deer_buster, thanks for the info on Eve maps. Those maps are more static, I believe, which makes it a little easier. Plus there's a matter of scale. TW maps need to be from a few hundred sectors up to 30K sectors. The sample I presented in the thread viewtopic.php?f=14&t=33267&p=237139 shows a real 30K map. I always imagined that nodes on a map like this are actually oriented in 3D, but the height of a galaxy is very small relative to its length and width, so a 2D projection is a sufficient approximation.

Thrawn, good to hear you'd like to explore these options. What I'd like to do is go ahead and get the next revision out without any of these options enabled, then activate them and send you a pre-release beta so you can try these out and give me feedback on any balance issues you find, etc. Then once we've had some playtesting, I'll include it in the public release. If you'd be willing to do that, I'd appreciate it.

The only change that will appear in the next release will be alien movement and attack delays (attack delays are already active, in fact, as of the last release). This is a pretty minor change and I don't think it needs a setting to toggle it. All it means is, for example, if an alien takes off from a port, it might take a second for it to jump out of the sector rather than being instantaneous like it has been. It'll just be more like a player's ship moves.

T0yman, I definitely had the thought that there needs to be a way to limit an alien race's activity in games, even if it's independent of player limits. Maybe you can assign a race a total of 5K turns per day where a player has 1K turns, making the race comparable to a 5 man corp in terms of turns to spend. I think a turn limit is better than a time limit, and it wouldn't be too difficult to implement. But I didn't do anything like that yet.

This may be of interest in planning your future mapper:

Well, since the TW map is generated on a 2D hex grid, this isn't an issue. Of course, jump nodes defy this rule, but that's necessary in order to keep the maximum course length and average course lengths at manageable distances.

I think the map algorithm I've created has good properties for TW games. But we won't really know until we open it up for some playtesting.

Maybe there is already a way to do this, but an option to make the major space lanes FedSpace owned, would, I think, be nice.

As would the ability to say Sectors 1 through x (or x sectors surrounding type 0 ports) are FedSpace owned.

You mentioned to me about Botlink, not sure if that is something already possible through that or not....I just haven't had time to read through the info on it yet.

As part of Botlink, I've added support for marking sectors as owned/controlled by factions such as the Feds, pirates, players, corps, etc. It will be useful for things like truce modes or defining victory conditions.

And where can we try botlink? Or is not testable yet?

If I recall, it is still being worked on and has not been made available yet. Mind you, I've been away for a while and attempting to get back up to speed.

Speaking of BotLink, John. I've been reading some of the posts behind the theory and design. I had a brief chance in the beginning to get some ideas. From what I read, it seems to have the ability to be used in replacement of our server-side scripts, which is great. One of the server scripts we have running is the ability to traverse our games (going from Game A to B, B to C, C to A, etc). Our script has a large job to do, keeping track of assets, player info, etc to keep synced between the games. Will botlink have this ability as well? If not, can it, or is that too heavy a load?

The place to try Botlink while it's still in development is the beta server at twgs.classictw.com. You can connect to port 2003 and use the password sandbox to gain access to a sandbox game, then use the <L> Botlink option to open a Botlink session. From there, type ? for commands and see what's available. It's a work in progress. I have a long list of minor bugs and an even longer wish list to work on as soon as I get the time.

Thrawn, Botlink is actually designed with the primary goal of allowing you and others who write server side scripts to do everything you're doing and more, and make it more stable and easier to do and easier to share with others. There shouldn't be anything you're already doing that won't be more efficient and easier to implement with Botlink. Of course, easier is relative, when you've already implemented it. But moving forward, I hope you'll be able to do more interesting things with it.

We've talked a bit about support for multi-map games. I could provide a command in Botlink that basically swaps a player from one game on TWGS to another, but the player won't see anything. I could appear to the player as if he/she just jumped from one sector to another. But the target sector would actually be in a completely different game. This would be used in conjunction with Botlink scripts to clone a game's data from a master game slot to one or more slave game slots, but with commands that allow you to read an entire record in one game, then write it in another game, that'll be pretty easy.

JP, these are all great ideas, and could definately benefit the new players to this game, much like single-player in other games allows players to experience the game before they jump into competetive play (like any other new game most of us have played).

I think you should definately implement these idea's, I know there are plenty of creative sysops out there that could make some nice edits that would be challenging for the player that just doesn't KNOW what key to hit when.

You need to create some sort of database where players names that are attached to your site are registered with every active public TW server out there, and those players can be voted upon by other members in a rating of expertise. You also need a rating set by the sysop as per the difficulty of the individual game.

This could create an atmosphere where sysop's could become a little more hands-off with the builder/newb games, and also has the effect of giving new players an easier environment to learn. Obviously this change would take ALOT of time for it to work the way it truly should, but with the changes you are talking about, this one seems to be completely in line with all of those idea's.

With this idea, I believe you will have a way to truly seperate new players from old. There has been more discussion over the years than I care to remember about this exact idea, I believe this time around you have all the tools in play to make it actually happen.

Now that is one of the better ideas I've read since coming back (next to the new changes/additions to the Aliens). Certainly would be a benefit to player and sysop.

I think what you're describing, tracking player ratings in order to separate new from veteran players in some games, would fit well with TW Passport. If you're not familiar with it, you see a TW Passport block when you come to this site, and if you're an active member on this site, you will have access to TW Passport games. When you connect to a TW Passport-enabled game, you'll need to validate your account through the forum when logging in to that game for the first time. So that's the first step toward tracking player accounts and what games they play. It allows us to track a player's reputation in games, which is a big step toward making players accountable for their actions (following gameop rules, etc). Once that's functional, we can discuss what, if anything, we could do to give gameops control over what skill level they want to allow in a game.

Is this TW Passport you are talking about something you are working on, or is it finished? Never heard of it before.

I opened it up for beta testing on twgs.classictw.com a few months ago, but I haven't had a chance to do another dev pass to fix bugs that were reported. Once I do that, I'll do another round of beta testing, then hopefully open it up to the public.

I too like the idea of better AI available for aliens. I've been teaching my son to play, and it would be nice for some intermediate PvP challenge before going against players in a live game, just as you've pointed out JP.