SysOp - New Features
SysOp - New Features
Overview
Overview
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General
New Features
Go Integrated chat
Go "Who's Playing"
Go Real-time messaging
Go Global messaging
Go NavPoints
Go Quick-stats
Go "Backtrack" key
 
Updated Features
Go Interactive Combat
Go Cooperative play
Go Real-time ship movement
Go Independent Alien, Ferrengi, and Feds
Go Turn recovery every hour
Go Daily taxation
Go Real-time stats
Go "New Mail" notification
Go Stabilized planet and port updates
Go Works with DOS & MBBS helpers
 
TEDIT and EXTERN Run Concurrently With Trade Wars Sessions
 
You won't need to bring the game down to run the game editor, or even to handle nightly EXTERN processing.  These utilities will function properly when players are in the game, and changes made by them will be reflected immediately to the players online. 
 
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Seperate Message and Mail Files
 
As described in the "New Features" section, the message file is at the root of Trade Wars interaction.  In order to further limit the size and complexity of this file, we've split the mail messages out into a seperate file.  This file, which can be quite large and inefficient, is scanned only rarely as a player checks for mail. 
 
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Alien, Ferrengi, and Fed Processing Distributed
 
In previous versions of Trade Wars, these ships have been processed by the online player.  That was fine for a single-session game, but not for the multi-session version 3.  The activities of these non-players are now handled by a process that is divided among all players in the game.  Therefore, the overhead associated with these activities is the same regardless of the number of players online at any given time. 
 
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Some Player Activities Limited to Once Daily
 
Some activities have been taken advantage of in the past to hasten ones descent on the ladder of morality.  For example, unscrupulous traders wanting to "burn" their positive alignment could jettison innocent colonists into the void.  While this is acceptable on occasion, we have attempted to limit it to once per day.  Likewise, trying to hack into a corporation can have a negative effect on ones alignment.  It too has been limited to a once-per-day event.  Loop-holes that have allowed players to excessively engage in these and other similarly asocial behaviors have been closed. 
 
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Improved TEDIT Prompting
 
The TEDIT prompts have been enhanced to include not only the default, but the maximum and minimum acceptable values.  From any prompt, pressing ENTER without supplying a value returns the default (shown in brackets), as always.  In addition, pressing the "<" or ">" keys will return the minimum or maximum values respectively (shown in parenthesis).  For example, when entering credits for a user, you will see a prompt like this: 
    ... credits (0 to 999,999,999) [600] : _
In brackets you see the current amount of credits owned by the player.  Pressing ENTER will leave this value unchanged.  The range of acceptable values is 0 to 999,999,999, as seen in parenthesis.  Pressing the "<" will assign a value of 0, and ">" a value of 999,999,999.  For simplicity, these keys can be used without the SHIFT as "," and ".". 
  
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Various Code Optimizations
 
Here are a few of the important optimizations of Trade Wars 2002 v3: 
    All of the new code is object oriented, and the most important processes have been written in 32 bit assembly language, including all file accesses and record searches. 

    The game's idle loop has been limited to a few reads and writes per second. 

    The game's executable and overlay size has been cut significantly by pulling all text from the game into a string table.  In a text based game, this makes quite a difference.

  
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SysOp
New Features
Go Auto v2 to v3 data conversion
Go Fossil driver support
Go Modify real-time move delays for all player ships
Go Self-cleaning real-time message file
Go Online system status report
 
Updated Features
Go TEDIT and EXTERN run concurrently with Trade Wars sessions
Go Separate message and mail files
Go Alien, Ferrengi, and Fed processing distributed
Go Some player activities limited to once daily
Go Improved TEDIT prompting
Go Various code optimizations
 
 
SysOp - New Features
SysOp - New Features
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