Hi all,

I've just hacked together a little program to "fix" the techs in a given HST file to whatever I like; in paticular I see this being semi-useful for the good old battlesim, which is nice enough for testing with max tech, but sometimes the super-miniaturisation costs are actually inconvenient.

Do many people still use battlesim? If so, I can probably whip up a quick webpage to request a paticular tech set (which will, however, apply to *all* races - at least for now) and DL the HST, XY and M files.

Quote:

Important: This will only work well after tech 8ish or so - ie, after the point where techs cost more than 4k (a year's production in battlesim); however, I guess most of the really interesting battles do occur after this point.

-- This has been corrected using LEit's Mineral Alchemy suggestion [18/3/2006].

Quote:

But it'd be another one of my so-much-loved exercises in making a web-interface, however trivial - so I won't go to the effort unless people actually want it ETA would probably be a couple of weeks, mind you - I'm still entirely too busy with real life

-- It's done now, obviously [18/3/2006].


UPDATE 4.3.2006:
Here we go: http://wumpus.mine.nu/stars/battlesim_tech.php

UPDATE 18.3.2006 (Thanks Ashlyn and Micha ):
If the page is unreachable and I know about it and can reach the 'net, I'll put a notice on http://das.wumpus.googlepages.com/battlesimgeneratorstatus

[Updated on: Sat, 18 March 2006 02:23] by Moderator

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Have you plans to do UI that "fixes" also the needed fleets into good old battlesim HST file? Sometimes its difficult to have 100 38% damaged heavy blaster BB-s.

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This'd be awesome Wumpus, a real timesaver. I don't battlesim as much as a should, because it's such a PIA getting the the sim set up right, but this'd make it a lot easier.

Now if you could just specify custom race setup and fleet design (and damage) it's be perfect Not that we're demanding or anything?


On a side note, did you ever decide to release your .h file merging tool? I think most of the teams waiting to start xdude's huge packed remapped team game would be pretty keen to take that tool for a drive around the block.

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[Updated on: Mon, 27 February 2006 01:14]

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wumpus wrote on Sun, 26 February 2006 21:25

Do many people still use battlesim?

I hardly ever use it, I make new testbed for almost every game, with the "correct" races ... (PRT, LRT, player#, ... )
Reasons being:
- minituarisation costs
- player positioning, this is a very important aspect and can completely alter the battle result ... (and playing mostly team games there are often 4+ players on the board)

So my *ahum* request would be: could you make an online utility that allows you to just upload any .hst file and fix it to the right tech levels? At first global techs, but per race would even be better of course.

mch

[Updated on: Mon, 27 February 2006 03:50]

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Ptolemy wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 14:15

Only problem here is that all players don't have a copy of the .hst file. The .hst file would need to be sent to all players to make the tool useful for everyone.

Not sure which .hst file you mean.

If Wumpus makes his tool to only mod the battlesim .hst file, than it's easy to get by, just download the battlesim .zip. But you probably won't need the original in this case, just fill in a request for specific techs, wait for the processing and download the modded .hst file.

And I'm sure not giving my enemies MY .hst file! The one of my testbed which took me hours to setup and holds info that I discovered from all races including my own (PRTs, LRTs, ...)
I would see a problem if my enemies _did_ have a copy of my testbed .hst file!

Hm ... you don't mean the actual GAME .hst file? Nobody should get his hands on that one!

mch

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LEit wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 16:59

wumpus wrote on Sun, 26 February 2006 15:25 Important: This will only work well after tech 8ish or so - ie, after the point where techs cost more than 4k (a year's production in battlesim); however, I guess most of the really interesting battles do occur after this point. You could probably set all races to build MA at the end of their queues, and then any resources won't go toward tech. Probably easiest to do this in Stars! before you set modify the tech with your app.

Yup I'd worked that out too during the day; until then I'd been going on the assumption I'd use the "standard" battle.hst as a basis, but there's no reason for me not to change it in exactly this way.

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PricklyPea wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 14:56

If you download my non-encrypted version of JRC4, you can edit the techs directly in the HST file. I do this all the time for various testing. It's also possible to edit who has what MT items etc.

Hmm, granted I know such a beastie exists, but is it *supposed* to exist? IE is it sanctioned by the Jeffs or whoever feels responsible for stars! these days? It doesn't seem to be *readily* available, so I assume not?

Perhaps an irrelevant point to some, but I imagine not to everyone. *shrug*

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Kotk wrote on Sun, 26 February 2006 22:37

Have you plans to do UI that "fixes" also the needed fleets into good old battlesim HST file? Sometimes its difficult to have 100 38% damaged heavy blaster BB-s.

This is substantially trickier; *changing* existing stuff in stars! files is comparatively straightforward for many cases, creating new stuff (new fleets in this case, or new designs for that matter) is not so easy. Not really *hard* either, but so far I don'T have functions to re-serialise all the various "objects" in stars!, only to load them. Mostly tedious stuff

In the long term, sure, that's definitely viable though.

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Micha wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 09:50

wumpus wrote on Sun, 26 February 2006 21:25 Do many people still use battlesim? I hardly ever use it, I make new testbed for almost every game, with the "correct" races ... (PRT, LRT, player#, ... ) Reasons being: - minituarisation costs - player positioning, this is a very important aspect and can completely alter the battle result ... (and playing mostly team games there are often 4+ players on the board) So my *ahum* request would be: could you make an online utility that allows you to just upload any .hst file and fix it to the right tech levels? At first global techs, but per race would even be better of course. mch

Sure, that would work; the advantage to me of using the "standard" battle.hst is that I can just host the original on the server, and copy+modify+zip+send out when somebody requests something. No files need to come *in* to the server. Not that uploading files etc is difficult per se, but it opens up a whole slew of fun security issues that'd need to be tackled.

