After a game has banged, would it be beneficial to put any changes made to the game or any logging in to tedit in the game logs? The reason that I ask is for a specific reason, to give sysops and GameOps more freedom to play on the board they host? Any thoughts?

VGA Planets does something similar. When a game is created, the Host sends a message showing the configuration to all the players. If any change is made from the start, it updates that message. So players can see that changes were made when the header "<No changes made>" has changed to "<New Configuration Changes to the game>". You mean something like that?

Thank you! That is what I mean! Dont you think that would give more GameOps the ability to play on the servers they pay so much to host and maintain??

This has been considered, and it was decided that it would create more problems than it would solve. If you concede that there is ever a reason to use TEDIT, then it's really best that players not know about it. If they do, there will always be some who become suspicious. Sure, in cases where the gameop is really heavily editing the game, this will alert players. But also in cases where edits are necessary, it will unnecessarily alarm some players. Just consider a case where a bug results in a player losing some fighters. The gameop goes into the game and adds back some fighters into the player's sector. The log shows this. Players want to know why.

If settings are changed, that shows up in the settings page. Any other edits really should be the business of the gameop. Ultimately, you can either trust a gameop or you can't. If they want to cheat, they'll find a way to do it. Nobody has more power over a game than the gameop.

Ah thats a great point JP, I think you are right...

Good point. I'd hate to see our ScoreKeeper or other server-scripts we've developed trip the alarm over nothing...

I didn't arrive at that decision myself. That was straight from the TW guru himself, Gary ;) He is very wise about that kind of thing. I tend to step in it before I learn my lessons.

That said, sometimes you can be too cautious and miss out on some really good features. Back when we had this discussion, I was planning to add a special in-game scripting language to allow gameops to access and modify all game data directly from the game using commands like "get user.name" and "set user.credits = 10000". I actually had the basic functionality and it was just a matter of adding in all of the different records and fields to be exposed. But Gary decided that it would create too much suspicion among players about what sysops were doing. At the time I agreed, and I shelved the feature. But now I just think about how much gameops could have been doing with this over the years, writing server-side scripts to manage games like they do now with TEDIT, but I think it would have been even more powerful and flexible. TEDIT just doesn't provide as much access to game data as it could. But I'm working on it.

I know I have a lot of server side scripts that I use to enhance game play (i.e. remove figs from designated sectors, increase terra regen rate, ships cloaked while players are online, etc), I am sure the next time I bang one of my Evolution games, that thing would light up any TEDIT monitor like a Christmas Tree.

That being said, the language JP mentioned would be fun, I could cause all kinds of interesting game edits and features with that.

I could really use this log right about now, as I have been falsely accused of helping a player cheat. I don't think it should be part of the game log though. It should be a separate log, with a checksum to prove it hasn't been edited. It should also be possible to turn it off for games with server side scripts.