TWGS v1.03 / TW v3.13 Wide Beta - September 3, 2004

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10300.EXE			3,267,741 bytes		www.eisonline.com

TWGS Changes:

None.

Change: Added a setting for total day's worth of turn accumulation.  Default is 1 day.  A number can be set to specify the number of day's worth of turns to accumulate, with the maximum number of turns remaining at less than or equal to 65520 turns.

Bug:  If the Citadel on a planet is ready to upgrade, it will show as the lower level in the sector, and won't actually upgrade until a player lands on the planet.
Fix:  The display in the sector and scans will now properly indicate the level of the Citadel for planets that are ready to upgrade but have not yet been landed on.
 

TWGS v1.02 / TW v3.12 Wide Beta - May 13, 2004

TWGS Changes:

None.

Bug:  Changes to a player's state that occur while the player is in CIM may be lost when the player exits CIM.
Fix:  Changes to the player's state are now retained after the player leaves CIM.

Bug:  Globals are not functional after a command has been issued in CIM.
Fix:  Globals will now be available at all times from the CIM menu.

Bug:  Output of the Fig Lock Decay setting to the settings text file includes color format codes.
Fix:  The format codes are no longer included in this output.

Change:  Tightened up transport procedure to decrease errors related to multiple players transporting to and from the same ship.

Change:  Tightened up ship exchange procedure to decrease errors related to multiple players exchanging at one time.

Bug:  The ownership of ships exchanged in the Citadel was not being properly updated after an exchange.
Fix:  The ship ownership is now properly swapped.
   
Cosmetic Change:  References to costs no longer use the $ sign, and instead use cr for credits.

Change:  Removed message index locking to determine if which remaining bugs are related to that change.

 

TWGS Revision 61 - April 13, 20

TWGS Changes:

None.

Bug:  There are still reports of index lock errors.
Fix:  Further changes have been made to the message index synchronizing method to resolve these locked index errors.
 

TWGS Revision 60 - April 4, 2004

TWGS Changes:

None.

None.  v3.11.59 was released with the wrong TW2002.EXE, without the locked file fix.  This release includes the correct version of the file.

TWGS Revision 59 - April 2, 2004

NOTE:  Revision 59 uses a new InstallShield.  If you experience any problems installing TWGS10159.EXE, please report it to me at jpritch@eisonline.com.  Thanks!

TWGS Changes:

None.

Bug:  In revision 57, a fix intended to resolve missed messages resulted in a bug that has caused file lock errors.
Fix:  Another attempt has been made to address the missed messages bug without causing locked file errors.

Bug:  When quiet prompts are used, queued messages are displayed even if the messages are silenced.
Fix:  Silence message mode now includes display of queued messages.

Bug:  The announcement file, when accessed the first time, generates an error.
Fix:  A test for zero file length is used to avoid accessing the file before it contains any text.

TWGS Revision 58 - February 23, 2004

TWGS Changes:

None.

Bug:  The option to allow interactive sub-prompts was not allowing messages to be displayed.
Fix:  Prompts now behave exactly as before when interactive sub-prompts are enabled.

Change:  The number of messages queued while at a non-interactive sub-prompt has been limited to 20.  In the future, this will become a user setting, allowing the player to determine the number of messages to store and display.

Change:  It is now possible to abort the display of queued messages using the space key.

Bug:  Planet #2 is assumed to be Ferrengal when Ferrengal doesn't exist.
Fix:  Planet #2 is only assumed to be Ferrengal if Internal Ferrengi has been set in Bigbang.

Bug:  Dropping carrier while being attacked by a Ferrengi causes the player to lose at most one fighter, while the Ferrengi may lose multiple fighters.
Fix:  Dropping carrier in this situation triggers an automatic Flee command.  The player may lose fighters just as if he had fled the Ferrengi normally.

Bug:  The state of a planet is not updated after a player succeeds in landing.  If the player takes long enough to land, the state of the planet may have changed, and the player will see the planet in its original state.  Fix:  The state of the planet is refreshed as soon as the player reaches the planet surface.

New:  Added an experimental global to help scripts and helpers verify the active prompt.  Using the extended character ascii 145, a script or helper can tell TW to redisplay the active prompt, followed by the same ascii character, #145.  The result of issueing a #145 will be two newlines, followed by the prompt, followed by ascii 145 and a backspace.  In some cases, there will be  additional dynamic information following the ascii 145, so it is not guaranteed that the 145 will be at the end of the prompt line.

IMPORTANT:  This is experimental.  Do not integrate this fully into your scripts or helper until it has been verified to be effective and locked in as a feature.

TWGS Revision 57 - February 17, 2004

TWGS Changes:

None.

Bug:  It is possible, through a towing bug, to launch a Photon into FedSpace.
Fix:  The Photon prompt is terminated when a player is towed.

Bug:  It is possible to upgrade a Citadel multiple times at the cost level of the first upgrade.
Fix:  The game now verifies the conditions for a Citadel upgrade before initiating it.

Bug:  While at the transport menu, if a player is podded and cannot flee, the transport range is not updated to that of the escape pod.
Fix:  The proper transport range is now used.

Bug:  Events that normally abort a prompt are not aborting Globals like CIM and FedComm.  This includes events like being evicted from a planet or ejected when the planet is destroyed.
Fix:  Globals will now abort when the player's state is significantly changed.

Bug:  The login time penalty change in revision 56 only covered certain logout conditions.
Fix:  The remaining logout conditions have been included.

Change:  The revision 56 change to globals has been expanded to create a new prompt behavior.  Prompts are now either interactive, or non-interactive.  Interactive prompts allow the player to receive and send messages, while non-interactive prompts do not.  In general, all command prompts are interactive, while all information-gathering prompts are not.  This is a TEDIT configuration, defaulting to non-interactive.

New:  Messages that are received while a player is at a non-interactive prompt are queued up and then scrolled onto the screen when the player returns to an interactive prompt.

Bug:  Changes to the system clock are not recognized by an active Trade Wars session.
Fix:  TW now responds to a Windows time change event and resynchs its clock.

Change:  Fighter Lock Decay has been changed to include an on/off toggle.  It is now possible to turn this feature off so that a Warp lock is lost the moment the remote fighter is destroyed.

Bug:  It is possible to TransWarp a planet using less than the required amount of fuel.
Fix:  The Planetary TransWarp function now double-checks the distance to the destination sector before engaging.

Bug:  When a negatively aligned player attacks a positively aligned player, and the attacking player's experience is less than the victim's experience, the experience penalty that should be applied to the defeated player is applied to the victorious player.
Fix:  This experience penalty is now properly applied to the defeated player.

Bug:  When oppositely aligned players do battle, and the victor's experience is less than the defeated player's experience, an experience penalty is applied to the defeated player, but no message is sent indicating that the penalty was applied.
Fix:  A message is now sent to the defeated player.
 

TWGS Revision 56 - February 5, 2004

TWGS Changes:

When a new game is added to the game list, an index error would appear.  It would not effect server functionality.  This index error has been resolved.

