I'm ready to offer a super early preview of Weapon M to anyone who's interested.

At this point, there's no reason why you would use it as your helper. It's just a terminal you can use to connect to TWGS, with a database that's empty except for the host and port info. You'd be doing me a favor by trying it. Better to iron out any bugs in the core network and database code before I start writing the data parser and script system.

It's an executable jar, around 2.5 MB. It requires Java 1.6 or newer, preferably 1.6 update 10 or newer for the kewl Nimbus look & feel.

I don't have a website yet, so PM me an email address where you can receive attachments and I'll send it BCCed to everyone tomorrow night.

Just out of curiosity Mongoose, what are you thinking of for the scripting language for this helper? Is it going to be a user friendly language like TWX, or are the users going to have to try to write in JAVA or JavaScript or something like that?

I found TWX to be fairly easy for the non-programmer to grasp the basics of, in my case anyway. And then that coupled with the help of the advanced scripters and programmers that are so helpful when you have a question or a problem, it makes an excellent scripting platform to work with.

Well... your choice of words says a lot about our differing viewpoints regarding scripting. I would say that TWX users have to write in that awful TWX scripting language instead of a powerful and user-friendly language like Java.

Needless to say, Weapon M's scripting language will be Java. It's a Java app, and scripts will be tightly integrated with it. But I will endeavor to make the scripting API much more straightforward and intuitive than SWATH's, and I'll also write comprehensive tutorials. I'm really excited about the idea of newbie programmers scripting in a real programming language, learning to code in a fun game environment instead of the boring "Hello World" and "public class SalariedEmployee extends Employee" crap they teach in school.

I agree... Just reading TWX script give me a headache, and I would never write anything in it.

No offense but I think Mongoose and Micro lack perspective. From a 25 year old game that TWX was written in Java's infancy it's not bad at all. Additionally the barrier to writing is much more steep in Java whereas TWX follows a more BASIC approach.

Yes there is more writing required to do the same thing and no it's not capable of some of the routines other languages are but it gets it done in a very simplistic method. Something even a dumbed down version of java would have a hard time accomplishing.

As someone who has written in Java, C/+/# and Assembly I much prefer the ease of TWX. No fighting with API's, with an easier to understand language more people have picked it up (relevant language support) whereas Swath has next to no player support and is now basically a dumb terminal.

Just my vantage

I've never had any trouble reaching Stein or Eje. Because my games have MBBS turned on but Mega Rob off, Stein gave me a switch that disables Mega rob with Swath. (Don't need to bust unnecessarily.)

Swath supports Java, ZOC, and TWX, what more can you ask for?

I am interested in trying Weapon M. I have exams the first week of May, then I'm going to need to blow-off some steam in a game.

I like my perspective better

Microbot uses the .net runtime compiler. Strictly speaking, it is not classified as script, but it works quite well and is very easy to use.

The helper I am writing, FirstMate, will expand on this and allow scripts to be written in C#, VB, or any other .net language. I doubt that it will be popular with the TWX, or Java croud, but it will be very powerful.

As Cruncher stated , Stein and a small group of testers are working with
the new version of Swath to bring some new features to Swath , one such thing is the toggle for mega rob on/off because of the TWGS change.

Swath is still being supported , but the Java is a bear for most users
and most find it slower then twx proxy as far as performance.

I find twx a much better language for tradewars mainly because it was
written with that in mind.

We welcome any new helper , whatever anyone can do to keep this game
running and any new feature/script/function is also a welcome thing.

After 25 years from when it was first made public and it is still around
, well that has to say a lot for tradewars as a whole ...

Lets see if we can squeeze another 10 years out of it

I dunno, man... TWX makes a barrier out of writing a simple 'for' loop. And it seems that whenever someone can't get a script working, it's because TWX modules exchange data via global variables, which produces brittle code and brain-damages potentially good programmers.

You missed my point, Swath is not supported by the player base. possibly something you should consider rallying to change? I was not calling into question Stein or EJ but instead was just commenting on Swath's relegation towards being a terminal program over a full fledged helper it was designed to be.

Based off the replies it appears that some people believe that I'm against new helpers? I'm not, I was simply trying to point out the otherside to a "debate". IMO TWX has a easier barrier to entry regardless if all constants are global or not.

