I'm still throwing around an idea for my own terminal. it wouldn't work in the same manner as say swath or two proxy with a telnet client. it would display the data in a different manner. not just a graphical map of the universe. important info, when you need it as you play.

some drawbacks would be slower in some sense. as it would parse all data, interpret it in its own way and display what is needed. there wouldn't be any ansi graphics. it would show comms, and current sector activity. and update a trader list of the sector with the players position. port, planet, dock...

it would display areas where activity is taking place. it would filter out multiple fig hits and show it in a map instead as a general picture. that could get messy with fast girders and multiple locations. but it would alert with proximity sensors which would be preset. or automatically based on assets, ports, ships, traders, etc.

a lot of stuff would be automatic. and one of my biggest concerns are sectors with massive amounts of planets. it already bogs down, or at least it did in the past when displaying the entire list. i wouldn't want to abort the info because the parser can use the data for the internal database and updates to the display. this would slow it down. i guess its just like a fig update, or port update. although the fig update you can almost keep up to date with activity. but need to check once and a while.

it would place traders at "safe" prompts. if someone is red, your safe prompts are a little different than someone who is blue. another problem would be getting lost at a prompt because of a crazy key sequence. the user wouldn't know what the heck is going on or where they are in the game as it wouldn't show the text of the game. so it would have to be smart enough to take that into account and make sure it can't mess itself up.

thats one of my biggest problems and drawbacks of a different display of the game. sometimes text is faster still. even with smart on demand info. even a twx script could change the display one it wants with ansi codes. i had ones before when i used to play.

i don't play anymore, but i still think of program ideas. the script forum is my favourite to read here.

Nice to see that you still have interest in TradeWars Tweety. Long time no play.

Your idea sounds like the direction Tradewars could take in terms of game consoles.

Re: thousands of planets per sector... there really should not be allowed more than 10 planets persector (overloads aside). I mean, if you put 2,000 planets in the same area of space (sector), one would expect they would collide every few minutes.. not every 24hrs.. laff.

I live for the day when someone really takes this game to the next level... it could be amazing.

You might be interested in my lexer project. I've studied the lexer used by the Kokua helper and I want to update it and make it more complete.

The first thing I did was write an extension to JFlex called KFlex that makes it easy to write lexers whose actions call methods in a listener interface. The point of this is to separate the lexer spec from the application code. The lexer then becomes a drop-in component for any app that wants to parse the same data format. Anyone could then use the same lexer to write their own helper.

My goal is to write the most accurate and complete TW2002 parser in existence, and do it as a collaborative, open-source project to spur helper development. I think writing a TW helper would be a fantastic intermediate programming project, and I want to encourage new programmers with new ideas.

The KFlex project is available on SourceForge. I've tested it a little in an app I'm developing that periodically logs into a TWGS and reports who's online. Using a lexer for that purpose might be overkill, but it makes the app into a sort of mini-helper that demonstrates how to use a lexer.

In Tradewars, a sector is considered to be a single solar system, but it doesn't have to be. It could be considered a large area of space with thousands of stars. Its definition is related to an area, but the size of that area is not clearly defined.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sector

I think what you're describing is very interesting, Tweety. Something I'm personally exploring right now is a flat map option where the game map is a hex-grid with some distant wormhole jumps to random sectors. The result would be a game map that could be displayed in a 2D view, showing large bubbles with obvious tunnels, loops and dead-ends, but the structure of the game itself wouldn't change so significantly that it would alter gameplay. That's the goal, anyway. I'm actually planning to open a prototype on the beta server soon so I can get some feedback on how the game plays with the flat map option. I actually prototyped this back in 1997 and got pretty positive feedback, but never got around to implementing it in the game, and now the game has changed so much I need to re-test it.

Hey Tweety, like your ideas. Part of what you suggested that relate to a map display will likely end up in my Visual Map helper at some point

cool. i might try to build something myself too haha. but i've been away from programming for a long time now.

and i have a mac now lol. simply because i have never had one and wanted to try one. and i don't want to run trade wars clients and the like in wine. i have wine and even put twx on. but never use it. well i guess thats not true. i used it when i started back playing in a bre league to log me into the server because i didn't want to type my log in. didn't bother to script bre though.

another thought was to tie in a tablet like the iPad haha. it would be like a star trek command console. of course it wouldn't have the full power as a desktop app would have. and it wouldn't be connected constantly to a socket connection. it would basically do notifications based on events happening. which means the terminal app would have a built in server portion. i guess its kind of like tw sync that attac made one time long ago. never tried it, but thought it was a neat idea.

I dunno... I've used a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and I feel like they have enough processing power to run a full-fledged helper. (TWHelp ran fine back in the 486/Pentium days, remember?)

I'm juggling three projects right now: getting up to speed with the changes in SWATH since 2003 and writing a new script arsenal; writing my own helper in Java; and writing my own original TW-style game. I should probably focus on the game, but I'm rationalizing that my return to TW is for research purposes.

I think the biggest problem would be maintaining a continious internet connection if you are on 3G/4G. Probably would work fine over WiFi.

This would already have been done by many others if we had a separate connection port to the Game Server that spoke a real game protocol and not a markup/user level stream. Don't let this discourage you, I'd love someone to parse everything into objects I could use. I certainly don't have the time to reverse engineer everything.