This is a weird one. Has anyone considered running what you might call a TWGS VPS? It would be a situation where anybody can host one or several games on a server run by someone else, paying a fee to do so. Each game op would have admin access to their games. I'm not sure if you can actually create/delete games from the telnet admin interface though. The so-called VPS operator could specify rules to be followed for all games hosted on that server no matter who admins them, and each admin could specify rules relevant to some or all of their games.
I really wish there were a Linux version of TWGS. I'd probably run a game server if I could stick it on my Linode VPS. But I have absolutely zero experience with Wine. I guess one thing I could do is to try to get some BBS software running under Dosemu or something, and run 1.03D or 2.0 as a door, although that'd only be single-user. I don't have reg codes for any version though, and the older versions aren't worth playing if they're not registered.

TWGS has a GuestOP capability, and I have open game slots. You can't import a TWA, but you can rebang and modify the games in your slots. I can load TWAs and you can do everything else. No fee for this, and you can make the games public or private. Just PM or email me and I'll set you up.

Yes I did this a few months back during the TWGS beta. Thru the Worldgroup BBS software. I created an account class for TWGSOP that would allow a twgsop to run, manage and big bang thier game. It was also a very secure method as the bbs software controls who can access the telnet sysop conection and not the router. Thus preventing unathourzied access to the gameop/sysop commands.

I even setup a custom user class for JP to test my TWGS v2 server and telnet out option for him to telnet out and connect back to the TWGS beta server for testing purposes.

Unfortunatly I had to remove the twgsop from the twgsop class and return them to a normal user.

I would recomend extreame caution to anyone granting gameop status to any user as they (in my near 20 years experience of being a sysop) generally have alter motives.

Why is that, and what were their ulterior motives?

Truely, please do tell.

Wine is rather unstable, when one program crashes within wine it can bring the entire wine server daemon down. This means that while you can run twgs under wine, given enough time the program will terminate abruptly and leave files open. This can kill twgs, I've seen a lot of wine-related data corruption.

TWGS works perfectly under vbox, tho. If you want a VPS, get a windows VPS. There's quite a few out there. I pay $27/mo for mine, 1gb ram, 1tb transfer. In TWGS 2.0, you can create game-specific game ops. So a person would have game op access to one game but not another.

That is not an isolated problem. There are some strange gameops around.

I know of a gameop who considers using photons to deprive players of turns to be cheating, even though banged games have photons enabled. Stock Missile Frigates are for sale at SD. I guess the op thinks a phot invasion of an unshielded planet with a stock MF would work.

That same gameop had an MBBS game running a month back (for all I know still does) but considers megarob to be cheating .

This is true. And while I did appreciate playing the old HVS MBBS TW, it helped me get reacquainted after a long absence and helped me to sort of memories of which game does what. When I learned of the type of game he wanted to offer, I told him the settings he wants are only available in TWGS. I helped persuade Stonethrower to download TWGS and give it a try. He was like a kid on Christmas morning for 2 weeks playing with TWGS before he decided to offer it on his bbs as well.

When he realized who I was, he made me twsop. I never asked for it but agreed to it because he thought publishing my involvement, and making my TWA available to download from his web site would help drive traffic to his server. As a gameop, I did not play the game I had remote gameop on. I never once attempted to breach any security on his server. I was a “model” twgsop!

I continued to play the HVS MBBS game with Kav. Before Kav and I got really into that game, we told Stonethrower we were to use Mega rob, and he agreed to allow it. The only other thing I can think of that Stonethrower didn’t care for was cross-podding between Kav & I to max alignment. We did it in the 90’s – alignment is a tool in the game, or some may think cross podding is a dirty, exploitive trick which was the case with Stonethrower. I can’t read the man’s mind. If the game allows it, players will do it. He also believed in no death delay, at the time Kav did not play weekends, I was left to play 1 to 2 with two of his regular players. The alignment was for my own defense, since I was blue and they played blue as well.

Anyhow, in summation; I was a model twgsop, Stonethrower “demoted” me because he did not agree with my playing style on his HVS MBBS game.

Don't feel bad Cruncher ... I played one of his super high turn games , he does not believe in moderate turn games and also loves death delay off.

I told him that was wrong and allowed for CBY cashing.
To prevent that , turn it back on.

He refused and asked me not to CBY cash .. so I followed that wish and made
a change to CBY cash script to a Nav Haz cashing script .. same effect but uses turns and zero's alignment and exp.

Then his next complaint was the login script I made keeps me logged in no matter how many times he disconnected me .. later I found he banned me.

It does not matter , his server was empty cept for seeing you on occasionally.

To summarize : If a sysop does not like something , put up a rule or set settings to enforce them. Its that simple.

Vid Kid/CareTaker

I personally love the "no death delay" option! But then again, now I'm used to games where if you die, it'sno big deal. One possible solution to this problem would be a three-way setting. Either you have death delay, you don't have it, or you get one free death per day. In other words, any player may #SD# once and get back in immediately. But if they #SD# again, that's it for the rest of the day. And yes, I've figured out some pretty cool strategies in a non-death-delay game for becoming evil or good quickly. You can be in an ISS, get out of it, get into a junk ship, CBY, become evil, become slightly good again, jetison a colt full of colonists, then do your evil thing. Then just get the guy at the Underground to murder ya, he offers that service free of charge if all your money's safe. Get back on, grab some money, upgrade some ports, go to Stardock, get back in with the feds, go back into your ISS. Sweet! Although I can certainly see why some people don't like it.

I hate to say it but it looks like this thread got hijacked. Back to the topic at hand.

I have a VPS. It seems to me if someone really wanted to, they could create multiple accounts and install a TWGS server in each account.

As the developer, I have no problem with anyone running multiple instances of the server for personal use, but only one instance for actual game use. So you can have your own instance for testing, devving your races, etc, but only one instance where games are being played. That's the official policy.

I have definitely attempted to add support for guest-ops on game servers. An op with password access to a particular game should be able to do almost anything to manage that game. I haven't figured out an easy way to allow import/export of TWAs yet, however. But yeah, I'm perfectly fine with a gameop providing other gameops with access to games on their servers. In fact, I think that's a great service to provide, because not everyone who wants to host a game has a server where they can host a game.

If there are any security issues related to per-game admin access, please report it. A player with access to a single game should not have enough access to disrupt any other games on that server.

Yeah, I've used the guest gameop ability on the beta server. Sadly, my game never got any players. I was playing, and was getting sort of tired of the whole thing, nobody to compete against, and I was racking up hundreds of millions of creds honestly! So I rebanged.
I don't quite know what TWAs are, but if they're basicly all the settings for a game bundled up into a file, one possible solution would be to allow the server to download TWAs from a user-specified URL, and for export, either Email them or upload them somewhere. That's a tricky one, I do admit.

Yeah, the reality is, if you want players, you need to bring in your own. There are far too many games available to expect players to line up to play your particular game, unless you actively promote a game, and even then you're better off bringing in friends than strangers. The gameops who do attract a large base of players work very hard to do that. Most gameops run small games for private groups, not public servers.

What if someone were to buy multiple licenses for TWGS? Would you allow it and would mtheir be a volume discount? Not saying I'm going to do it but I think a TWGS server 'farm' is a very unique idea....

Speaking of which, how does TWGS licensing work? I know about the $2 per game slot and $3 per node structure. But is there a license that lets you have the max of both game slots and nodes the server itself will allow? Any other license types? If I were to buy TWGS, would that entitle me to use older versions like 2.0 or 1.03D? If so, can codes still be generated for them? I'm just talking theoretical now, since I don't have ready access to a Windows server, I don't know if I'll ever actually do this.