Bargeld

lol @ the mention of copyright in this game. All of continuum is a copyright infringement which is simply not being pursued. The tiles/map in question was never distributed or published. Are the people making claims the actual proven owners of the tileset? Has said tileset ever had a statement of copyright or a notice of exclusive use? Or was it freely distributed? Would a new map using a tileset be considered a derivative work, different from an original copyrighted map? Is it legal to 'distribute' this tileset using the Continuum client? Could/would the owner of the copyright actually spend the money and time to move forward with legal action? So much hilarity in one topic!

It's because the domains don't match, so chrome warns you that you are downloading an .exe from a site different than the one you are currently viewing.

The simple answer is that the bot is just another player/client. There is lag between all clients, in this case, the bot just happens to be sitting right on top of the server. 2 clients can see different things based on packet reliability. Since the bot sits on top of the server, it will drop far less packets than any remote player. This being said, the bot sees and registers any shrap/bullet/bomb that got dropped to the player(s). TLDR; You lag more than the bot does and you dropped your packets but the bot did not.

First impression: Take dedicated players with the most incentives to play and highest statistical abilities, then give them something to remove them from the game for a while. Seems counterproductive. Would be better to give these prizes to the lowest stat people in order to up the average ability of the playbase as a whole. Kinda like Darwinism, remove them from the gene pool

I concur. I started playing again more regularly a number of months ago, but pub lost it's appeal almost instantly due to either lack of population or quality of population (AXE's mouth and Caillin's lag). The obvious option is to play in 4v4, but found that the players there are elitist with their control of the teams. There is also no on-demand play there, and even if you do get a !cap spot quickly, you find yourself with a random team of players fighting the stacked defending team, which is typically a guaranteed loss. Once you lose enough times in a reset because of this, when you try to join a pick-up team as a non-cap, the cap ends up either kicking, banning, or just asking you to leave due to your poor rec. 4v4 is basically just for the ongoing league players and not a substitution/opportunity for the casual player to get some SVS. Unfortunately, I have no solution to propose to any of this.

+1 NFS is awesome

Alpha had 30 minute timer. It was actually a big deal for us to expand it from the default of 15 minutes due to our strict SVS policy, but over time, 15 mins really proved it was a tad too short. 9 or 12 hours? Ridiculous! Also, dual logging used to be an issue when people parked a second login on their freq at J14 and just used it for free team anti... not sure if that is a consideration today or not. There is a server.ini setting: NoAntiInSafe=0 Use it or don't use it... there should be no need for dynamically changing it. With the setting allowing anti, you have players saying 'i forgot to turn it off when i entered the safety'. With the setting disabling anti, people will say 'i forgot to turn it on when I left safety'. Pick the lesser of the evils, or the more desired result and stick with it. As far as the pro's and con's, I think they have been covered reasonably well. What is more important is the effect on gameplay... certain points can be a pro or a con, but if they rarely impact gameplay, then it doesn't really matter, so an aggregate 'there are more pros than cons' doesn't work. What IS important is generating more gameplay and happy gamers. Axe killed his own argument: Then goes on to say: So safety isn't really about saving a ship. To reinforce this statement, I would say that players who care about the quality of their ships have !bonus options to use. If they use their !bonus to max a ship to their standards every time they return from an afk session longer than 30 minutes, it provides an incentive to play more in order to regain the !bonus points that they are using. So rather than sitting around with 60-70 bonus with a 250 bounty ship in safety all the time, you end up with players actually playing (not in a safety) with say 40 !bonus with an incentive to play more. As a final note, I would like to mention 'new players'. Hopefully this won't derail the topic at hand, but IMO, what the general public thinks about a new player's behavior and thought process are compete guesses. To add on to that, I would doubt that new players occur often enough to really change the zone settings to cater to them. During the downward slide of Alpha, I learned that it was more important to cater to the current playerbase than to try to cater to the new player. You will lose more players due to attrition and displeasure with their opinion of their zone than you will end up gaining through influx of new players trying to 'guess' what you think you need to do to make them stay. Players leave the game/zone more frequently than they start playing/adopt a new zone. Summary: do 30 minutes, it makes players start a new ship and use their bonus, then play to replenish it. New players prefer a fair fight, so their 70 vs a safety-saved 250 or 1000 sucks for them anyway. Use the zone setting to turn off anti in safety if it's really an issue.

