Is there any way to restrict a gold alien's movement? Specifically, I want one unique ship to stay planted in its homeworld sector as a guard, while the other non-unique ships could move around. I also tried setting it up as two separate races so that I can make specific changes to the "guard" to prevent movement, but I'm still unable to find a way.

The closest thing I could find was the "<I> Movement chance" setting in the Alien Editor page 1. However, that won't prevent the alien from moving entirely. In fact, I set it to 255 and it still moved around quite often, so I'm not even sure that setting works. I also tried a setting of 200, and then 100 to see if anything reduced the movement, and the alien continued moving pretty often (seemed to be every 30 seconds). I restarted the server between each test and no change. Anyway, I don't think that's what I'm looking for since it still allows even a low chance (if it were working properly) of movement.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-Ohmz

Deleted because there was obviously some misunderstanding.

Lionmane's rude reply quoting me aside. There is currently no way to hold an alien in place in a sector. What i did for a game one time was to create an user account and place it in game as a trader. But not sure it would work for you as you want it to be in an alien sector.

sk

Yeah, I thought of that too, but then I have to make sure the account doesn't expire. Or is there a roundabout way of preventing an account from being auto-deleted? Something like setting their "last day on" to -32767 perhaps? I also don't like that it shows up in the player rankings, but it's not the worst thing ever.

I did find another way to do it, though not elegant either. I modified the sector it guards to only lead back out to sector 1, and made sure the alien race was set to avoid FedSpace. This is working so far, but it has the drawback of creating a new path back to sector 1. Regeneration also doesn't seem to be working in this scenario.

Is there a way to mark a sector of choice as FedSpace protected? That would be a better solution than changing the sector warps. Then I could just mark the sector directly outside of the alien sector and not mess up the pathing. I've fiddled around with a few things and haven't figured out a way to do that yet. I'm not opposed to using a hex editor to do it if needed.

Thanks for your input.

-Ohmz

I believe you are looking for the Neutral Zone settings.

H

Yeah there are no way to set a sector that way except with a server side script running. the old Ice9 use to run stuff like that b4 I took over. I have all the scripts but have not been able to make them work.

sk

Could you elaborate on that a little bit? I'm not aware of anything in TEDIT like that. Or are you talking about a concept rather than an actual setting in the editor? I did some digging on this forum using Neutral Zone as a search term, and I can see where others were doing something similar via FedSpace linking to block aliens into their own mini-verse. However, the design I'm after is a little different. I'm looking to keep 1 alien in 1 specific sector, without linking it's only warp out to sectors 1-10 or Stardock.

There doesn't seem to be anything in the editor that allows you to mark a sector as Fedspace owned. Changing the Nebulae name to "The Federation" like the real Fed sectors doesn't make any difference either. That leads me to believe it's one of two things:

1) There is a hidden flag that marks sectors 1-10 and SD as Fed. If so, and you knew the data file structure, you could hexedit a sector to switch it to Fed.

or

2) It is hard-coded to sectors 1-10 plus SD, no special toggle in the .dat file. In this event no manner of tinkering with data will get around it.

As you can see, I'm trying to figure out a way to not link it to well known sectors, so that it doesn't immediately give the sector position away. I'd like to keep this alien sector relatively hard to find.

Thanks,

-Ohmz

So with a server side script, the best I've come up with would be to have it sit in TEDIT and change that particular alien's location every couple seconds back to the sector I want it to guard. The would mostly work, but I'm concerned it could cause a tug-of-war with the nonpserv.exe process for that alien race. Maybe it wouldn't actually have any serious impact. It's definitely on my list of things to try. I have other scripted events I'm planning to run server side, so it wouldn't be a big deal to add one more. My other concern would be making sure the script was always running properly, else the alien will wind up out in open space. It would require making sure the script was properly restarted and connected to TEDIT anytime the server was rebooted, for example.

Speaking of server side scripts, if you'd ever like a hand dissecting those, I'd be happy to help. I'm not the best scripter out there, but I'm decent and with my systems engineering background, I also understand the server end well. I might be able to help bridge some gaps and get things working again. I also have spare servers I could run tests on so as not to impact the live games. It could be mutually beneficial - I might learn some new things and you might regain some lost functionality that made these games more unique.

-Ohmz

Just a follow-up for anyone curious. I spent some time dissecting the twsect.dat file (and others) and have come to the conclusion that Fed protected sectors must be hard-coded into the game. I took a backup of all the dat files, then changed the SD sector within TEDIT, compared the new dat files with the backups and identified all changes. There was nothing special set that identifies the sector as Fedspace, unfortunately. I'm about 99.9% confident in that statement at this point. Oh well, was worth a shot!

-Ohmz

He was being a smart-ass there are no such settings

sk

Well i have to admit i am not a scripter. I have friends write mine. lol

sk

Um... I have a question regarding gold aliens, but not related to movement:

How do gold aliens accumulate experience? There is a setting in Tedit under "3) Alien Race Editor" and then "3) Spawning Profile" for "(C) Experience" that allows you to set the rate at which they accumulate experience.

I would speculate that it's simply calculated based on the variables presented in the Spawning Profile. And maybe other actions would yield "bonus" experience: trading, fighting, etc?