John,

Running our TWGS (Beta) and we noticed that there is no inactivity warning any longer. Daala was sitting at the Command prompt and was kicked out of the game. Game settings show inactivity set to our setting (which is 4 mins) so when the 4 mins hits, if she is still inactive then she is kicked out.

I'm assuming that this was meant to be this way now?

there should have been the usual set of warnings. If those warnings weren't being displayed, could be some kind of bug with the player state that kept that text from being displayed. I can have a look at that code, but without reproducing that, it might be hard to track.

I was thinking the same thing. I know that she timed the instance where she was idle, and it was 4 minutes and when she'd hit ENTER to redisplay the sector it would come up Connection lost. The 4 minute mark matches the inactivity time I have set in the game (14400 seconds). I thought perhaps she had something running that may have interfered with the Inactivity Warning being displayed. She would run a script to sell product to ports, and then once the script was done it would terminate and she would sit at the Command prompt. I will check my account as well to see if I can reproduce the same thing and try to grab screens and log info for you if it happens again.

However, we've already adjusted for this in our own unique fashion

Just wanting to clarify your info, you said 4 minutes, but also 14400 seconds, which is 4 hours. Either way, I don't think it changes the behavior you're seeing. Doesn't sound right.

Looking at the code, there are only a few ways that message would not show up. The easiest way to reproduce the behavior you describe is to turn off all messages on your personal settings menu. It may be that a script is setting messages off and those messages are then being hidden. There are other ways that messages can be hidden, like when non-interactive prompts are used (simulating MBBS) so that messages only appear when you're a command prompt and not a sub prompt. It could be a bug where the game thinks it's at a non-interactive prompt and so it queues up the message until you reach a commad prompt.

Don't know why I had 14400 on the brain. It was 240 sec in the settings which is 4 mins. Canadian moment...

Yes John. I've experienced the exact same thing, but not only with the newer version. There have been times that a players don't receive messages and it wasn't because of a toggle being off/on. We double checked the settings and everything was set correct, but the player just wasn't getting messages. I've never really come up with a definite fix for it, the messages finally just started appearing again. I think somehow as you are saying it's a problem with the interactive sub prompts.
It's very hard to reproduce this bug, and it seems to fix itself on it's own after several relogs/reboots.

i too have had this same issue...

I ran another check this morning. Seems that Daala had scripted her script to toggle off the messages and forgot to toggle back on. I also tried with just a telnet client and at first attempt no Inactivity Warning message. Then I checked and noticed my comms were toggled off. Second attempt produced the Inactivity Warning message for us, so all is good for now. But there are times where it does not come up at all and after the inactivity time is up, you're booted out. However, we wrote a work-around in the form of an inactivity script that did the trick for us and will run whether comms are on/off, or the interactive sub prompts are on/off. Daala sometimes runs a script then goes to do something and when she returns at least our solution keeps her in game.

I have heard about the lost messages issue for years, but yeah, it's been very hard to repro. I guess a key question would be whether the missing messages are just those event messages like "player enters sector", etc, or is it everything, including messages like "inactivity warning". Those are handled very differently, and if it's true that the inactivity warning and other similar "local" messages are showing up while interactive event messages are not, that would mean that the problem is with the player detecting these events in the first place, and not simply hiding the messages like it would for non-interactive sub-prompts or when you've toggled messages off. Knowing this would at least narrow the focus a bit.

My guess is that the problem is caused by the message event system going out of synch for a player. It's a complex system and could probably be updated to something more robust now that the game is only supported under TWGS and Win32. That system was designed to be compatible with Desqview and DOS 3!

Ok, I've been looking at the code on this. I think the most likely problem is with the general event notification system. This system covers everything that a player might need to know about, not just incoming messages. If another player, alien, or TEDIT changes a value on a player's record (fighter count, for example), the player would get an event saying something changed so he can update his data. If this becomes nonfunctional for some reason, the player would not be told when messages are waiting, and would therefore not process them. The way to determine if this is the problem would be to go into TEDIT and change a value on the player's record and see if that change is processed on the live player. If the value doesn't update, then that means the problem is with this event notification system. If the value does update, then that means that the player is getting a notification of the message, but the message is just not being displayed for whatever reason. So if someone manages to reproduce this bug, that's something to test.