You can use this also, but it can be hit or miss depending on your system (works fine on my win7 but not on vista): http://www.subspace.co/files/file/28-continuum-resizer/ It also helps to increase the font size in-game.

Find: (.*) Replace: \4

Shazam! Just some of my humble input (if I can remember anything)... In the days that alpha served it's original purpose, there were 300 people and 4 pub arenas. The original, original alpha had no real sysop or staff. There was one admin who was responsible for (on a business professional-ish level) a number of the SVS zones, including chaos and others. We asked for 3 of us to be granted sysop access in alpha, and that sysop was glad to hand it to us and he took more and more of a backseat role in all the zones overall. Eventually all the server and ownership issues and crap all happened and we found ourselves with no formal ties to anyone or any other zone, aside from the friends and acquaintances along the way. We mostly followed chaos and was hosted wherever they were, as well as DZ and some others others... this is how the community was originally partitioned. Later on, TW was started and hogged all the players and newbs because the action level was higher and the gameplay was stupidly easy and straightforward... the learning curve consisted of how long it took for you to memorize the map. Point being, the SS community has always been a rag-tag group of hosts and admins and websites, AND their vets. That's really the only reason the game is around now. So, onto a new alpha... it needs to be about the players, not the gameplay or learning curve. The reason that players stick with the game is due to their overall experience, and different people want different things, but what ALL players want chat. Chit-chat. Why have so many people stayed around in spec? Why did the players with 8000ms pings from australia stick around? One thing that alpha had, was that there was always a player or 10 willing to shout out help to people and be 100% newb friendly, like a welcoming squad. We had talked in the past about using bots to create training scenarios, and advancing through a training course, as a subarena function. This game's simplicity and capability is just nuts, and that's what a lot of others got hooked on. A lot of people want to contribute content and man hours to help a cause. People wanted to learn and share back then, and they want it now, too. Vets or no vets, that never mattered as a newb. It just gave you goals over a longer period of time, a list of players to beat up and dominate.

My archive of this stuff is so huge, it would stop the internet in it's tracks. But since no one has even remembered alpha through all this, I will refrain from posting any of it.

As mentioned in another thread, I'm pretty sure the minimum downgrade energy is set too high, active SVS98 setting feels like about 400 but should be closer to 150. I still can't believe the zone named CHAOS has non-chaotic shrap! Heresy, I say!

I've always wished players understood how ship/zone settings worked. They could answer a lot of their own questions about what is possible. Maybe that's asking too much because it kinda requires you to run a zone to learn the nitty gritty and limits of many settings... It would still be nice if they at least looked at a settings file and understood how they function, especially with what the bots can/can't do. Sysop commands are kinda the same... you don't want to start with 0 bounty and then just green. 0 bounty = 0 speed/thrust etc = takes FOREVER to get enough stats to even make greening productive. You can start at 0 bounty and have the bots green you with exactly the greens needed... but then ploss might make it miss a couple and you get a massive spam with each new ship. Ship recycling real quick can cause doubling up depending on the prizes granted and lag. For the record, SVS settings are much more than just what the ship stats are and the special item properties. One thing I noticed today in SVS98 settings is that the minimum downgrade energy is way higher than it's supposed to be. But the SVS98 setting currently active is probably at about 400, and it should be around 150 or something, if I remember correctly. Prizeweights seem off a bit too... but maybe I'm remembering settings for a different zone that did real SVS

You can't please everyone. If you stay the same, you stagnate and die. If you try to change, your core players leave. You can't measure the effects of change either, so basically you just do stuff. The loudest person gets their way. Then they quiet down. Then someone else is now the loudest voice. And the cycle continues.