When attempting to run TWGS as a service with an OS that uses a non-english language, TWGS would not recognize the administration account.  It now uses a non-locale dependent method to detect an administration account.

TW game archives were intended for debugging purposes, so a gameop with a game problem could easily send data to EIS for testing.  It has been used to pass game settings around as well, but prior to .56, the registration information for a gameop was passed along with the global settings file.  This information is now masked off.

TW game archives now require that all local data files are archived, but still allow global data files to be included or excluded from an archive.
 

Bug:  Some ports were inaccessible in games with bubbles.
Fix:  The problem was created when tunnel sectors were scrambled during bigbang.  It has been resolved.

Bug:  The number of active ports reported in the startup menu game stats screen only allows 4 digits.
Fix:  The display now shows 5 digits.

Change:  Added global Delete Mail command, ':'.

NONPSERV Bug:  When multiple Gold races exist within a game, it is possible for two races to have overlapping homespace areas.
Fix:  Gold aliens test for existing homespace before claiming a sector for their homespace.

NONPSERV Change:  Gold aliens that control planets will now evict players from any planet they control.  A check for players is done each time an alien lands on a controlled planet.

Bug:  For timed games that run extern at midnight, extra time is being allocated to a player who is online at midnight.
Fix:  This has been fixed, and a change has been made to reset game time at midnight.  Game time will no longer carry over if a player is online at midnight.

Bug:  Fighters in a sector are sometimes truncated to 50,000 after an attack by a player or an alien.
Fix:  The fighters are no longer trunctated to 50,000, even if there is not a planet in the sector.

Bug:  If a player transfers 0 credits to another player, a message is generated.  This has been exploited as a means to spam other players.
Fix:  You now must transfer 1 or more credits before a message is generated.

Bug:  It is possible to scan for StarDock using the Nav menu.
Fix:  StarDock will not appear on the Nav menu until it has been visited.

Change:  Internal Ferrengi and Alien Traders must be activated or deactivated during Bigbang.  They can no longer be toggled from TEDIT.

Bug:  When a player is podded while attacking a planet, a pause allows the player to remain with the planet instead of being ejected back into space.
Fix:  The pause is no longer used whenever a player is repelled from the planet.

Bug:  It is possible to exchange ships with a player who is not in the Citadel.
Fix:  The game checks to verify that the player is still in the Citadel before completing the exchange.

Bug:  A number of bugs are related to the use of globals from game prompts.
Fix:  Globals are now limited to only command prompts.  Prompts like "how many fighters" will no longer allow globals.

    Prompts that currently allow globals:  Main Menu, Computer Menu, Corp
    Menu, Planet Menu, Citadel Menu, StarDock Menu, Tavern Menu, Autopilot,
    Retreat, and Planet Attack.

Bug:  A player who is online 24/7 can be booted after the inactive player delay.
Fix:  The player is now marked as having played on a given day even if the player has not logged off and back on.

Bug:  A ship record bug exists when a player is towing a ship and selling another ship.
Fix:  To avoid this and other similar bugs, any ships in tow are dropped on entry to the shipyard.

Bug:  A similar bug exists when a player attempts to sell a ship that is in tow by another player.
Fix:  Ships in tow are not listed on the "sell another ship" list.  Also, a test is done after a ship is selected for sale to verify that it is not in tow.

Bug:  In combat, when a ship flees, it is not fleeing over Corp-affiliated fighters.
Fix:  The flee procedure now checks for both player and corp affiliation with fighters.

Bug:  When a player is carried on a planet, the "Last Sector" is set to 1.
Fix:  This sector is now set to the location of the planet before the move.

Change:  Added a TEDIT setting to implement a minimum login time for time- limited games.  This time ranges from 1 minute to 20 minutes.

TWGS Revision 55 - February 14, 2002

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10155.EXE			4,497,488 bytes		www.eisonline.com

TWGS Changes:

None.

Change:  I've modified the settings in Bigbang related to Bubbles.  It is now possible to specify both a maximum and minimum number of links from a Bubble into the main area of the universe.  It is also possible to specify a minimum and maximum length of tunnel connecting a bubble with the main area of the universe.

Bug:  A player can use the Take All product command to clear the turn cost for taking product.
Fix:  The flag is no longer set to false at the start of any call to "Take All".

Bug:  When a player is pinged multiple times using the SDF script, eventually the loss of turn will be turned off allowing the player to move without the cost of an additional turn.
Fix:  Now, the only way to turn off this loss of turn flag is to actually use a turn.

Bug:  If a player flees to another sector after an attack, any ship in tow will still be in tow, or the ship itself will still be in tow.
Fix:  The tractor beam is released when the ship flees.

Bug:  The amount of credits being given when a Gold alien is destroyed is being kept at higher than about 100,000 credits rather than UNDER 100,000.
Fix:  The max has been replaced by a min.

Bug:  Several problems have been reported having to do with salvaging ships during an attack.
Fix:  A fix to an earlier bug seems to have broken salvaging.  I have reversed that change and attempted a new solution to the problem.

Bug:  When a ship is destroyed, the pod won't escape past its own fighters or mines.
Fix:  The pod is now able to escape past their own personal or corporation owned fighters and mines.

Bug:  A player's avoids can effect the path that an escape pod will take when fleeing.
Fix:  The avoids are no longer a factor in determining this path.

Bug:  For tournament mode games, if a player is podded through some action of his or her own (like a Quasar or Port, as opposed to another player destroying you), other than CBY, and that player is over the death limit for the tournament, he/she will be dropped out of the game and will have to log back in to recover.
Fix:  A player is no longer dropped from the game in these circumstances.  Only if the player has been actually destroyed, not podded, will the player drop.

TWGS Revision 54 - November 21, 2001

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10154.EXE			4,452,675 bytes		www.eisonline.com
						ftp.chaos-knights.com
						playtw.org
						www.planettw.com

I tried to limit changes to important bugs, and didn't add anything new in this revision.  I'm trying to get a very solid revision out before I start to add new features again.

TWGS Changes:

When a TW game is shut down by TWGS or by a dropped carrier, a handle was not being closed.  Over time, this can add up and create resource shortages on the machine running TWGS.  This handle is now properly closed.

When a socket is aborted because of an abnormal condition, the socket was not being properly closed.  This has been fixed.

Bug:  If a player transfers 0 credits to another player, a message is generated.  This has been exploited as a means to spam other players.
Fix:  You now must transfer 1 or more credits before a message is generated.

Bug:  It is possible to scan for StarDock using the Nav menu.
Fix:  StarDock will not appear on the Nav menu until it has been visited.

Bug:  Sometimes the message "Locator beam lost" will be displayed even when a player is not locked for TransWarp.
Fix:  If you attempt to lock onto a fig for TransWarp, then say "no" to the TransWarp, the locked state remains and you'll get a message if something happens to the fighter you were locked onto.

Bug:  If a ship without a pod destroys another ship with Corbomite devices so that the devices destroy the attacking ship, the ship with Corbomite will not be destroyed.
Fix:  Both ships will now be destroyed.

Bug:  If a player doesn't play the full time allotted in a time limited game, the time won't reset on the next day that the player connects.
Fix:  The player is given the full amount of time on the next day.

