I want the game age to start when a game is first activated, not when it is banged as it has in the past. Here's what I'd like to do.

When a game is banged, a "bang date" is set, but the game is flagged as "not yet started". If you look at the game age prior to the game running (either TW2002 or alien server starts, or TEDIT is used to set game age), it will say "Not Started". Once the game starts, the game age is initialized to zero. So if you bang a game and set it to activate in 4 days, it will initialize to day zero when the first player enters the game, or as soon as the game comes online if it has Gold aliens. One potential issue here is that if the game doesn't have Gold aliens, and it doesn't get its first player for several days, then the game age won't be initialized until that first player enters. So if the game goes unplayed for 3 days, then the game age will be initialized to zero 3 days after activation. Of course, if you want to guarantee that the game age starts on the day of activation, you can create your own sysop account on the first day or set game age in TEDIT. I can see where it might be useful to start the game age on the day of first activity as opposed to the date of activation or of bigbang.

Any game that was created prior to TW v3.17 will be flagged as "started", so this won't effect old games, even if they are imported into TWv3.17+. This will only effect games banged by TW v3.17+.

Are there any potential issues to this approach?

Well with Aliens , I have to activate the game once so the spawn the planet .. that way I run a Alien planet setter ..

Then I turn it to inactive .. and like to set a timer to start .. and at the activation .. under timer .. maybe a tick mark for option to zero date
if other then same day activation.

but I can see maybe someone want a game to start in 30 days and age ..
so they would not check the zero date tick.

I'm sure there are other ideas .. but this is how I was thinking it could go.

So what I'm proposing won't work for you.

Ok, what I could do is, when you click "activate" or "schedule", a dialog comes up asking if you want to reset the game age to 0. For clicking "activate", it would ask if you want to reset game age to 0 now, and when clicking "schedule", it'll ask if you want to reset the game age to 0 when it activates. I prefer this to a checkbox because there's just so much going on in that game settings area already. Testing this, it feels ok to me. Let's give it a try and see how it feels.

yes , that would work .. because after setting aliens planets ..
and shutting down game .. I can go into tedit and set date as needed , plus could let timer run and age game if wanted .. so I see your idea is do-able.

btw , the text reader works fine .. the spy window .. when re sized , seems to clip about 5 or 6 characters off on end of long lines compared to what is seen by
duplicate account using a telnet window with full stretch capabilities.

just a cosmetic thing , I don't use spy mode much , but noticed it,

So many nice things in TWGS now ..

And maybe soon we can get to something that will remove deleted parts from ship & planet file parts of twa or edits.

No rush .. your due for a break with all of the improvements you've done.
kudos man

I think what you're seeing in the spy window is different from what I've seen on my test machines. Can you email me a screen shot?

Thanks for the kind words :)