One of my games the twmail.dat file was 19,154 kb. it was hanging extern maint. yesterday i deleted it and now, one day later it's back to the same size and hanging maint.
what could cause this?

Aliens... a lot of them. Would be my guess.

quote:Originally posted by kilroy

One of my games the twmail.dat file was 19,154 kb. it was hanging extern maint. yesterday i deleted it and now, one day later it's back to the same size and hanging maint.
what could cause this?


The twmail.dat file gets bloated due to the mail process of the TWGS. If you have 5 Alien Races and 20 Aliens per race, and there is a fig grid present, the file will expand. You could try to reduce the number of Aliens per race. On our server, I have a game with 14 races, but kept the actual number of Aliens per race down low (under 10) and so far my twmail.dat file is under 1 meg. I do have 1 game where the file gets to 19 megs, and have to remove it once a week. The more amount of Aliens per race you have, the larger the file can become. You can get a bloated twmail.dat file with 2 races but 50 Aliens per race. It appears to be triggered when fig grids are present. At least that has been my observation.

How do you limit the number of aliens per race?

Yea, it's when you have a corp w/ a large grid. That mail gets sent to everyone on the corp, which can make a big file.

You can also just make aliens less active... so they move less and tap figs less often. Or make them more aggressive so they kill figs instead of riding them over and over.

quote:Originally posted by kilroy

How do you limit the number of aliens per race?



Select Alien Races Editor when you enter tedit, then under Settings (1) you will see the following:

<E> Initial number of aliens 0
<F> Maximum number of aliens 10

This is where I limit mine to 10 or less with more than 4 Alien Races.

quote:Originally posted by Singularity

Yea, it's when you have a corp w/ a large grid. That mail gets sent to everyone on the corp, which can make a big file.

You can also just make aliens less active... so they move less and tap figs less often. Or make them more aggressive so they kill figs instead of riding them over and over.



Thanks, I forgot to mention that too. I believe you had told me a while back this solution and that helped our games out.

There is a bug with the aliens moving less often.

Each individual alien will move every 30 seconds no matter what you have the move settings at.

Somewhere on here is a detailed description of the bug and the research I put into it. JP knows about it.

EDIT: Found it!
http://www.tw-attac.com/twforum/topic.a ... hichpage=2
My last post on the 2nd page.
quote:Ok, while doing some more research on GOLD aliens in general, I found that the biggest freaking problem with them is that the odds of them moving that the sysop sets NEVER seem to be considered. (option i on screen 1, Movement Chance) I created a race (Men In Black, M.I.B) which only had ONE member. That little guy moved every 30 seconds like clockwork, even though I had the movement chance set to 1 in 100. That means that in a 24 hour period, the little guy will move almost 2900 times. That's about the equivalent of a 6 man corp's moves in a 1k turn game.

I take back what I said earlier. More than one alien TOTAL is excessive. heh. I can see why most modern players (myself included) HATE them with such a passion. adding just 20 agressive aliens to a game has the potential to sweep all the deployed figs in a 5k sector game in just over 2 hours.

It didn't used to be this way. I'm gonna bug JP about it.