Change:  For unlimited turn games, the photon will disable a ship for one minute for each second of the Photon duration.  For a maximum Photon duration of 60 seconds, for example, the ship will remain inoperative for 1 hour.  The effect of the photon is to mimic the loss of turns, so that anything that would require a turn is not allowed during this time.  After the time has passed, the ship will be able to operate normally.  For a game without unlimited turns, the loss of turns exists until the end of the hour when turns are recovered.

Bug:  When launching an Ether Probe into an adjacent sector, the output will sometimes be undefined.  The probe will continue plotting any sectors that are stored in the path array after the end of the course that was plotted.
Fix:  The probe will now scan properly even for adjacent sectors.

Change:  I've modified the way offensive fighters (in sector or on a planet) will attack.  Before this change, fighters would limit their attack to 125% of the attacked ship's fighters and shields.  This causes problems when the ship is weak, or when it has no fighters or shields.  In particular, it is a problem when a ship has high defensive odds, and can therefore often move into and out of a sector without being destroyed, regardless of the number of figs stationed in that sector.  The new system will allow sector figs to attack with 125% of the maximum fighters and shields for the ship, not the current amount.

Change:  The high scores list from the Entry Menu will never have pauses, whether pauses have been enabled by the player or not.

Bug:  For a time limited game, any change to the local configuration file by TEDIT or EXTERN would result in the player's game time being reset to unlimited.
Fix:  The players game time will not be effected by changes in TEDIT.

Bug:  For a planetary scanner, only three digits of a planet number will be displayed.
Fix:  The maximum number of planets allowed for a standard game is 2000, and for a Gold game is 8000.  The field has been expanded to handle four digits.

Bug:  A ship in tow will remain in tow after a player has exited the game as long as the player doesn't completely exit Trade Wars (X from the Entry menu).
Fix:  The ship is now released when the player exits to the entry menu.

Bug:  If a player is towing a Corp ship, another player can sell that ship and the tow lock will remain active on that ship record number.  If another player buys are creates a ship, the tow will then be active on that new ship.
Fix:  The tow is released when the ship is sold regardless of who is selling it.

TWGS Revision 53 - October 14, 2001

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10153.EXE			4,449,325 bytes		www.eisonline.com

Only one change was made between rev 52 and 53.

TWv3 Changes:

Bug:  The FedSpace test was reversed for planet destruction to determine if NavHaz is created.  It is only allowed IN sector 1 and StarDock sector.  It should be the reverse.
Fix:  This has been reversed.

TWGS Revision 52 - October 13, 2001

Due to a major problem with rev 51, I had to bring rev 52 out ASAP.  I also took the opportunity to make a few changes to the FedSpace photon rule that was added in rev 51.

TWGS Changes:

Bug:  When running TWGS as a service, the console window appears for Command Center when running TW, TEDIT, EXTERN, etc.
Fix:  The console window is now hidden when TWGS runs as a service.

Bug:  A major system-wide bug was created in Rev 51 regarding the saving and restoring of primary game records (ships, planets, etc).  I had hoped that I could save and restore this around any player prompt so that any change in these records during interactive processing would not effect the state of the player.  But that's not possible and I've been forced to backtrack on this.
Fix:  Now the primary records are only saved and restored around CIM processing.

Change:  The FedSpace Photon limitation has been changed to effect only players who are protected in FedSpace, not all players.

Change:  Added TEDIT setting for Gold games to allow FedSpace Photon limitation to be turned off.
 

TWGS Revision 51 - October 11, 2001

I released rev 50 as soon as I could and then got busy on several TW bug reports that had been reported over the last month.  A few of these bug fixes should have a major impact on the stability of the game.

TWGS Changes:

When TWGS is run under NT as a service with the Task Tray icon enabled, there is now a "View TWGS" option to bring it up to the desktop.

When TWGS is run under NT as a service with the Task Tray icon displayed for non-admin logins, the "View TWGS" and "Close TWGS" options are not available.

Bug:  The current planet of a player can change during CIM processing.  CIM doesn't retain the current primary records for ships, planets, users, etc.  Since it is a global, it can be entered from anywhere meaning it is possible to change the primary record when it would otherwise be considered static.
Fix:  The primary records are saved before calling CIM, then restored after.

Bug:  Related to the previous bug, global shared data can become corrupted when a global command is issued or when a player's session responds to interactive events.
Fix:  I am in the process of removing several global data resources and replacing them with locally passed data.  I have completed the data resources for ports and planets.

Change:  Added a Gold-only setting to disable Death Delay.  With Death Delay disabled, players can reenter the game immediately after being podded, and they won't lose their turns.

Change:  Added a Gold-only setting to disable the # (Who's Online" display). When disabled, only the player, the player's Corp Mates, and Alien Races will appear on the list.

Bug:  When a player is attacked, the player will not flee to an adjacent sector when figs owned by that player's Corporation are located there.  Also, if the player is destroyed, that player's pod will not escape.
Fix:  Players are now allowed to flee to sectors occupied by figs from their own Corp.

TEDIT Change:  When starting TEDIT from the TWGS console, a gameop can change the TEDIT global or local password without entering the existing password.  This will allow a gameop to recover from a lost password.

Bug:  Fighters on a planet are sometimes not dampened by a Photon, EVEN when the planet does not have shields to protect them.  Also, shields would not always protect the planetary fighters from the Photon effect.
Fix:  The fighters were only held if the sector itself had fighters that were Photoned.  If the sector had no fighters, the planetary fighters would go ahead and attack.  This has been changed to check for the planet Photon effect rather than the sector Figs photon effect.

Bug:  Holds are defined to allow up to a maximum hold capacity of 255 to be defined for Gold ships.  But the Hold purchase routines set a cap on Holds at 250.
Fix:  This cap has been changed to 255.

Bug:  The time and date are mishandled when a TW session is active over the change of a month.
Fix:  The day is now set to 1 when the month changes.  This should fix the problem.

Gold Change:  Added a setting to Gold behaviors to determine if Gold aliens will ignore other Gold and internal aliens.  If a Gold race is set to ignore other aliens, these behaviors are changed:

    An Interdictor won't trigger to hold another alien.
    Mines won't explode when another alien enters the sector.
    Fighters won't attack when another alien enters the sector.
    Quasars won't fire on aliens
    Won't capture another alien's planets.

Change:  An upper bound of between 90,000 and 110,000 credits has been placed on the number of credits that can be gained during an attack on a Gold alien.

Change:  Gold aliens are less liky to trade for profit when they are weak, making the amount of credits possessed by an alien correlate to the strength of the alien.

Change:  Players are no longer allowed to fire Photons from FedSpace.

Bug:  Whenever more than one Planetary Interdictor Generator is located in a sector and one player attacks another player so that the other player will attempt to flee, the attacking player's game session will crash.
Fix:  Once I isolated the cause of this bug, it was clear that it was not strictly a PIG bug.  It was a low-level TW data system bug that has the potential to effect any number of areas of the game.  Fixing this bug could potentially solve other bugs that result in game crashes and data corruption.

