Got a question and I'm not real sure if this is where I should ask it. After a lengthy abscence I finally got my server back up and running and even have a couple of players in it already, besides myself that is. I did a ZTM and found a rather large bubble, 299 sectors. When I tried to go there, I got 'No route within 45 warps of sector xxxxx' clear avoids? I hit yes knowing I hadn't avoided anything and tried again and got the same message. I then looked for black holes with SWATH and found none. How can I fix this so other players don't run into the same problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Its all based on the random seed you choose at bang.

Only way to fix it is to increase max warp length or rebang and use 0 as seed .. then most of the time it should all be assessable.

But it happens , usually only a few sectors .. but nothing can really be done.

Ok. I just increased it to 65 and got 'No route within 65 warps'. Seems I ran into this a few years ago with a game but just can't remember what I was told to do to fix it. Seems like I had to go into editor and 'attach' it to another sector.

Probably a sector w/ no warps in. Make a list of the sectors and then look at them in t-edit, see if there's any hops out. If there aren't, obvious enough. If there are, then you've got a disconnected bubble... an area of the universe that's isolated from the rest. If that's the case then you have to "poke a hole" and connect a warp out and a warp in into the bubble.

Thanks Sing...I'll go in and look.

I've seen this also where the op banged a game with say a 50 warp max and then changed the setting to a shorter warp max. If the sector that you can't reach is in a bubble that was found, then the warps in and out are intact. If you used a bubble script similar to proBubble, then it just has to get to the first sector to start working the bubble. If the max warp length was changed to a shorter warp length then it should have broken the ztm for the most part, and resulted in a very inaccurate ZTM and bubble identification.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I've seen this also where the op banged a game with say a 50 warp max and then changed the setting to a shorter warp max. If the sector that you can't reach is in a bubble that was found, then the warps in and out are intact. If you used a bubble script similar to proBubble, then it just has to get to the first sector to start working the bubble. If the max warp length was changed to a shorter warp length then it should have broken the ztm for the most part, and resulted in a very inaccurate ZTM and bubble identification

Ok. When I bang a game, I use the 'normal' 45 warp max. I've found that this has always worked out and have never seen a reason to change it. I've run into this maybe 1 or 2 times in what, 7 yrs or so? I ran the ztm and found this bubble. I tried getting to the bubble and got the no route message. Right now I'm running another ztm using ATTAC (I ran the first one in SWATH). I'll then go one by one through whatever I find and see if I can get there. In an earlier reply it was suggested I try lengthening the warp limit to 65 to see if, perhaps, this bubble was just that much farther out. I did and got the same 'no route only this time within 65 warps, so I just went back to the more normal 45. I will say that this is puzzling and a little irritating that I just can't remember how to find that one sector to allow me to 'poke a hole' and connect this sector. I don't use proBubble, in fact had never heard of it until I just read it. I believe it's that first sector of the bubble that somehow got disconnected during the bang, or somehow got missed when holes were poked during the bang. As I said, is just bafflling as in all the time I've been testing these games BEFORE I finally got the port forwarding issue straightened out this never happened. I guess it's just another manifestation of Murphy's Law that it HAD to happen the first time the server is back open to the public <laughing>.

You may be able to use an observer account to find the sectors by havinga script parse the data. You can also use a T-edit script, but it will be fairly slow. I think the following might work, but haven't really tested it.

Run it from the T-Edit game selection menu.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Testing it now

If I am following you correctly here is what I do to test for them
Login using Observer account, run CIM
run this script test_get_distance.ts (wrote by Karl Leifeste) if it comes back a -1 there is no route.
ran in about 30 seconds to test, the script writes the file to the root of TWX

I think that would be a far better script to run than using the t-edit step through as it is a lot faster. Stepping through 20k sectors will take a lot of time - more time than setting up a TWX database, an observer account, cimming, and running Karl's script. Nice work to Karl on the script.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I thank you all for your input. I believe that I've found the offending sector and poked a hole in it. Seems to be ok now so will see what happens. Again, thank you all for your input.