Full damage & Random Shrap!

Welcome back to the real world! You've done a lot for the game and you shouldn't have any regrets about stay or leaving. Life goes on... You'll always be a newbie to me!

The tiles are still 16x16 though, in the end you will end up fitting 2 ships thru each empty tile that provides a 'door'. We did this same thing years ago too, we had a mini in alpha. It makes you feel like there is a ton of space, but it doesn't actually DO anything for you. Take those screeners, and scale and crop them to 800x480 and imagine yourself reading chat and trying to control your ship and all your weapons. An external keyboard will definately be required just to play & use weapons & chat. I really really WANT this to not be true... but seriously, just imagine trying to play like this. Also consider that most other tablet and phone games have much less functions/buttons and are mostly 'point and click'. I'm not suggesting that anyone STOP developing SS/Continuum/anyOtherClient, I'm just suggesting that those who are going this route, trying to bring the game to the mainstream platforms of today, might consider taking a couple steps back and re-evaluating what they can do to further the community. Basically, forget about making a mobile/facebook/etc client, and focus on the game on a PC, where it's pretty much guaranteed to stay. Along similar lines, has anyone made an external chat client that is stable, multi-platform and doesn't require anyone to be on spcial VIP lists or have sysadmin access? I've always wanted that on a phone

Subspace is/was a great game. Awesome community, awesome people (most of em). To put this simply, the game requires high resolution. Most PC monitors and televisions now are 1920x1080 for HD video. For those of you who used to drool about the dell and apple monitors that do 2560x2048 know what I'm talking about. In this day and age of handheld devices and HD mainstream, subspace can never excel. The game simply isn't anywhere near as enjoyable at 800x480 as it is at 1600x1200. Even dropping to the resolutions of HD is like playing through a mail slot in a door. The game with thrive only as long as there are players out there with monitor purchases dedicated to this game. But playing on a tablet or phone... never gonna happen. Sorry to be a downer, but I just dropped in after many years and saw this topic and thought I would share with the community the same struggles that were apparent 5-10 years ago. And hi Polix, Ulti, Jenn_B, NfS, hallu and all the others that are still lurking about. Glad to see some of ya all are still keeping it going. Have fun! http://bargeld.us/storage/alpha.gif