TWGS Revision 50 - October 9, 2001

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10150.EXE			4,450,690 bytes		www.eisonline.com

Not many changes in this revision.  It took awhile because I was having problems running TWGS as a service under 2K.

TWGS Changes:

Added Service functionality.  TWGS will now run from startup under NT/2K or Win9x.  See the Settings page for additional settings related to this functionality.  NOTE:  TWGS seems to be unstable when run from the task tray as a service in NT/2K.  If you experience problems, disable the task tray icon and run TWGS silent.  The instability seems to have something to do with GDI handles retained through logoff and logon.  I am continuing to study the problem.

Improved timing functions to perform more efficiently.

Several changes were made to improve TWGS stability with multiprocessor systems.

Bug:  When starting a new time limited game under revision 49, players are unable to create a new character.  This is caused by an uninitialized user record resulting in the user to timeout at this prompt.
Fix:  The timeout test is not initiated until the new user has been properly initialized.

Bug:  Gold aliens are not displayed in the Who's Playing list.
Fix:  Probably in revision 49, a bug was created that caused the Gold aliens to stop reporting themselves as Online.  It is unclear how many things this might have effected besides the Who's Online list.

Bug:  Frequent purchases of ships can lead to a profit in some cases.  This is caused by an overlap of the current selling price of fighters and the constant buy-back price.  The current method depreciates fighter costs from a base cost of 180c.
Fix:  I have changed the buy-back policy for fighters to be at a percentage of the lowest possible selling price, 160c.

TWGS Revision 49 - August 31, 2001

Revision 48 had a major problem with the Yes/No prompts, so I've replaced it with revision 49.  I'm just adding the two TW revisions to the bottom of the list.

TWGS Changes:

Fixed a cosmetic bug in the server stats screen.  When displaying a list of IP addresses that include the number 0, the list would display incorrectly.

Changes for revision 48:

Bug:  When a player transports into a ship that is in tow, the tow lock is supposed to be broken.  If the player is in a different sector, the lock is not being properly broken.
Fix:  This bug was introduced in revision 43.  Many messages are only processed by ships that are in the same sector, but the message to drop tow is not one of those messages.  It was inadvertently added to the list of such messages in revision 43, along with a few other messages.  This has been fixed.

Bug:  The fix to the Corp Assets display in revision 47 created a bug with the display of Corp Assets without ANSI and without Pauses.  The formatting of the display is incorrect under that specific condition.  This is actually a general display bug that has appeared for the first time with the changes to this display.
Fix:  Formatted displays now work properly even if ANSI and prompts are disabled.

Bug:  A fix in a recent revision that was intended to protect players from attack before they enter the sector when starting a new game had the side-effect of allowing players to log in under the same account.  Any players who knew about this and didn't report it, shame on you!
Fix:  Players are now both protected against attack during login AND prevented from login in more than once under the same account.

Bug:  A problem exists with landing on a planet while a ship is in tow.  The problem is caused by the pause delay.
Fix:  I have removed the pause delay.  The "ship is no longer in tow" message is displayed, but no pause is issued.

Bug:  A general TransWarp bug exists that is caused by the pause after locking onto a destination sector and the time of the actual TransWarp.
Fix:  A new setting has been added to address this problem.  The setting is Fighter Lock Decay.  The decay time is set in minutes and can range from 0 to 1440 (24 hours), defaulting to 1440.  This decay time is used to determine a probability of success in warping into a sector where a fighter is no longer transmitting a locator beam.  For the default of 24 hours, there is a 100% probability of success at 0 seconds and a 0% probability of success at 86400 seconds.  There is always a grace period of one minute regardless of this setting, so any attempt to warp within one minute of the lock will ALWAYS succeed regardless of this setting.  Therefore, a setting of 0 means that warps will succeed up to 1 minute but fail for every attempt over 1 minute.  This minute is not subtracted from the decay time, so after the first minute, warp probability is determined based on the full time since lock, not the time since the grace period expired.

Change:  Some strange problems have been reported about alien interactions with other planets.  In order to guarantee that the alien homeworld has not been disabled, I have limited access to Alien homeworld planet flags in the planet editor.

Bug:  Aliens are only supposed to remove product from non-Homeworld planets found in their sector, but they have been leaving product.  This is caused by a formula that determines how much they can carry that can return a negative number.  In that case, the alien actually leaves product rather than taking it.
Fix:  Aliens cannot leave negative product amounts, and will not leave product on an unprotected planet.

Bug:  Aliens do not touch non-Homeworld planets in the same sector as their homeworld.
Fix:  Aliens will now process their homeworld first, then process any other planets in the sector.

Change:  I have added an alien behavior that will effect their interaction with non-Homeworld planets in their homespace.  If the homeworld is in need of product for either defense or Citadel advancement, an alien will fill its holds and transport that product from a nearby planet to the homeworld.

Change:  NavHaz in alien homespace continues to be a problem.  Now, when an alien detects NavHaz in a homespace sector, it will report this to the proper authorities and have it cleared away immediately.

Bug:  Aliens can drop more than the maximum number of fighters into a sector.
Fix:  The fighter drop routine now correctly tests for boundaries.

Change:  The game will no longer place a new player planet into a sector that is occupied by a player, planet, fighters, or mines.

TEDIT Change:  I added the ability to place Gold alien fighters and Armid mines into a sector.

Bug:  It is possible to trick the transporter and transport an evil player into an ISS.
Fix:  This is no longer possible.

Bug:  Costs for very expensive ships (over 100,000,000 credits) are not displayed correctly in the ShipYard ship display.
Fix:  I have added one digit to the display width for this field.

Bug:  When a player is at the Move prompt and is forced into another sector either by fleeing or by being towed, they will immediately return to the original sector.
Fix:  On exit of the Move prompt, a test is made and no action is taken if the move prompt was aborted.

Change:  If a player is at the Photon prompt and is forced to move to another  sector, the player will drop out of the photon prompt.

Change:  If a player is at the Mine Disruptor prompt and is forced to move to another sector, the player will drop out of the Mine Disruptor.

Change:  If a player is at the Ship Transport prompt and is forced to move to another sector, the player will drop out of the Ship Transport prompt.

Change:  If a player is at the Planetary Transport prompt and is forced to move to another sector, the player will drop out of the Planetary Transport prompt.

Change:  TEDIT:  The General Editor Three setting "Secure Local Access" is now a global rather than a local setting, and it defaults to NO.  If you intend to limit access to the editor from the TWGS Console, you should reset this setting after installing revision 48.

Change:  Added Ship Count to raw settings output of startup menu (*).

Bug:  The global message file is sometimes being purged during high activity.
Fix:  If an error occurs when the file is read, it is reset.  This has been limited to only a few types of errors.  In particular, the share timeout error that has been causing this to reset will no longer trigger it.

Change:  In order to limit name spoofing, I've added some additional checks on player aliases.  Names cannot contain these text fragments:
 

EPLOYED FI
EPORT SECT
INE IN
INES IN
NACTIVITY

Also, for any name with "F ", "R ", or "P ", the six characters to the right of the space are tested against the first six letters of all existing player names.  They are also tested against the first six letters of all existing ship names.

