Stonewall will be banging “Stonewall’s Suprise” tonight at 8:00PM EST over at the Deep South TWGS. This will be Stonewall’s first attempt at a large edited game. He says there will be a few ships and new odd planets for players to find and the rest will have to be “figured” out. Sounds fun! Go check it out!

The GodFather of Trade Wars himself has made a dupe catcher so advanced, it is mind boggling. When I was a sysop at Intergate, I thought Andrew’s dupe catching tools were pretty cool. And then I go and read the following message Eleq posted in Egroups , or should I say, YahooGroups (more on that later).

I have created a new dupe catching program that is outrageously lethal to those who cheat.

It can catch dupes over a wide variety of IP addresses. Even if the cheating user logs in from different IP addresses for each of his dupes, he can still be caught! The dupe catcher employs up to 15 different techniques to identify potential abusers.

Using the logs from Fusion, it tracks and analyzes massive amounts of data to look for known duper patterns that I’ve identified over my years of being a sysop and player. I choose not to reveal exactly how this is being done, but it would be extremely difficult to avoid it. To give you an idea…the code is extremely optimized, but it still takes a AMD Duron 650 up to 30 mins to analyze and process all the data from the logs.

The first run of the new program identified a large (and disheartening) number of dupes that could of never of been traced using IP alone. Right now, they are not being deleted, but only blocked until they can contact me and explain their situation.

EleqTriziT
Sys Admin – The Stardock BBS

I’m very very impressed on this, Eleq. A very nice job. Andrew would be so proud

As you obviously can see, you’re looking at the new design of TRADEWARS.WS. I decided yesterday that I was going to cut out most of the parts that I have not had the time to finish and just launch the site with what I did have done. The other features will come gradually, but I’m not going to release any specific dates at this point. So enjoy what’s here for now and keep checking back for more!

I see someone shelled out the $1,500 (that’s what it was when I last inquired) for the domain name of TRADEWARS.COM finally (I knew of three other groups of people that were thinking about buying it for original TW purposes). And along with it: Trade Wars: Dark Millenium…the next step to the text-based game we all know and love. Looks like it could be really cool…but in some ways this news really disturbs me. Is this going to take the place of the text-based game that we have all become extremely addicted to over the years? I guess we’ll find out. Official site to be launched February 15th.On a different note: For a similar online game in development (Freelancer) check out this site: The Lancers Reactor (unofficial site)… This game is in a totally different league than the upcoming TW: DM game and looks to be very addicting.

ust a reminder that the second TWLeague game of the year will be starting this Saturday (Jan. 27th) over at The Deep South TWGS. The game will be a standard game (Type A) with no changes except those needed to accomodate the open game. Starting time will be 8:00pm EST.The first game of the year has already begun at the Family Entertainment Network and there is still time to get in that game before it closes!

Again, these games are open registration to everyone. They require no previous registration and you do NOT have to be a member of the TWLeague in order to participate. If you are a member of the league and want to receive points for the game (if you place), make sure you log into the TWGS with your TWLeague alias or else points will not be awarded. You can have a different name within the game however. If you would like more details or have any questions head over the the TWLeague web site and e-mail the board members with inquiries.

Xide seems to be working away on his TWX Proxy helper. In this message he tells us about one of his scripts to be released with the second script pack for TWXP. It is a helpful script for unlimited games…I have a similar one for ZOC. Xide states that the final release version of the ‘World SSM’ script will not be as powerful however. I haven’t had the chance to test out TWX Proxy yet, but I hear it’s pretty cool. (Official Web Site)

As some of you may well know, eGroup.com was purchased by Yahoo! back in August. Well they finally have everything converted over it seems. For those of you that haven’t already you will need to proceed to the site to convert your eGroups account into a Yahoo! account. You can do that and read more about the acquiring of eGroups by Yahoo! by clicking here.

Fuseblown wanted some “air time” to respond to my article so I granted his request. Follows is his thoughts on his plans for his website:

“I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses for everything that I have been trying to do recently–and have failed to do so–but it may sound like that anyway. I feel that I should give some sort of an explanation to the visitors of my Trade Wars site, TRADEWARS.WS.

I realize I should not have announced the redesign of the web site per Timberwolf’s advice on TWGazette.com. My main plan was to take down the old design and just put up the splash page until the new design was done so that I didn’t have to worry about posting news on a regular basis and try to get the redesign done at the same time.

Wham, bam, things happened (as they always seem to do) and at the moment I’m juggling four web sites at work and four at home, NOT including TRADEWARS.WS and the other subsequent sites that go along with it (TWPA, etc.). Obviously my work takes priority over my personal endeavors and I just haven’t had the time to get the redesign finished to my liking.

For now, what I am going to do is take my previous design out of the closet, dust it off, and relaunch it. I will update news as often as I can and the site will probably be ‘toned down’ a bit from when you last saw it. Gradually, as time allows, things will come together and you will see a new face on TRADEWARS.WS, but not for a little while.

That’s it for now and I apologize. See ya in the USO everyone.

Thank you Fuseblown, for that insight on the progress of your website. You heard it here first folks – TWGazette.com – the best Trade Wars news site in the business 🙂

I recently started working on my personal home page, which will be a subsection of Kitty’s Playground, and will cover a broad range of topics and interests, especially music, for which I’ve installed and configured a RealServer in order to provide streaming audio feeds of my favorite music.  In the next couple weeks I may start doing some live broadcasts.  This is more for my own benefit (self-teaching myself the ins and outs of streaming multimedia), but if you’re a fan of punk, ska, heavy metal, euro-trash, industrial, or alternative (real alternative, not the fake $hit they play on the radio), get those RealPlayers updated and ready to tune in…TW-radio.com anyone?  ;o)

TWX Proxy, a new Tradewars helper that can work in conjunction with other helpers, has just been released into beta. The program is free, except for the upcoming “script packs” which will not. I thought I’d ask Xide a few quick question:

Once again, the web makes the life of a mooch like my self much harder. I guess I’ll just have to be thankful for the free animated porn I got the other day.