I'm not going to rehash in effort to not have this thread get to far off track. His intent which is clearly illustrated in his statement quoted above, as is his reasoning.

As to the other changes, some cosmetic some not; I don't honestly know why he implemented them and contrary to some belief I'm also not against change. To me fundamentally changing the way the game has been played since the dawn of TWGS seems counter-intuitive with attempting to offer new and exciting options while retaining your existing player-base.

I actually have been and will continue to be excited about some of the changes and bug-fixes. I advocate for the above concept so vigorously because it affects so many aspects of the game in what to me at least is a very negative way.

When I first returned I did play a HVS MBBS TW2002 game. No timing at all, just like v1. The only "timing" we had was the inherent latency. Today if you play HVS MBBS TW2002 I think it feels even faster than v1 truthfully, maybe because it was designed to run on a 486MB processor? Put it on a modern machine and it flies!

However, TWXProxy was written for TWGS and will not run on HVS MBBS TW2002. Swath still works, everything except turbo mode, there is no abort display in the computer menu.

And OMG.. talk about bugs! Too funny.

I believe I can confirm that this behavior happens with aliens as well in Version 2. In the games I played on this little backwater BBS back in the day you could make some money capping aliens, either the sysop set it up so that the aliens had a lot of money on them or the ships were worth some money, don't remember which.

Anyway, I remembered this and set up my local testing game with aliens in valuable ships. So I could work on a ship cap script, and also so I could take a break and cap aliens and make some money when I got bored. I'm pretty sure I have seen them leave the sector I was in with them while my ship's IG was running. Can't swear to it right now though, just did a game re-bang and I would have to go run some down and test it out to make sure.

I don't think it was his intent to break scripts, but he doesn't use scripts when he plays locally on his test box. He probably didn't realize that changing "Ttade Wars" to "TradeWars" would break everyone's logon scripts, or that fixing a value that's being displayed incorrectly would break scripts.

I started porting my 1992 dos helper to windows when the anniversary edition was about to be released, but I stopped when I saw how scripting has ruined the game. My requests for features that would intentionally make it harder to script were denied.

Micro, in interest of conversation and potentially to understand why people are so against scripts as a whole (outside the advantage of being unable to respond).

What were your suggestions that could/would shut down scripts?

*Code = /SideRant

If we could "throttle" scripts to oblivion would that drive player-base away who don't want to ppt by hand?

Wasn't that the purpose of the original macros and helpers?

I hope you won't take this as me defending or trying to otherwise provoke a argument, I'm genuinely curious if there is a method that could stop scripts and otherwise make the playing field even against those who would prefer to do it mostly by hand?



I sincerely believe a large majority of the players who visit this board and are vocal against the people who are upset about some of the mechanical timing changes are confusing timing (latency/ability to respond) with timing (mechanical/game/server). I'm not against finding a way to impose latency based timing restrictions (as a option) to allow sysops to even the player field, in fact many options existed prior to V2.

Twx will still run , you will just need to build a BBS login script to get into a game.
I have done this before and I think I still have it.
I cant use it because the SysOp was adamant about scripts that can kill him and his players , so he banned me after trying to kick me from server only to have my script pilot me through the BBS front end to get me into the game every time.
He did not like that either.

So I know it can be done. Twx does a great job if written well.

Vid

Cruncher, hate to admit it but you got me thinking the other day. So as I'm back for a short while in scripting capacity I fired up the server and really took a detailed look at V2 options. As a sysop yourself, have you or potentially Micro played around with the timing editor in regards to photon launch and Constant (250ms) ship movement?

I'm curious if sysops can emulate a slower version of V1 photon mechanics using those two settings.

I'm not exactly against scripting. No one wants to go out trading, stealing or colonizing by hand, but you have to draw the line somewhere. The real problem is that a new or returning player doesn't have a chance in hell of staying alive, much less winning.

There are a lot of things you could do to make scripting harder:

scrambling text with ANSI movement codes
random and animated prompts
disable command bursts
progressive delays

All of these could be circumvented though, so the only real solution would be a dedicated client with an anti-cheating package.

Not all of my games are "throttled-down", only the public classic games. In those I have photons and planets on 2s delay. Some very low turn games I have set to emulate a 56k modem. These are for the returning players who just want to relive the game how it was in the 90's. Some still play 100% manually, because they can and they enjoy it.

My Games P & T are without delays, except a constant ship delay of 250ms and latency of 150. To me, that "feels" very much like v1. Micro pushes it a bit faster, I think he runs latency at 75 and ships at 150ms. You need to be careful, events can run out of sequence. Too fast and we have data corruption.

Then I have some games just for my team to practice in that aren't in the main menu.

The irony of these two statements being in the same sentence amuses me.

Even that wouldn't help. There is absolutely no way to authenticate a client as being the "official" one. The closest you could ever come would be a proprietary client that encrypts all communication, installed on custom hardware with anti-tamper seals and a self-destruct mechanism. And somebody would eventually figure out how to circumvent the physical security and reverse-engineer the software.

I've never felt that scripting has ruined TradeWars. To me, scripting is the game. Viewed as a contest between programmers, TradeWars is a pretty unique game. I think this is precisely what sustains it. I'd love to see a sequel with clearly-defined order of events, timings, and other "rules" designed with the inevitability of scripting in mind.

It is a conundrum that I struggle with.

It is now, but not in the beginning. It still amazes me, even more so now that TWXProxy was created by a high school student.