Also, no name with "F ", "R ", or "P " plus "GALILE" is allowed.

Also, when a ship is named, a check is done for any names containing "F ", "R " or "P " plus the first six letters of the ship name.  If any exist, the name is not allowed.

Bug:  Several problems have been reported with game time limits.
 

A player who has been destroyed is not recovering game time the next day he/she is allowed into the game.
Fix:  The time online for the player is now reset for a player who is starting with a new ship.

Players who are online during the transition from one day to the next are not recovering their game time.
Fix:  The time online is now reset at the moment of midnight.

Game time is consumed from the moment of startup.
Fix:  Players are now allowed to remain at the startup menu indefinitely.  Time at this menu is not detracted from a players game time.  Only after the player has entered a password does the countdown begin.  The countdown ends after the player exits to the intro menu.

Bug:  The turn that is deducted on lift-off when a player has taken product from the planet not deducted when the player exits the planet by way of the Citadel.
Fix:  The turn is now deducted when the player enters the Citadel.

NONPSERV Change: Gold aliens will now spend 25% of their treasury per day to fortify their homeworld sectors.  I know this is fudging a bit, but I needed to increase the defensive capabilities of Gold aliens while giving them something more to do with the credits they accumulate.

Change:  I've added the ability to override Gold name and rank files by placing them into the Gold subdirectory of a game's data directory.  If the file is not located in the local Gold subdirectory, the game searches for the global version of the file in the global Gold subdirectory.

Change:  I've extended the ability to override ANSI files to include all files located in the ANSI directory.

Changes for revision 49:

Bug:  I accidentally removed the "Yes"/"No" echo after a yes/no prompt in rev 48.
Fix:  It's working again.

Change:  I made further changes to the Fighter Lock Decay feature.  This is how it now works.  The settings still specify a value from 0 minutes to 1440 minutes (24 hours) as the maximum duration that a TransWarp lock can hold after the locator beam is gone.  But now the countdown for lock decay begins at the moment the fighter is removed from the sector, not the moment the TWarp lock was established.  Also, you will receive a message indicating that the locator beam has disappeared and that the lock has begun to decay.  Then, when the lock is finally lost, you will receive a message indicating this and TransWarp will shut down.  The decay is generally linear over the Fighter Lock Decay period, with some fluctuation.  I leave it up to players to figure out this system and learn the average and minimum decay times for a given setting.  But in a nutshell, the lock WILL be lost before the end of the decay period, it will PROBABLY be lost at some average earlier time, and it MAY be lost quite early due to fluctuations.
 

TWGS Revision 47 - July 11, 2001

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10147.EXE			4,313,542 bytes		www.eisonline.com
						www.twlinks.com

This is a major revision with an enormous number of bug fixes and new features for TW.  Some extremely critical bugs have been fixed, along with quite a few less important ones.

TWGS Changes:

Fixed a bug with the spy window.  It wasn't displaying output unless it was in the foreground.

Fixed a bug with ship record boundaries that could potentially effect several areas of the game.  The most obvious effect of this bug was when a player podded and then wasn't able to purchase maximum holds, figs, or shields from a class 0 port without first leaving the game and restarting.  I've fixed this bug several times, but new changes keep bringing it back :(  This latest change is a low-level fix of a bug that could be causing many other problems.

Fixed a bug that caused the Player Retreated message to be displayed in the sector where the player retreated rather than the sector the player retreated from.

Added a "Surrendered ship" message to the external and in-game logs.

I fixed a bug with the sector fighter offensive attack.  In the past, if a player entered a sector with zero fighters or shields, the sector fighters would not attack.  Now, the sector will attack with one fighter.

Changed the startup menu game listing to list by value rather than by rank.

Fixed a cosmetic bug that caused the letters to be omitted on the ship list display when ANSI was disabled.

Fixed a bug with eProbes.  Currently, if you attempt to send an eProbe and do not have a path, the probe will launch and self-destruct immediately.  With the fix, you will be asked if you'd like to clear avoids just like a standard move.  The eProbe will abort launch, and you will have to relaunch after you clear the avoids.

Added a Personal Setting for tactical display pauses.  Currently, several screens have a pause that conflicts with older helpers.  I have made all of these pauses configurable under one Screen Pause setting in the Personal Settings menu.  This defaults to off, so those who rely on those pauses will need to turn them back on.  I am willing to consider adding optional pauses to other screens that do not currently have them.

Added a global to turn pauses off and on at any prompt.  The new global is "&".  You can list all globals using the * global command.

Fixed a bug with Corporate planet display.  When the length of a display line is longer than the screen width, it would cause the pause to lock up the game.  This same problem could have been effecting other displays with pauses.  It has been fixed at a low level so that it will not occur at any pause, even if the line length is too long.

Fixed an attack bug.  When an evil player attacks a good player, and the evil player has a lower experience than the good player, the experience penalty that should have been applied to the destroyed good player was actually being applied to the attacking evil player.  This has been reversed.

TEDIT:  Changed Nebula and Beacon edits so they will accept an empty string.  When an empty string is specified, the Nebula and Beacon are not identified in the game.

NONPSERV:  Fixed a bug with alien planet captures.  If an alien race has lost their homeworld and they capture an enemy planet in their space, it will cause them to stop trying to recapture their own homeworld.  This bug has been fixed.

Fixed a bug with ship towing.  When a player destroys a ship in tow, the ship record remains in tow so that the next ship created with that ship ID will still be in tow.  This bug included both manned and unmanned ships in tow.

I've changed the way Corp hacks are recorded.  Awhile back, I changed this so that an attempt to hack a corp would only be reported once per day.  The new behavior works like this.  Hacker attempts are only reported once every 10 minutes.  This means that a corporation will receive a maximum of 144 hacker messages per day total.  But if a hacker attempts to hack a Corp for more than 10 minutes, a Corp will receive another message indicating that the player is still trying to gain access to their records.  This should help to differentiate between the accidental hack message and a true hacker.

Fixed a bug with player initialization.  When a new player is initialized but is unable to get a ship (because the ship records are all used), a bug caused the player record to persist even though the player was not created.  I have fixed this so that the user record is thrown out if no ship is available.

Added code to synchronize data processing for the Transport routines.  This was done to try to avoid cases where the ship number can go out of sync.

Improved handling of external changes to planet number.  The user record holds the number of the planet or port that a player is on, and a flag is used to indicate that the player is on a planet or port.  Previously, if the user record was changed by another player or EXTERN (an external change), the user's session would detect it and respond.  If the planet number was set to 0, the player would be removed from the planet.  I have changed this so that the OnPlanet flag is also checked to verify that the player is actually supposed to be removed from the planet (this can happen in some cases).  If the flag is consistent with the planet number, the player is bumped from the planet.  Otherwise, the planet number is corrected.  If I am correct that this is what is causing players to appear in SD sector while on SD, this will fix it.

Bug:  An online player that has been punted from a corporation will still appear to be on that corporation until the player exits and reenters.
Fix:  The player is now notified that he/she has been punted.

