I got it up and running and people can remotely telnet in. Thanks for the recommendations on telnet clients.

As far as settings go, the game defaults to GameA (I think) with 1,000 sectors. Would this be considered "classic"? Keep in mind I haven't played in earnest for many years. Any recommendation on sector count for 10 players on a private game, none using helpers?

Also still curious to hear if anyone has estimates on the community population size.

My dial-up memories are of 5,000 sector universes. That also seems to be the standard for "classic" games today.

The game tends to favor red hunters over blue builders. Smaller universes make planets easier to find, and good port pairs and PT areas harder to find. Evils can work in smaller spaces, because they can work the same few ports continuously and clear each other's busts.

Yes, a 1000 sector game was considered large in the day. Single player door versions typically defaulted to 500 sectors. 1000 would be a good place to start.

I guess it's all a matter of what sizes the universes were when you first played and got "hooked". For me it was the 5k universe, so that's what I concider a classic game. Others who started playing earlier than I did use the default 1k universe, or smaller.

I think it depends upon how many players you have as well, and the configuration of your universe, do you like a few large bubbles or a lot of smaller ones? Play around with the port density settings as well. There's so much you can do to change the feel of the game with just the big-bang settings.

Start with the default settings for game A to see what that looks like. Then you can use that game as the basis for the next and just change one of the other big bang settings, and see how that feels to you.

Course length, port density, one-way warps etc... This game has practially infinate possibilities.

Smaller universe are good for just a handful of players, the more players you have the larger the universe needs to be so they can stay "hidden" long enough to build good defenses.

High colonist regeneration makes for happy builder type games, low colonist regeneration makes for lots of hunting and stealing of each other's colonists.

The big bang settings really do set the stage or "mood" of the game before you concider any of the other general settings.

BigD, why do you always have to go so negative?

I wish my version could be a "very good version for those who can't compete with today's style of play". Ahh, what a dream ;)



More like WTFM (Write the F'in Manual) ;) There is a pretty basic help file you can look at, and you can click the ? to get help text about many of the options in TWGS. And there are the help dialogs that show up when you first run TWGS. Then in TEDIT, everything tries to be self-documenting. But there really isn't an official doc on setting up and running TWGS and banging games. The basic process of installing and creating a game should be very easy (if it isn't, I need to keep working on getting it there), but there's so much more to learn from there if you're so inclined.

As to the question of community size, there have been about 20K registered TW games, but including pirated instances, considering the game was often distributed with a code generator, the number is more like 90K, nearly as large as the number of BBSs. But taking 20K, one could estimate that if only 5 players played on each BBS, that's about 100K players. I tend to consider that a low estimate, considering the number of players active on BBSs at the time of TW's peak in 1994 was 3 million, and TW was legitimately registered on 1/3rd of all BBSs. Based on that number, it could be as high as a million players at its peak. I put together a presentation on this for the TW museum at http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?tit ... Statistics

As of TWGS v2, I can provide better stats. Today, there have been over 600 activated v2 sites. There are currently only about 200 sites running the version that includes player activity counts, but of those 200 sites, there have been nearly 800 unique players. The player stats have only been available since last month. There were about 670 unique players last month, and so far this month, there have been nearly 100 new players.

For various reasons, some of the more active public sites have not updated to a version that can provide a count of player connections. So most of these numbers are smaller private sites. It has always been my belief that the vast majority of players on TWGS have been on private sites like yours, not the few high profile public sites where the 10s of "elite" players play today.

[/sarcasm]

It appears that this statement is becoming more true as each updated comes out. "Death to Scripters, Hang em' all"

Please save it for your smack forum. This is a good thread and I wont have it derailed.

H

BigD, I won't spoil your delusions with any further debate on the subject. I'm sure you guys have a lot more fun claiming that I'm taking away your precious game. And just because it's becoming "more true" won't make it true until it's true. Until then, let it go.

Maybe I missed something on the smack. The "death to scripters" remark or the poster's comments that the desire of the programmer is coming true? I see tongue-in-cheek, but no smack.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Funny... I'm a scripter, and I just started working on writing my own helper. TW2002 is the original reason I became interested in programming, and still the reason for most of the code I write. And I don't feel the least bit threatened by JP's plans. Worst case scenario (which I don't expect), we could all play the current version forever.

I hope Mongoose and some others understand when I refer to "certain players", I'm not referring to them. It's a particular type of player that's been rubbing me the wrong way lately. Some of my best friends are scripters ;)

I'm back in school now to learn how to program (starting next term), and yes this game was also an influence for me. Along with my buddy Kavanagh who taught me how to create scripts with REXX for Zoc. Before that I would only write a few simple macros.

That and so many business programs conflicting lately, causing me grief, I want to learn how to help straighten this out, AND to get updated on SoS.

This game I see has launched many an IT profession. It will always be scripted to play, it's just bringing back some spirt of sportsmanship that's needed.

Um... and you know I'm on your side but sportsmanship has always waned in this game. i can remember getting phone calls (on the phone that hung in my kitchen!) threatening me with my life for destroying a base that took 2 months for someone else to build.

Stop giving your phone number out! LOL

This game does stir up passions in people, that's for certain.