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 Scramble edit 
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Unread post Scramble edit
Sing, we had a discussion in another thread about the reasons you can't run an exported TWA without rebanging it. The main reason was that once it's been played once, people would know the game too much and would have an unfair advantage. What I'm wondering is, would it be possible to scramble a game so that it's playable without having to reband and undo any "cooking" the op may have done? There are so many ways an op can customize a game beyond what TEDIT and Bigbang offer, and regardless of what I do, there will always be creative ops who come up with cool ways to modify a game edit. It would be great to be able to package up an edit as a snapshot of a point in time, prior to gameplay starting, but after Bigbang when server-side scripts have been run to "bake in" some changes. Then other ops could run that game without having to go through all of the process the original op went through to get it into its final state.

Offhand, I think randomizing the sectors would go a long way. The structure of the galaxy would be the same, but the numbers on each sector would be different from one play to the next. Beyond that, what would need to be scrambled in order for these edits to be playable "out of the box", without a rebang?

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Thu Jun 16, 2011 6:41 pm
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Unread post Re: Scramble edit
Off the top of my head...
Aliens
Ports (mcic, amounts, type, etc)

I'm sure there are others... just not sure what they'd be.

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Thu Jun 16, 2011 6:49 pm
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Unread post Re: Scramble edit
Let's assume that relative location of ports, Class 0, SD and Terra, and alien homeworlds stayed the same, but the number of every sector changed, then you'd have some information (Class 0 is N hops from SD, etc), but you wouldn't be able to say Class 0 is at sector S. So how bad would that be? You'd still have to map the game to know how to reach everything.

Port numbers could be scrambled as well, even if the relative locations of ports would be the same.

Class 0 ports, SD, Terra and alien homeworlds would all be at the same relative locations, even though their sector numbers would be different.

It would probably be possible to scramble links as long as a few things are kept constant. The number of links into and out of Fedspace sectors should be held constant. The distance from StarDock to Fedspace should not change. All sectors in FedSpace and alien homespace should keep their links relative to one another, but outside of these areas, sector links could be scrambled a bit.

This seems reasonable to me. I could have a special option in Bigbang to scramble an existing game rather than rebang it. Once the general feature was in place, it could be tweaked to address any problems that come to light. I'm going to add that to my list of improvements to the TWA system.

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Thu Jun 16, 2011 9:54 pm
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Unread post Re: Scramble edit
There may be some holes in that system, as I can think of a few ways to use that data to narrow down a location search, but it is a whole lot better than what we currently have. As long as the option to completely rebang still exists (and it'd be nice for port hardness, at least, to survive rebang), we can always just use whatever we need to. Scrambling would always be better than not scrambling.

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Thu Jun 16, 2011 10:09 pm
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Unread post Re: Scramble edit
Yeah, I'm not saying I won't work on implementing some of these things. I'm just saying there will be long periods when I can't work on the game and it'd be nice to be able to have the ability to run a game without a rebang, because ops will continue to innovate.

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Thu Jun 16, 2011 11:03 pm
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Unread post Re: Scramble edit
As of resent events and the possibility of a job afk (from Guam)
I am prepairing by rebang/banging edits and doing the setups like
set terra , set alien planets , move and change Stardock and making all
ansi screens for in game info (all scripts I use so its real fast to do)
then I'm exporting to twa's and dropping each in folders marked for
turns and unlims , as well as universe size ....

Now as I need games , I'll pull an edit out and set it to open on a timer.
By the time I get back , I should have rotated through all the different ones
and might need to rebang them.

the only thing that needs to rebang in most cases is universe map and alien locations.

just my take on this.

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Fri Jun 17, 2011 1:29 am
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