Change:  A message is sent to a player or corporation whenever another
player, corporation, or alien race claims one of their planets.

Change:  When a cloaked player is towed from one sector to another, the message that will be received by players in the source and destination sectors will be limited in information.  Instead of stating which player was towed, the message will simply state that a cloaked ship was towed.  It seems reasonable that a player would notice a ship with its tractor beam on, but since the ship is cloaked, the player won't know who has been towed.

Bug:  When a planet is destroyed out from under a player, but the player is unable to escape to another sector, the player will remain on the planet which is now inactive and undefined.
Fix:  A player will now be placed in the sector even if the player is unable to move to a different sector.

Change:  I've added a turn penalty for fleeing.  This penalty is only applied when a player attempts to land or port after fleeing.  If the player uses a turn doing anything else before landing or porting, the penalty will not be applied.  This change is intended to increase the turn cost of SDF from 2 turns/cycle to 3 turns/cycle on average by penalizing a turn roughly 50% of the time.

Change:  I've added a new Personal Settings and Global to toggle Online Auto Flee.  By disabling Online Auto Flee, a player will not automatically flee to an adjacent sector when attacked by a stronger opponent.  When this is enabled, the player will flee as usual.  When offline, the player will always flee as usual.  The global key is "\".

Change:  All unmanned ships will be repossessed in FedSpace during EXTERN unless they are locked in tow.

Bug:  Ship and planet names can be blank (one or more spaces only).
Fix:  This is no longer allowed.

Change:  I've changed the way TW polls for events.  The Polling Interval, which defaults to 1 second, was being used as the maximum time it would take for TW to detect an event (message, changed data, etc).  I've modified this so that TW detects these events at 1/4th the rate of the polling interval.  This means that, by default, TW will detect events every 1/4th second. I have also changed Poll Interval so that the maximum Poll Interval is 4, which equates to one second between event notifications, the default and fastest rate before revision 47.

NONPSERV Bug:  Gold alien planets stop gathering colonists after they have enough product to reach next Citadel level.  In many cases, the homeworld reaches its requirements for product before it has the necessary number of colonists, and this bug causes the homeworld to be unable to advance its Citadel level.
Fix:  Aliens will continue to drop Colonists on the homeworld until the
requirement for advancement has been met.

NONPSERV Bug:  Gold aliens do not clear NavHaz from their sectors.  When NavHaz gets high, newly spawned aliens will simply explode on entry.
Fix:  NavHaz is cleared in a race's homespace every 24 hours.

NONPSERV Change:  Several modifications have been made to improve the ability of an alien race to advance its Citadel.  Along with the above Citadel advancement bug, this should enable aliens to better fortify their homeworlds.

Bug:  When a player is starting or restarting and looking for an inactive ship to use, the user record is locked while looking for an open ship.  The process of searching for an open ship was running too slow under the stressful scripted ship purchases, and this was causing other users to timeout and drop from the game while trying to access this user.
Fix:  The inactive ship search only makes one pass through the ship database now and will always complete quickly.

Bug:  Players in ships with numbers greater than 255 were getting Out of Sync errors whenever they were attacked.
Fix:  A byte variable was used to temporarily store the ship number when deactivating the ship, causing the ship number from be "modded" by 256.  When the game attempted to write, for example, ship #265 to ship #9 (265 mod 256), it generated the OOS error.

Bug:  When a player transports from a planet and fuses, the pod is being placed into sector 1.
Fix:  The pod will now be placed in the sector of the planet.

EXTERN Bug:  Alien homeworlds are not supposed to be destroyable, but they can be destroyed by planet collisions.
Fix:  Alien homeworlds are excluded from the max planets per sector calculation and will not collide with other planets.

Bug:  Density scan isn't working when a player has zero turns.
Fix:  Density scan will always work regardless of turns left.

Bug:  Alien homeworlds can be trapped in the Major Space Lanes.
Fix:  When aliens recapture a homeworld, they will always be allowed to
warp the planet back to their homespace if it is located in an MSL, regardless of the level of the Citadel or the amount of Ore on the planet.

Bug:  Events that booted players from a planet were moving the players into the sector, but not properly updating their "on planet" flag.
Fix:  Players are now properly flagged as off of the planet when they're evicted or the planet is destroyed under them.

Bug:  When a player reconnects and boots another connection offline, the new connection was retaining some of the status of the old connection.  For example, if the original player was on a planet, the new player would start on a planet.
Fix:  The session of the booted player is completely shut down before the new session starts so there won't be any carried-over data.

Bug:  When firing Photons, a player can begin the command but not complete it until he has been moved to another sector.  The player is then able to fire the photon to a distant sector after a long pause.
Fix:  The photon rechecks the sector before actually firing.  If the sector is no longer adjacent, the game reports the new adjacent sectors and requests a new sector.

Change:  Added TW command processing.  TW can be run from the command
line using COMMAND=.  Currently, the only commands handled are COMMAND=RANKS and COMMAND=STATS.  Typing TW2002 DATA=C:\TWGS\GAME\TW1 COMMAND=RANKS will cause TW to generate the two player ranking files and the corporation ranking file and then exit immediately.  COMMAND=STATS will generate a list of settings and dynamic values identical to the startup menu * display. All reports generated in this way will be stored into the standard subdirectory OUTPUT off of the game directory.

TWGS Revision 46 - May 24, 2001

TWGS Changes:

Fixed a problem with entering TW registrations into TWGS.

Reverted the winsock handling to pre-.45 because I started receiving more reports of problems after that revision.

GOLD:  To simplify creation of Alien Deployment ships, I have changed the behavior of the editors slightly.  Now, when you specify that a ship is to be deployed by an alien race, that race is automatically set up for Alien Deployment.  In the Alien editor, you can see if Alien deployment is enabled, but cannot change it there.  You must remove Alien deployment from all ships before Alien Deployment will be disabled for the race.

GOLD:  In previous versions, when a Gold alien is unable to find a ship to use, either because none are available to it, or because it doesn't have enough experience to fly any of the ships that are available to it, an error is reported and the alien is not created.  The new system will a) give the alien the least powerful ship if it doesn't have enough experience for any of the ships, or b) give the alien an Merchant Cruiser if there are no ships available.

GOLD:  In order to simplify the process of designating a time at which an Alien Race will begin to use a ship based on the level of the four ship categories (Combat, Cargo, Transport, Scout), I have changed the behavior so that the day specified in the Gold Alien editor is the day at which there will be a 25% chance that any alien spawned will be able to fly a ship of that category level.  The previous behavior allowed only a very small percentage of aliens to have access to a ship on that day.

The problem with message silence that was supposed to be fixed for .45 was not actually fixed.  I have revisited this problem, and it appears to be fixed for revision 46.  The problem seemed to appear after using CIM or playing TriCron at the Tavern.

Fixed a bug with planetary ship transport.  When a ship transported blind and was destroyed, the escape pod was being placed into the destination sector.  The NavHaz was being placed into the sector with the original planet.  This has been changed to match the normal blind warp results. The pod is sent to sector 1, and NavHaz is placed into the destination sector where fusion occurred.  Also, any ships in that sector will receive a message that a ship was destroyed.

