Advanced Features The Portable Host Version 4.0a Jump to Table of Contents

Index

• Introduction
• Non-standard Race Assignments
  • Missions and Racial Abilities
  • Ship List
• Message Filtering
• Wraparound Universe
  • Setting up a Wraparound Universe
  • Playing in a Wraparound Universe
  • How Wraparound Works

Introduction

This document describes PHost's advanced features, how to set them up and how to play with them. It is intended for players and hosts.

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Non-standard Race Assignments

PHost allows any player to play any race in the game. This is accomplished with the PlayerRace config option. This option has 11 entries, with each entry specifying the race that the given player is to play. For example:

PlayerRace = 1,1,1,1,1,6,6,6,6,6,6

This has players 1 through 5 playing The Federation, and players 6 through 11 playing The Borg. A race value of 12 is also accepted, meaning that the given player will have no special racial abilities.

New v4.0: PHost 4 goes even a step further and allows to customize the special missions available to the player separately, using the PlayerSpecialMission option. This is intended for design games with custom races. By default, this option has the same value as PlayerRace.

Missions and Racial Abilities

In the client program, the special mission listed for each race will not change, so the player needs to remember that his special mission may be different, depending upon his race assignment. For example, if player 11 selects the special mission on one of his ships then the client program will show the mission as Build Fighters. But if player 4 has been assigned race 5, then the ship will actually perform the Rob mission. Using the Special Mission extended mission can bypass this confusion.

It is suggested that players edit the mission.ini file to have the Special Mission extended mission reflect their true special mission, and use this extended mission instead of the usual one.

Some client programs may refuse to set your special mission. For example, the Build Fighters is only permitted for fighter ships, so a client program will not allow the Privateer-playing player 11 to set this mission on a torpedo ship. Using mission 31 instead also avoids this problem.

The following table summarizes the abilities controlled by these two options:

For example, if a race has PlayerRace=7 and PlayerSpecialMission=7, he plays a "standard" Crystal. Giving him PlayerSpecialMission=6 instead, he'll still be like desert planets and be immune to glory devices, but will no longer be able to lay web mines or tow-capture. Instead, he'll be able to repair in space.

Not all of the possible combinations make sense. Unless you explicitly want to try out the new possibilities, we strongly recommend anyone to not have a PlayerSpecialMission option in his game, so that only the 11 standard races are used.

Many other racial abilities are configured by array options. When playing with non-standard race abilities, you have to change them manually. Options which fall into that category:

• AntiCloakImmunity (normally, Feds, Lizards and Birds are immune)
• ColonistTaxRate, NativeTaxRate (normally, Feds have 200%, others have 100%)
• ExtraFighterBays (normally, Feds get 3, others get none)
• FighterSweepRate, FighterSweepRange (normally, only Colonies may use this; all others have value 0)
• GroundKillFactor, GroundDefenseFactor (normally, Lizards have 30/10 bonus and Klingons have 15/5)
• RaceMiningRate (normally, Feds have 70%, Lizards have 200%, rest has 100%)
• ShipCloneCostRate (normally, Crystals and Privateers have high values to make cloning un-attractive);
• UnitsPerTorpRate (normally, Robots have 4X bonus)

Ship List

Each race can build a unique set of ships; this set is defined in a file truehull.dat. When playing with non-standard race assignments, host and clients have to agree upon a consistent (and sensible) interpretation of that file. This is what PHost's MapTruehullByPlayerRace option is for.

Normally, the truehull.dat is indexed by player number (MapTruehullByPlayerRace=No). All client programs can handle this interpretation. However, the host must modify the file accordingly; for the above example, it must contain five Federation ship sets, and six Cyborg ship sets.

In order to generate such a file, you need Penguin (version 2 or higher) or its clone, Peng (version 0.2 or higher).

• Decompile the ship list (penguin -d);
• Copy the PlayerRace assignment from pconfig.src into truedat.txt;
• Recompile the ship list (penguin -r);
• Send the newly-generated files to your players.

You can also freely edit the ship assignments if you wish.

In case all players use client programs which can handle it, you can also set MapTruehullByPlayerRace to Yes. This instructs the client programs to do the above remapping. The advantage is that you can use unmodified standard ship list files; the disadvantage is that it fails when someone uses a different client.

Programs that are known handle MapTruehullByPlayerRace as of December 2002 are VPA and Planets Command Center.

The special ship abilities are sometimes considered racial abilities. However, it only depends on the truehull.dat file who can build which ships; if you allow the Fed player to build MCBRs, the Fed will have a gravitonic cloaker, although that is usually considered a Privateer ability.

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Message Filtering

Many people use programs which can read util.dat and display it graphically. Examples of such programs are EchoView, VPA 3.61 and PCC.

Since util.dat contains mostly the same information as the subspace messages, it is somewhat redundant to have both. In addition, player messages can become overwhelming, especially in the later stages of the game, when mine scan messages, sensor sweep messages, dark sense messages, etc. can leave a player with over 200 messages to deal with.