So: again, in the short term it's not going to be that way, but definitely possible.

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(I think I covered Dogthinker's other questions in other replies, but:)

Dogthinkers wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 01:09

On a side note, did you ever decide to release your .h file merging tool? I think most of the teams waiting to start xdude's huge packed remapped team game would be pretty keen to take that tool for a drive around the block.

No, it stalled for two reasons; first because - to do it the way I want - requires a reasonably involved interface, and as is probably know by now, I'm not at all a fan of doing interface stuff. And secondly because it turns out that this problem is a great deal trickier to do "just right" than I realised at first. Planet reports can contain different levels of detail (The usual 4: Just owner, owner/pop/defenses/climate/min concs etc, that+surface mins, everything (the owner's version)). And, paticularly if the most recent scan was only of the owner, then the report may be of a given year but actually contain, eg, pop information which is *much* older, and there is no (static) way of noticing this.

At the beginning of January or so, I finally got to the point where I can load most file types into memory and hold them there in a reasonably sensible structure (rather than just handling the data in the file one element at a time and throwing the elements away after processing - which meant that relationships between elements could generally not be used at all for useful results); it may be worth coming back to the H file thing now. But as I said, it has some thorny issues, so even if I had plenty of time available, it would still take a while to produce something properly usable.

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Micha wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 09:50

At first global techs, but per race would even be better of course.

Actually I should probably point out: This restriction only came into my program because I didn'T feel like having a command-line program taking 97 parameters (16 races x 6 techs + hst file). With a reasonable interface to hide the hairy details, it's actually trivial to modify the program to set the techs for each race to whatever (different) levels.

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wumpus wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 18:22

PricklyPea wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 14:56 If you download my non-encrypted version of JRC4, you can edit the techs directly in the HST file. I do this all the time for various testing. It's also possible to edit who has what MT items etc. Hmm, granted I know such a beastie exists, but is it *supposed* to exist? IE is it sanctioned by the Jeffs or whoever feels responsible for stars! these days? It doesn't seem to be *readily* available, so I assume not? Perhaps an irrelevant point to some, but I imagine not to everyone. *shrug*

Gack, ok, two additional things:

First, I missed the "my" in your post - I guess the tool is yours. Please don't take my reply personally; it wasn't meant to be an attack on you, but I think that there really are some people who would not feel using such a modified EXE is "ok". I personally wouldn't really care, but then, I'm not the best person to ask ;P

Second, I would strongly encourage you *not* to make the tool readily available (although maybe it's too late already). The single biggest reason I'm still holding onto my code, as much as I'd like to release it and let other people play, is not that it has the encryption details, but because it has so many of the *other* details that are much easier to work out once the encryption is removed. This makes it (for reasons I'll go into in a PM if you really want to know) far, far easier to cheat in existing stars. I'm working on workarounds for that, but it's quite difficult in places; see http://stars-util.sourceforge.net/split_fleet_cargo.html for one of the really thorny current issues).

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[Updated on: Mon, 27 February 2006 14:44]

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wumpus wrote on Mon, 27 February 2006 18:58

The single biggest reason I'm still holding onto my code, as much as I'd like to release it and let other people play, is not that it has the encryption details, but because it has so many of the *other* details that are much easier to work out once the encryption is removed. This makes it (for reasons I'll go into in a PM if you really want to know) far, far easier to cheat in existing stars. I'm working on workarounds for that, but it's quite difficult in places; see http://stars-util.sourceforge.net/split_fleet_cargo.html for one of the really thorny current issues).

Hi,

I get the feeling the cat has got out of the bag more than once already. Perhaps the sanest tack would be to get as much help as possible with your own "turn-policing" tools and finish them soonest for AH to use in avoiding cheats.

Surely you know what happens to "security by obscurity", yadda, yadda...

As a spinoff of the effort, I'd bet some "automation" scripts can be evolved too, to help ppl skirt heavy MM which puts them off the game.

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wumpus wrote on Sun, 26 February 2006 21:25

ETA would probably be a couple of weeks, mind you - I'm still entirely too busy with real life

I've let it loose on the #stars! denizens for some semi-limited beta testing; it looks resilient and stable enough at first glance though, so hopefully I'll publicise the URL on Sunday evening or so

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PricklyPea wrote on Sat, 04 March 2006 15:47

I can't imagine somebody wanting to cheat would go to the trouble of using a more complex and sophisticated method.

The existing ways to cheat are not so numerous and not so profitable. Skill makes more difference than cheating there.

Lets see what can be done by modifying the x# files?
As i understand hacking "split fleet" and/or "manual transfer" there are infinite minerals and infinite fuel cheats.
By editing "modify design" and/or "set queue" records there old "fixed" cheap orbital and cheap ship cheats can be made back.
One can target fleets he does not see (by ID) so probably with clever hack of "waypoints" one can track down everything that comes sneaking his way.
Then ... eyeball "race record" about opponent in CA m# file. For rest of PRT-s its only icon and name ... to CA goes full info about race and its research progress there?

I have not tested if one can for example do cheap bases cheat simply by using JRC3 in JRC4-hosted game ... but rest of these are hacking only cheats and very powerful. So ... thats what i only think is bad there. Probably lot more. Do we want to write something that checks and alerts about all these and probably other cheats?

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