So, a friend of mine decided to start hosting a BBS off his internet connection at home so that a bunch of us could play our old favorite door games again. He only has two that I am really interested in, Legend of The Red Dragon, and Tradewars.
A lot of the people playing Tradewars are using helper programs that can automate trading, maping out the universe, and things like that. I’m not a huge fan of using something like that to play the game, but I don’t really say too much about it to them. But, I’ve gotten tired of trying to keep all of the sector information in a notepad type document.
So, I wrote a script that goes through and parses all of that information out of the game by executing commands on the ship computer and then storing them in a database. I’m also going to be unable to play for a week and so I’ve decided to write a script to do something useful with my turns in my absence. It’ll run as a cron script while I am gone.
All that playing around with scripting has made me decide that I want to write my own helper program that uses my own experience with the game. It will basically do all of the same things that current database script does but will allow me to interact with the game while it silently logs what is going on.
I’m going to have it do things like remember who owns any planets I see, keep track of where I encounter fighter nets, and allow me to insert notes about sectors. I also want it to have a UI that draws a map of the entire universe and allows me to zoom in and out, rotate the map three dimensionally, select nearby sectors to view them, and stuff like that. It will also remember successful trade values when working on a port pair so that I have a basis to use to try and maximize my exp when trading. Also handy would be a database that keeps track of where I’ve been caught stealing, and when so that I know if it is safe to steal from a port again (when I am playing evil).
Eventually, I might make a non-interactive version that tries to play “alien” traders with enough intelligence to give a little extra challenge to human players.
So far, I’ve been doing all the scripting in Perl using the expect module. I’m thinking about making the map using java and have it pull database information out of a central server that corp mates can use to share their travel information real time. We’ll see how sophisticated this ends up being. Either way, it has been pretty fun to work on.
Woah ur really running with that. Sounds fun. I played tw for just one day a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t believe I had forgot how to even play after many years of going at it.
That sounds cool, however there are already a couple of helpers out there most people these days use Swath in conjunction with TWX Proxy and it works for most. Any program that could combine the features of both would be welcome. Good luck with your project.