I found this post in an attempt to figure out why Alpha was showing up in the directory servers with 10 population, but with the inability to connect to it. The zone *should* not be available or listed at all. I will throw a curveball into all of this ownership stuff and mention the idea of commonlaw. After 7 years in many US states, a couple living together is regognized by that state as a married couple. Apply a similar concept to Alpha Zone (east west Zone, whatever you wanna call it.) I was one of the original 3 sysops to the zone, appointed by Minbari Warship back in 1997/98. I was the last standing of those 3 sysops for roughly 7-8 years, running the zone solo, with a staff. The map is from the CD. The original tileset is from the CD. The orange/blue (newer) tileset is MINE, I created it (not psyops). The zone settings are 98% SVS from the CD, with the exception of new lag settings, which were introduced sometime in the middle when new software was developed, as well as some changes to the amount of greens and freq size (due to lower population). The zone was up and running until one day psyops shot me an e-mail that went something along the lines of 'btw I made some changes to pub, come look'. I looked, and sure enuf, he had added this dynamic 'wall' that expanded and shrunk as population changed. After some bickering (as was common between us, as Psy was for change, and I was for preservation) Psy refused to accept my wishes. Because the zone had an average population of 4 (2 bots and 2 afk in private subarenas) for more than a year or two, I decided that it would be better to shelve the zone and house it's arena in Chaos and secure an SSC slot for Psyops so that he could continue his development in his own zone BattleSVS. At the time (and also recently) Psy refused to accept the slot and so BattleSVS never came to fruition. Most recently, I heard that Psy had purchase a website for alpha and was petitioning to have Alpha reinstated as a zone under his management. This is when I stepped in again, had it out (again) with psy, and came to the same result (again). He took his new alpha site down for a week or so, but brought it back up again. I have learned that Alpha West has been listed in the directory servers in the aforementioned state for about as long. Back to square one... I still exist. I still have continuum installed. I'm still on the council forums and my account still functions on this forum. I still pop into Chaos from time to time. I have also dedicated about 12 years to Alpha zone. Circling back to the concept of commonlaw marriage, shouldn't this continue to allow me to call the shots for Alpha (Zone)? If you want to really get into ownership... BDE owns SVS and could very well shut down continuum in a legal battle if they decided to take the proper actions. Priitk made a copyright infringing client for a dying game that got shelved, yet maintains a feeble population of 1000 players or more. It is unmarketable from a financial gains standpoint, which is why we are allowed to persist. Everything else here is based on respect and long term relationships forged over more than a decade. SSCouncil are not Vangels. We do not own the game any more than anyone else. As any long term member of the SSC should attest to, we have been at the whim of Ghost Ship for a decade. Once Priitk abandoned this project, GS was left in the wake and still remains to this day. Ultimately, any requests and any ability that any player make or has, can be removed by GS alone. This is not a slight to you at all, Ghost. The game has run quite smoothly given the aforementioned reality that we have dealt with. The SSCouncil has the needed organization to maintain order as needed amoungst those connected to central billing. The billing ops and other high-end admins have also played their roles throughout the years. But I will mention that there is almost NO member within these circles that hasn't been accused of some form or corruption at one time or another. People have come and gone and the only thing that has persisted through all of this are the memories of friends and acquantances, and the knowledge and respect that these Sysops, Admins, 'owners', and the like have kept. If there are still requests with regards to Alpha Zone, I can bring up the sentiments of many from our community... some are for it and some are against it... for many differing reasons. But ultimately I would request that the zone continue to stay down, as Psyop's 'version' of Alpha Zone is not Alpha Zone. Psy deserves BattleSVS with his battleBot from UDP and his own decision making. But that zone should stick to the guidelines that have existed for years with regards to infrigement on other zones. BTW, hi everybody

It's not really a bug, it just happens because that's how the multiplayer part of the game is made. There is really no way to correct it.

You need to create a shortcut to the new continuum039pr1.exe. The shortcut you are using is referring back to the old .38 version and throws an error. View the FAQ thread at the top of the Tech support forum for more info.

The way that all 'ongoing' traces function allows it to happen. It doesn't trace to the destination and then take hop times from there. It determines the path during the initial stages of starting the trace, then I queries each IP address along the way, one at a time. So if you happen to have a moment of network traffic at an earlier hop, you can get an ms ping. The latency clears up and the next hop reports back normally, at 10 ms. Client -> Hop 1 (10 ms) Client -> Hop 2 (10 ms) Client -> Hop 3 ( ms - cuz there was some network traffic while sending to this IP) Client -> Hop 4 (10 ms - the temporary network traffic has subsided and therefore doesnt impact this ping) Client -> Hop 5 (10 ms) etc. Then it repeats. This is why, when you watch a trace from the main menu of Continuum, the time it takes to update each hop, as it progresses, takes longer than a single ping to the destination. The time it takes to update each hop should be about the same as the latency to that hop (which it reports) + the latency of the return trip (which isn't reported) + processing time.

Put them in the "skins" folder. If you don't have one, make it (c:\program files\continuum\skins)

If you can find out what device is having the problme (video card, sound card, network card, etc.) physically remove that device before booting and see if you can reload drivers for it manually.

Some DNS servers don't properly route to certain IP addresses. If you are using a router/gateway, use DHCP to dish out the IP addresses and DNS servers to your computer (set your network TCP/IP settings to "automatic". That's probably not the prob tho, seeing as how you can ping it... my bad. I think it's firewall related, because ping uses a different port and application to hit the directory server vs. continuum. You probably need to disable your firewall or confire it to allow continuum unlimited access to the internet. It probably worked on your old computer because a warning popped up the first time and you allowed it access... after that it never asked again, nor caused probs.