for.

I'm glad you're interested in that hybrid delay approach. I would like to explore that.

From what I experienced playing HVS today, there are no ship movement delays. At least none disernable to the naked eye with today's processors. So if there is a tpw delay, we don't see it now.

The hybrid delay looks like something we need to explore further, put it up on the beta server to see how it feels.

Delays simulate a laggy connection, although it is laggy for everyone. If I am seeing lag, delay intentional or not, I get off the server. I have better things in life to do than sit and watch a move, steal, or pdrop take a long time.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

The last two versions of HVS that I played (both of them in the last 12 months or so) did not seem to have any ship delay.

The last time I played HVS before that, was just before TWGS came out. There was most definitely ship delay, directly linked to tpw. I was never a gameop and so cannot say that it was or was not configurable, but it seemed always the same anywhere I played, bearing in mind that my perception might have been colored by lag. It was very noticeable if you towed a ship.

Eleq wrote an article describing how a Colt could escape an ISS despite the big difference in tpw, which should have meant that the ISS could have easily outpaced the Colt. It involved the Colt hitting the ISS with multiple 1 fig attacks, the messages spammed the ISS flyer, allowing the Colt to escape:

http://www.thestardock.com/?cat=19

56K isn't slow enough to affect scripts at all. You would have to drop it down to about 0.01K to have any effect at all.

All the MMORPGs have delays built in. Movement delays, combat delays, etc... if they didn't you could be level 80 in 1 day.

Simulated lag is a completely separate setting from the delays imposed on specific actions. If you had ANSI animations turned on (which I don't recommend, of course... but if you did) you'd see a progress bar animation during ship movement delays, to let you know it's not just lag.

I think it would be nice if that was a seperate toggle.

Not to mention that none of them allow you to script movement or combat at all, at any speed.

As I've said many times, I love that TW allows scripting. I am a script writer myself. But I also hate what reactive scripting has done to the game. I want to develop an alternative to that style of play. And I think it will be popular, but it probably won't become popular overnight. It will take some time for casual players to feel safe again.

Name one other multiplayer game that runs as fast as the computer will allow it to run?

"Laggy" is just perception. Every game, every sport, movies, books, etc, everything has a pace to it, and that pace is a crucial part of it. You can't just throw it out. Is a movie better if you can watch it in 30 seconds than if you have to sit for 2 hours? It's just silly.

Nothing about delays should mean that you are forced to spend any more time playing the game than you would without delays. You're just limited in what you can accomplish. And what's wrong with that? Why should success in the game be based more on how much you can do than on what you do and how efficiently you do it?

Or single-player game, for that matter. Every modern game has timings built in. When they didn't, they had to build a whole generation of PC hardware with "turbo" switches that lowered the CPU clock to cope with popular games running unplayably fast. I wonder how many people in this thread remember those days. (Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!)

There will aways be people who are satisfied if they score high points, regardless of how they do so. 3rd party scripts running while they are asleep, or whatever, it is of no matter to them, just so they rack up the score.

It amuses me that they take satisfaction from using another person's script(s) to win AFK. Mulder would be disgusted if he saw what his TWX had done to Tradewars.

This is exactly why I disagree with JP's stance on making changes that break scripts (although I respect that he's sticking to that policy on the principle of keeping a promise.) If something breaks a script, you fix the script. Can't fix the script? Learn... or go play Nintendo.