Projected turn data...

[esoteric]

Now that you've so awesomely fixed those other bits, any chance that turn projections could show indication of knowing something about probed worlds on the map?

[drwr]

Grumble grumble *never satisfied* grumble . . .

OK, I'll look into it.

David

[ZenCat]

That sounds like a wicked cheat! You order a probe, run the projected turn, see whats "going" to be there, and go back and change your orders. Yeah, if everybody takes advantage of it, it would add an entirely different dimension to the game..... but at what price? I see how it would be desirable to have, but it would put a weird twist on the game. My opinion.....
Suggestion: if you do it, only do it as a specialty tweak, NOT as a standard feature.
Dale

[esoteric]

I was thinking of just marking each world scheduled to be probed with a symbol, like a big 'X'. No information provided except an indication that something WILL be known.

[ZenCat]

That's a whole different story.

[drwr]

Yeah, I'm on your page. No worries. The client doesn't even have the information it would need to cheat like this.

David

[esoteric]

Something else useful...
I just inherited a game from Zencat but what I didn't inherit was all the map sorting he had done. Suffice it to say it's a big ugly map. Being able to acquire the map arrangement inheriting game positions and through import would be great.
In playing with torque and rotating clusters of planets a coarser angle snap would be useful. I arrange everything in rectangular grids and would find 45 or 90 degree rotation increments more useful than what it tries to do now.

[drwr]

I've toyed with different ideas of how to implement a map arrangement sharing mechanism. The biggest problem is dealing with partial sharing: how would you integrate someone else's layout into your existing map?

Of course, in your case this isn't a problem; you don't have an existing map yet, and would be perfectly happy to import the entire map arrangement as ZenCat had laid it out. But this is a very rare situation; the much more common case is that you would have some worlds already, and would like to import additional worlds that your ally is sharing with you. This seems to me a nearly insoluable problem, since your ally might have a completely different and incompatible arrangement of worlds.

So, due to the insoluability of the more general problem, I have so far resisted making any attempts at solving the very easy special case you ran into. I'm of course open to suggestions, though.

Adding an angle snapping function to the torque rotation is a sensible and easy thing to do. I'll add it.

David

[ZenCat]

I had a really good, total universe map of tuition, but my computer kept choking on it. I handed the game off to Scott, but couldn't figure out how to hand the map off. Would there be some way to override any mapping already done and just replace it with a map from someone else? I know the map gets saved somehow on the server because when my computer chokes I can pick it up the next time I reboot and download.
Dale

[drwr]

Not by the current design--the map is considered private data associated with the human player, not with the game position--but yes, in principle, it would be possible to hand off the complete map when you take over a position. At present, there's no interface to do this.

One problem is that you actually take over just a position, not a game player; in a multi-position game, it is possible for one player to take over position A and another player to take over position B of what were formerly operated by one player. This is probably just a flawed design in the server more than anything else, though, and I should just fix that flaw first.

David