Sortof a sysop question, but more of a game question. Ive never seen this happen before.

My players are pissed because 2 corps in my game lost ships last night for no reason that ive been able to find out. Ive checked the logs 5 times. None were captured by players, none were captured by aliens, none were blown up. There no navhazard in the bases in question, so nothing had to have gone boom (looks like it happened after extern)

I guess my question is this, are there any game events that can cause a ship to be lost without notice besides parking in MSL's at extern? These bases are certainly not in MSLs, so im royally confused.

Probly something stupid that i dont know yet, but hey, might as well learn.

More info. People are telling me other weird stuff was happening last night as well. Someone even took this screenshot:



From what ive heard, they said (3 players, artanis who took that shot and another two) that when they went in that sector no matter what ship they were in, it bounced them right back out with no messeges, and put them in a pod. None of the 3 knew it was happening to anyone else, and just figured they were getting blown up, but nothing was in the sector except for weakly-armed assault traders (that art was evidently having a blast capturing in that screenshot).

Sector in TEDIT:

Sector : 8715
<Z> Nebulae : Ferrengi Space
<N> Beacon : None

Warps lead to: <A> 5256 <B> 7007 <C> 8914 <D> 9816 <E> 0 <F> 0

<G> Port : None
<H> Fighters : None
<I> Planets : None
<J> Mines : None


OK im confused.

I actually watched it this time with an observer account. I had 2 players come to that sector, nothing happened and they made it there fine. I spawned a pod for one of them to try capturing and towing and that worked fine. I logged off observer figuring it wasnt going to happen, and as soon as a ferrengi entered the sector, and my friend tried to tow, the same thing happened.

http://reblended.com/www/rfuilrez/wierd.png

I dunno. Looks like its my ferrengi. Ill disable them if i have to, but id rather not.

it might be a currput game file you might try a rebang and see if that clears the things up it prolly will and is unfortunate that it has to come to that but that will probably fix it.
Strider

Maybe the Ferrengi captued the low armed ships in the sector and as the player was beaming out of one ship, it captured the others including the ship the player was in. But since the player wasn't in a ship at the time, it didn't record the capture? Do Ferrengi capture ships?

It sounds like a ship capture/beam bug. Somehow the Ferrengi did something to the player account as they were beaming out of their ship.

No thats not it, Because it would move us OUT of the sector unexpectedly, and without notice, also the ships being captured are *NOT* in the logs. Also, Last night there was a forrengi in a Dreadnaught with 10 fighters. i tried to attack him with my interdicter on. It wouldnt allow me to attack him. Always moved me out of the sector he was in.

btw im one of the players on Enos' Server.

A definative answer should come from EIS if this is a bug or not.

However, whenever games have seen ships disappear for no reason the cause has usually been a corrupt game file. A rebang will fix this...

Judging by what was posted here, looks like game corruption.

My players would kill me if i rebanged the game. Its only been up a week or so. We play very laid-back, nobody annihilates everyone and dominates the game in a week like i imagine some people from here would.

Anyway i turned the stupid ferrengi off, and everything seems to be back to normality.

So what causes the game to just corrupt like that anyway?

Windows Technology, flawed by design. Enough said.

I hope the *nix version of Tradewars works better.

quote:Originally posted by Enos Shenk

My players would kill me if i rebanged the game. Its only been up a week or so. We play very laid-back, nobody annihilates everyone and dominates the game in a week like i imagine some people from here would.

Anyway i turned the stupid ferrengi off, and everything seems to be back to normality.

So what causes the game to just corrupt like that anyway?

The most often cause of game corruption is tedit use of an active game. The problem is that the current code is a nightmare, from what I understand. The basic code wasn't meant to be played multi-player.

I think mail.dat file in high turns and LONG TRUCES generate massive fig reports and shipmail.
This fills up very fast and slows down the server IMHO.

I posted a susgestion for a new TWGS feature, to allow sysops more control over the mail.dat file
without going into the directory and manually deleting this file.. or editing it.

Res Judicata