The idea behind message filtering is that the utilities mentioned above will display the information they got from util.dat, and present the information to you visually, so there's no need to read it textually.

Players can turn on message filtering themselves, without host intervention, using the filter command. When filtering is enabled, the following messages will be suppressed:

• Mine Scan reports (but not sweeping or laying)
• Dark Sense reports
• Super Spy reports
• Exploration reports
• Sensor Sweep and Bioscan reports
• Wormhole scans
• Meteor shower messages

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Wraparound Universe

PHost implements one model of a wraparound universe. In a wraparound universe, ships that fly off the "edge" of the map appear on the other side of the universe. Thus, the universe behaves more like a sphere (or a torus) than a plane. For example, in the original VGA Planets map, you can fly from (1010,2000) due west (heading of 270) and after 20 LY of travel you will appear on the other side, at (2990,2000), where you will continue on your journey flying due west.

A wraparound universe allows players to make more use of all areas on the game map. Depending upon placement of homeworlds, there need not be any more "dead" areas that take a long time to reach and may never even be explored. A wraparound universe also gives each player more neighbors, thus leading to greater interaction between players. Races on opposite sides of the universe that used to be distant unknowns can now be neighbors.

Setting up a Wraparound Universe

To enable the wraparound universe, set AllowWraparoundMap to Yes. In addition, you have to define the wraparound rectangle using the WraparoundRectangle config option. The wraparound rectangle confines all map objects (ships, planets, minefields, etc.). Any ship, for example, that exits the wraparound region reappears within the wraparound region on the other side.

Note that unlike ships and minefields, planets outside of the wraparound region are not remapped onto the region. If a planet is outside of the wraparound region, then PHost pretends that the planet does not exist. This allows custom maps with fewer than 500 planets to be used. Just place the planets outside the wraparound rectangle. Usual map editing tools place such planets at coordinates like Y=0 or Y=9000 which is just fine.

The WraparoundRectangle config option is an array of 4 values. The first 2 values define the X and Y co-ordinates (respectively) of the lower-left corner of wraparound region. The last 2 values define the X and Y co-ordinates of the upper-right corner of the wraparound region.

Note that, since PHOST 3.3c, the extreme top and right co-ordinates are no longer part of the map. In older versions they were, which could lead to the strange situation that a ship that moves from Y=2999 one ly to the north would end up at Y=3000, while one that moves 2 ly to the north and back one ly to the south would land at Y=1000.

For example,

WraparoundRectangle = 1500,1000,2500,3000

defines a universe where possible X co-ordinates range from 1500 to 2499, and possible Y co-ordinates range from 1000 to 2999.

Here is another common setting:

WraparoundRectangle = 1000,1000,3000,3000

This provides a standard-sized map which is seamlessly wrapped.

No co-ordinate of the wraparound region may be less than 0 or greater than 10000. In fact, it is recommended that the wraparound region be located away from these boundaries (e.g., don't make the lower-left corner closer to the origin than (1000,1000)) for proper operation of many external programs.

The WraparoundRectangle config option has no effect if AllowWraparoundMap is not enabled.

Playing in a Wraparound Universe

Wraparound universes can be a challenge to work with when you have to imagine your ships flying from one edge of the universe to another within a single turn. Landing on planets on the opposite side of the map, for example, requires much planning. Fortunately, some client-side programs are currently available that replicate the map (i.e., they tile the plane with the map) so that cross-boundary motions are much easier to visualize and plan.

• VPA (a DOS client program) supports square wraparound maps centered at (2000,2000).
• PCC (a DOS client program) supports almost all wraparound maps (map size must be even).
• EchoView (a Windows information tracking utility) supports square maps of arbitrary size and position.

Since wraparound maps are rather popular, most other new tools should also support it.

How Wraparound Works

The most important rule about wraparound is: there is no special rule. All processes work seamlessly across the map border. When a ship sits at the left border and moves to the left, it will appear on the right. When a minefield with 100 LY radius is 50 LY from a border, it will reach over the border, 50 LY into the opposite quadrant.

Caveat: There's one caveat to watch out for. When you set a very long waypoint ("1900 ly to the right"), the ship may move in an unexpected direction. PHost will always move ships along the shortest possible path to their waypoint, possibly using a wrap boundary to make the journey shorter.

Caveat 2: External add-on programs may not know about or respect the wraparound settings. Thus, they may move ships outside the wraparound region, and not modify their effects to take wraparound into account. PHost will move all ships outside of the wraparound region back into the region, but there may be other interactions that are not so easy to predict. Check with the documentation of the add-on program for any mention of wraparound support.

Sphere and PWrap: It is not recommended to use Sphere or PWrap with PHost. Although these add-ons also implement a wraparound universe, they can not deliver the full integration as PHost does. For example, minefields near a border will not reach into the opposite quadrant with these add-ons. You should definitely never use Sphere or PWrap when AllowWraparoundMap is enabled.

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This document is maintained by The Portable Host Project (support@phost.de).

Last updated 18 May 2003.