@Mongoose: I guess I'm spoiled in that I don't see While/If loops as being complex in TWX compared to Java or any of the C variants. In fact they are very similar from the Boolean point of view IMO. I don't see a correlation between dumbed down languages and poor programming.

BASIC was top of the line one day in the past and now its considered simplistic and sloppy when compared to its successors however in the end the techniques used to program are essentially the same.

Mongoose, I wish you luck on this helper, I hope you can get the kind of speed out of it that TWX seems to have. I have noticed the difference when running a built in java script in SWATH, which I use for my helper. I use them in a pinch, but they just seem slow compared to TWX.

Now some of that may be due to more checks and safeties built into the java scripts in SWATH, I don't know. Not being a programmer I don't know if that's the reason, safeties and such, or if it is a constraint of the programming language. I have heard that JAVA is slower than other languages because it is interpreted not compiled.

I don't really have any experience with programming in another language, other than a bit of BASIC, and I wouldn't mind trying to get some code writing knowledge in a language that is used for other stuff. I have taken a look at java and javascript, even started into a tutorial on javascript once, and I've looked at some books and tutorials on java.

It's just one person's opinion here and I don't want to start a language war, but it just seems to me that the way the code examples I saw were written in JAVA were ugly and counter-intuitive to me.

var(){
do something
do something
}

That just seems a bit ugly and confusing to me. I don't know, maybe having done a little playing around with BASIC when I was younger ruined me to these other languages as far as being able to follow along and understand them. I don't doubt the books and tutorials and such when they say that object oriented programming is more powerful and modular and things like that.

I guess it's just that I got used to linear programming with BASIC (not that I know how to write much code in it) and so I have trouble adjusting to the kind of code layout that they have in JAVA and some other languages I have taken a look at. I just can't get used to the curly braces stuff and the funky way it seems you place them in some of these other languages. Or maybe it's just because of my problems after the Gulf War.

As I said earlier, if there was a helper out there as fast as TWX proxy that scripted in a standard language so you could be learning a widely used language while having fun writing scripts for Tradewars then I definitely wouldn't mind taking a look at it and trying to write some code in it.

I used to think I would like to be a programmer when I was younger and I was getting ready to enroll in a local college for it before I was recalled to active duty for Desert Storm, had the paperwork done up and was getting ready to apply, but with the cognitive and memory problems I have as a result of that war, there's not much chance of being a programmer happening.

Micro, is the FirstMate helper going to be fast? How does .NET compare speed wise to TWX?

Like I said, I don't have much hope of being any kind of a programmer but I like talking to programmers and learning more about how it works, I find it an interesting subject. Sorry about writing a book here folks, I know i get a little long winded at times and this subject interests me.

Hit it on the head IMO, I second that and look forward to seeing a finished revision of Weapon M.

Yes... $28 easier.

I'm not far enough along to make any speed comparisons, but speed is a top priority. The .net compiler fast though, and I can provide objects that should make interacting with the game simple. On the other hand, displaying colored text at the required speeds without using a console application is a bit of a challenge.

That's a big part of it. Another reason SWATH is slow is that it's a native application with a Java virtual machine embedded in it. Java scripts keep having to move data between the JVM and native code, which is very slow. SWATH also had some issues with its display speed, but those have mostly been fixed.



Early versions of Java were indeed very slow. Things started getting a lot better with version 1.3 and 1.4, but unfortunately its reputation for slowness was already established.

Native code will probably always be faster than Java, but Java is plenty fast for most purposes. On any kind of decent computer, I expect that the bottleneck for a TW helper will always prove to be the network. But I'm certainly making speed a priority. You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but I've been working on this app since September. Most of that time was spent writing a lexer generator based on the extremely fast dk.brics.automaton library, and a terminal component that uses pre-rendered character tiles so it's pushin' polygons instead of drawing and filling individual character outlines. It's wicked fast. It uses passive rendering so if your computer is slow it may not actually redraw the display more than a few times a second. But the redraw speed doesn't affect the write speed. I clocked the terminal component (writing directly, bypassing the ANSI emulation) at over 1.3 million characters per second on a crappy netbook.