Stefan's Player Utilities

On this page, you find my player utilities. Most of their functionality is also included in my client program, Planets Command Center (PCC).

CCBSim

CCBSim is a multi-ship battle simulator, based upon PCC's built-in simulator. It does not require you to have PCC, but if you have it, it will benefit from the installed PCC add-ons.

• supports up to 200 ships plus one planet/starbase;
• supports THost, PHost 2, PHost 3 and PHost 4;
• easy-to-use graphical interface -- like in PCC;
• fast! up to 200 VCRs per second on a Pentium 200;
• can be used as a standalone battle viewer;
• simulates ship abilities: PlanetImmunity, Commander, FullWeaponry;
• This version corresponds to the simulator from PCC 1.1.21, with support for the recent PHost options EModPlanetaryTorpsPerTube and UseBaseTorpsInCombat and FLAK added.

A 32-bit successor to CCBSim, PlayVCR, is available as part of the PCC2 project. It is a native Windows program and is even faster than CCBSim.

CCShips

CCShips is a utility to view ship specifications. It was written as a companion to PCC, but can also be used standalone. If you already have a `ships' type program or a printed ship list, you may not need this, otherwise this is a convenient thing to have on your disk.

CCShips can also edit the extended hull specification used by PCC.

New: supports shiplist.txt resp. hullfunc.txt and all PHost 4.0i features. Updated to include the fixes to PCC 1.1.16.

ViewMess

ViewMess is a quick and easy message-reader. My original intention when writing this tool was to have something to save messages into files with. This is the function this program does best: it can save and print your incoming message traffic.

The message reader itself is a text-mode program, so it is very fast. It can display both incoming and outgoing messages. However, support for outgoing messages was added as a last-minute hack, and does not yet support Winplan. PCC can view and edit all outgoing messages.

However, a feature unique to ViewMess is that it can view messages from a result file without unpacking it. So it is the ideal companion to MGrep.

This is version 1.2 which had lurked on my hard disk for several ages; it now supports files >64k (duh!) and has a "skip group" command (Tab key) to quickly advance through a message file.

MGrep

"So, you say I owe you five ships. Didn't we say, one Cube for four loads of fighters?"

If you often find yourself asking things like this, you need MGrep. This little command line utility can scan all your message files for messages containing a specific phrase. It searches in everything that looks like it contains a Planets message:

• `inbox' files
• `outbox' files (DOS and Windows format)
• TRN files
• RST files
• VPA databases
• ZIP and RAR archives of any of the above

So, all you need to do is to archive all your RSTs to find your messages again later (PCC can do this, or a little batch file tailored around your unpack command).

This is version 1.3d with some fixes to allow it to search in really big message files.

A new and updated version of MGrep is included with PCC2 as c2mgrep.

Check

Check (please excuse the unimaginative name) is a turn checker. Unlike most programs of this type, it operates on client files.

This program aims to help people whose turn is rejected by their host. The most-often given advice in such situations is to redo the turn, because you usually do not know exactly what is wrong. Check tries to locate inconsistencies in your game directory and give you an exact identification of the problem. You can then use a program such as PCC or Tanascius to reset only the affected objects. So you have to redo only a fraction of your turn, not everything.

Version 0.2 can check a TRN file against a RST without the need for unpacking. This makes it usable easily at host-side. Note that it is not possible to check a lone TRN without further data; a turn file contains too little information to allow a full-scale consistency check. Version 0.2 also adds the ability to generate HTML log files for inclusion in web-based turn checker output.

Version 0.4 adds some optional extra checks that help you in debugging problems.

New: Version 0.5 adds an extra option "/Z" to hide problems caused by stray "-1" values that are most of the time harmless.