Fixed a bug that allowed "player enters Citadel" and "player exits Citadel" messages to be displayed for any planet in a sector.  This message is now only displayed for the planet on which this Citadel exists.

The mail problems have decreased, but still exist.  The problem of the exploding file seems to have been fixed, but the file has continued to become corrupt.  I guessed that this was a new bug created by the last mail file changes, and that turns out to be correct.  I have fixed this problem and am hopeful that the mail file will be completely stabilized at this point...  Fingers crossed!

I finally found the cause of the attack/port synchronization problems.  I've modified the code so that the game is more able to deal with a case where one player is attacking while another is porting, or landing on a planet or SD.

TWGS Revision 45 - April 30, 2001

TWGS Changes:

Minor changes related to RLogin connection.  Problems with RLogin have been reported, and have not yet been solved.

BIGBANG:  Fixed a bug that caused additional uninitialized ports to be created by bigbang when small sector counts are specified. Extern will crash when run on the created game data.

NONPSERV:  The server will crash if more than 500 aliens are active.  This has been fixed.

NONPSERV:  Fixed a bug with the management of Unique ships.

Fixed a bug that caused ships to become cross-linked when exchanging in the Citadel.

Setting to silence messages was being turned back on by CIM.  This has been fixed.

TWGS Revision 44 - March 20, 2001

Anyone who installed revisions 40 through 43 should seriously consider rebanging their games after installing revision 44.  Data corruption will most likely have resulted from running these revisions.  Even though revision 44 has fixed these problems, it will not repair damage done to data.

One particular bug has caused the Gold ship database to become corrupt.  Rebanging a game won't solve this problem.  The Gold directory must be completely deleted before the rebang so that fresh Gold data files will be generated.  The Gold data is located in the Gold subdirectory off of the TW data directory.

No patch is being posted for this revision.  I have had reports that lead me to believe that patches are only being partially applied in some cases, and I want to guarantee that everyone installs this revision properly and completely.

TWGS Changes:

No significant changes

Mail system wasn't designed to be reentrant, but under some circumstances, particularly while running internal aliens, mail can be generated in the background while mail is either being composed or read in the foreground.  This cases can cause unexpected results with the mail system.  This has been fixed.

Index system was made more stable and efficient.

Fixed a bug that allowed fighters over 50,000 to be placed into sectors without planets.

In cases where a planet was present and fighters were placed over 50,000, then the planet was moved, fighters should be able to remain at a level above 50,000 but not increase.  As fighters are taken, the acceptable level should drop to the amount of figs in the sector until eventually a maximum of 50,000 fighters exists.  A bug related to this that has been fixed was causing fighters to drop to 50,000 if even a single fighter was destroyed.

The difference between Gold and standard Tholian Sentinels has been removed.  Standard Tholians will now get 4x defensive odds when they are located in a sector that contains a planet owned by the player (for a personal ship) or the player's corp (for a corp-owned ship).

Removed pause after Atomic Detonator destroys a planet.

Fixed a bug that caused Gold ship description files to become corrupt.

TWGS Revision 43 - February 22, 2001

TWGS Changes:

When a TW game is hung up, TWGS can detect it and force the game to close.  I have changed this so that the test method runs in its own thread because it was causing TWGS to be unresponsive during the 10 seconds of the shutdown test.  I have also extended the shutdown test to 30 seconds to make it more definite that the game is hung.

A bug introduced in 42 has been fixed (I hope!).  This is the bug that has been causing ships to be placed into sector 0.  Though I was never able to reproduce the error on my system, I did isolate a probable cause and have made the necessary changes.

The fix for the previous bug may also fix some other problems that have not been reproducible.  The problem results from uninitialized variables.  These are typically initialized to zero, but can sometimes be non-zero resulting in unexpected behavior.  This fix initializes all variables to zero so this should not occur.

Several Gold alien server bugs were fixed:

Gold aliens won't take over sector fighters.

Gold aliens won't be able to move on from a sector until they have destroyed the sector fighters.

Gold aliens won't drop more than 50,000 fighters in a sector without a planet.

For Gold servers that are inactive while players are not online, timed homeworld management events were not triggering with the correct frequency.  They will not trigger with the proper frequency even if the game is inactive for long periods of time.

For alien races with the Banding behavior, aliens have been much more active than they are supposed to be.  For example, if aliens band in groups of 8, it is likely that the aliens will be moving at about 8 times the rate that they are supposed to.  This has been fixed.  Banding aliens should be much less active from now on.

Added some breaks in the alien processing routines so the alien server will allow other processes to have more CPU during heavy processing.

TWGS Revision 42 - February 15, 2001

Nothing

Some important bugs were isolated and fixes were attempted.

Found a bug that caused the message system to become unresponsive.  In this state, all sorts of data corruption is possible.  This bug has been fixed.

Found a bug that was causing certain game flags to be thrown out after they were set.  One such flag is the "On Planet" flag.  When this flag is cleared while a player is on StarDock or a planet, it will cause them to appear in the sector.  I have located and fixed a few other possible causes for this bug, but it has remained.  Hopefully I'm getting close to a final resolution to this bug.

Moved "player enters the game" event to very end of initialization routine in order to protect a player entering the game from being seen until the very last possible moment.  Wanted to avoid situation where player is seen, but isn't ready to move.  If anyone is aware of a problem with this change, please let me know.

TWGS Revision 41 - February 2, 2001

Minor changes were made.

Made "Run all extern" and "Enable/Disable Alien Manager" admin options global so only gameops with global admin password access can change them.  Also added an extra "are you sure" and a warning to the Reboot option.

Attempt to fix locked file errors related to TWGS.LOG.  If the log can't be created or opened normally, TWGS attempts to open TWGS.LOG1 up to TWGS.LOG9.  If all attempts to create or open a log fail, the log is disabled.  TWGS shouldn't error out if it is unable to process the log file.  The worst case scenario is that TWGS won't be able to generate log entries.  Anyone experiencing problems with this file, please report any changes (improvements or disasters) related to this fix.

The mail file fix is still inconclusive because of another small bug I introduced in the last fix.  This bug caused the game to crash when processing mail to multiple recipients.  A fix has been made.

In the last revision, I removed the test for cloak failure at TW shutdown so that the cloak will always engage regardless of the failure probability.  The cloak can only fail at extern, not at TW shutdown (I forgot to report this in the revision log).  Unfortunately, I not only removed the test, but I removed the cloak enable line.  Doh!  So cloaks weren't engaging AT ALL.  Now they'll engage always, and fail at extern depending on the sysop-configurable failure probability.

TWGS Revision 40 - January 26, 2001

No changes were made.  I've had problem reports, but I want to see if the problems are a side-effect of the mail file problem.

I finally identified a likely cause of the mail file corruption.  I believe it is being caused by a completely unrelated TWGS feature.  When a player exits TW and it deletes a large number of mail messages, the player may think that the game has locked up and will drop carrier.  When TWGS detects that the node was cleared but the associated game is still active, it will assume that the game is locked up and will force it to close.  In this case, TW is actually in the middle of deleting mail messages when TWGS tells it to drop everything and close.  This will corrupt the mail file more often than not.  This situation has been fixed.

The mail system has also been improved so that when TW is forcefully halted (like in a power outage, for example), it will either discard all changes that were made by that user session or flag the mail file as corrupt so it can be refreshed on the next load.

TWGS Revision 39 - October 27, 2000

	File			Size		Download Sites
	TWGS10139.EXE			4,261,028 bytes		www.eisonline.com
						www.twlinks.com
						www.intergate.cx
	TWGS10138-10139.EXE			697,466 bytes		www.eisonline.com
						www.twlinks.com
						www.intergate.cx

A problem was found with the previous patches under some systems.  The self-executing patch does not run properly.  This has been resolved.  If you have not upgraded to revision 38, you should download and install the full .39 archive.  If you've already installed .38, the .38 to .39 patch should work correctly.

TWGS Changes:

Added tab to Configuration screen to prepare for Trade Wars JumpGate.  This feature is under development and will begin beta tests soon.

Fixed planetary combat bug that made it impossible to attack a planet's shields.

Added Maximum Regeneration per Visit field to configuration.  This setting determines the maximum amount a port can regenerate on one visit.  The classic setting was 50%.  The new default setting is 100%.  This setting appears on General Editor Two, <8>, in place of Multiple Photon Firing.  Multiple Photon Firing has been moved to General Editor Three, <8>.

Fixed bug with destroying planets via collision or Atomic Detonator (this also effects port attacks) that caused the game to crash when killing a player on the planet or port.

Added single turn deduction to retreat.  If player has no turns, the retreat is still successful.

Changed port combat so it's difficult to sustain attacks against a weak port.

Fixed bug that allowed players moving into a defended sector through a one-way to be able to move past defensive or toll figs.

Changed mail system to try to improve stability.  This change requires that the mail file be purged and reinitialized.  TW will do this automatically when you run .39 for the first time.  Just be aware that this upgrade will delete the player's mail.

Changed message system to improve message performance.  I expanded the file size from 255 messages to 4095 messages.  TWGS games generate a much higher volume of messages than TWv3 was originally designed to handle.

TWGS Revision 38 - October 11, 2000

A bug fix in .37 created a major bug with port trading.  Revision 38 solves that problem.
 

TWGS Revision 37 - October 10, 2000

I went through a long list of bugs and managed to fix quite a few.  This is an important revision.

TWGS Changes:

Fixed problem with TWGS system timers.  The bug caused occasional TWGS crashes.

Fixed a bug that was causing players to lose game time when leaving and reentering the game.

EXTERN:  Fixed bug that caused players on a planet during a collision to be untouched.  Now the player will be destroyed just as if an Atomic Detonator was used to destroy the planet.

Fixed bug that allowed multiple players to rob the same credits from a single port.

Players landing on a port to rob or steal are now treated as landed (hidden from the sector) while at port.

Fixed port attack bug that caused ports to attack back with only 5 power points.

BIGBANG:  Fixed a bug that allowed clusters of sectors to be "black holes".  These clusters could be entered, but not exited.

Fixed bug that caused a player to drop to the shield combat menu when invading a planet and being destroyed by atmospheric quasar cannons.

You no longer need holds to embezzle credits from a port.

TWGS10136.EXE (4,217,994 bytes) - September 19, 2000

This isn't a major revision, but it is an important one.  The problems addressed in TWGS by revision .35 have been further addressed.  .35 was not functional under some system environments, and the addition of new games caused unstable behavior on all systems.  The core of the problem is the creation of TWGS registry fields.  Hopefully this revision will finally solve these problems.

Also, a TEDIT fix was added to repair Gold alien records.  Until now, if the Gold alien data file became corrupt, the only solution was to rebang.  Now, running TEDIT with a corrupt Gold alien file will trigger a reset of the Gold aliens.  All existing aliens will disappear as the alien data file is reset, and new aliens will begin to appear the next time the alien server is started.
 

TWGS10135.EXE - August 8, 2000

I managed to find some time to work on this during our move!  Not much done, but a major TWGS problem should be fixed.  If .34 was crashing with an invalid file error, .35 should fix the problem.

TWGS Changes:

I believe I located the bug that is causing TWGS to crash on an invalid file.

A port will attack back with at least 5 damage points unless it is destroyed.

Fixed a bug that caused the global message file to reset after reaching the maximum number of lines.  It now empties the file of all lines over the maximum number.  By default, this number is 800 lines.

Temporarily removed code to purge the error and game logs when they reach file size of 65000 bytes.

Fixed a bug that allowed a player to create a port in slot 1 through 4 which is reserved for SD and class 0 ports.  This could happen while SD is destroyed, and when SD is recreated it will be cross-linked to the other port.
 

TWGS Changes:

Fixed a MAJOR bug this time :)  I won't get into the details too much, but a bug in the main server and alien manager windows was causing TWGS to use about 20% GDI resources on startup (unless you started TWGS minimized).  After locating and fixing the problem, TWGS only uses about 8% GDI.  That should leave much more breathing room for running the actual games and alien servers.

TEDIT:  When setting Gold aliens maximum count to 0 and back to non-0, the editor was crashing.  This has been fixed.

TEDIT:  The earlier fix for sector warp list changes was incomplete.  Any active players had to exit and re-enter the game before the changes to the warps of a sector took effect.  This has been fixed.

Fixed a bug that was causing a player to be in one sector but appear to be in another sector.  The player's sector index number was out of synch with the sector record number.  The record number is now synchronized to the index number when a player moves.

ANNOUNCE.TXT can now be displayed from the entry menu with the A command.  If the file is found, the A option will appear.  If it is not, the command will not appear.  The ANNOUNCE.TXT will be displayed with pauses.

TEDIT:  Added a setting to General Editor Three that allows the gameop to override the password protection of TEDIT when run from TWGS Command Center.  This setting can be set for each game individually.

NONPSERV:  Aliens that were interdicted were not re-entering the sector.  This means that the sector defenses would only trigger once for a given alien no matter how often that alien tried to leave.  This made it easy for an alien to deplete a planet of its ore by triggering the interdictor.  Now it will be more likely that the alien will be destroyed by a sector Quasar before it manages to deplete the ore and break free of the interdictor.

Click here to for earlier revisions...

NOTE:

BACK UP YOUR DATA before installing any new revision.  There's always the potential for a catastrophe because the beta doesn't get much testing until YOU download it ;)

Released for Beta, June 11, 1999:  TWGS Tools.  This package contains two tools, one for editing Gold name files and the other for editing Gold rank files.  These files are used by Gold aliens.  If you'd like to try these out, just run the install and you'll be able to find the applications in the Command Center Tools menu.  Eventually I will have other tools included in this package, or perhaps in other packages.  If anyone is interested in developing applications for the TWCC tools menu, let me know and I'll give you the details on setting it up.
 

Tools mirror sites:		Apparition's anonymous FTP
		Stardock Alpha-Prime
		twgs.twars.com

John Pritchett