Work and debugging continue on the EXTERN replacement. Here's the
status as of 31 March 1995. This (TW2EXT10.ZIP) is the third
release. Here is a summary of actions:

1.  Delete inactive players, ships and corporations.

2.  Make unowned fighters, mines and planets turn rogue.  Rogue 
    Limpets have no real use, so they are removed. Does not
    clear attached unowned Limpets from a Ship.

3.  Clear NavHaz by configuration-set percentage.

4.  Clear busts and destroyed ports every 14 days.  Posts additional
    info to Daily Journal only if Stardock is displayed on "V" screen.

5.  Clear Ferrengi grudges against deleted players and corps.

6.  Remove heavily-armed (>100 fighters) players from FedSpace,
    and excessive players from FedSpace. They're evicted to
    some random sector clear of any fighters, mines, planets or
    NavHaz. No guarantee that the sector has a clear warp path
    out to anywhere else, however.  In practice, it should not
    be a problem.  2.05 seems not to have "orphan" Sectors.

7.  Add regenerated Ferrengi fighters if their sector isn't blocked.
    A limit of 250,000 fighters is set. Also adds 2 mines per day.

8.  Appoint new Corporation CEO if the old one is deleted.
    A random somebody is better than no one at all...

9.  Subtract 5% experience for opposite-aligned Corp members.

10. Port construction. Needed product must already be on a planet 
    in that sector. Clears blown-up ports to make room for new ones.
    Corrects all Ports to correct Class for what they buy/sell. This
    adjusts the phantom Class 0 Ports.

11. Cloaking failure using configuration chance percentage. First 24
    hours guaranteed, after that the Cloak Fail percentage determines
    if it fails. 

12. Overloaded sectors.  Collides the *least valuable* planets first 
    if Photon Missiles are enabled. Otherwise, collisions are totally
    random. Also adds 10% NavHaz per destroyed planet.

13. Patrol the Major Space Lanes.  Removes fighters/mines/NavHaz.
    If it finds a Level 3 or higher planet, it drops it to Level 2
    and evicts it to another sector. If a planet is Level 2 or less,
    it is not changed.  The MSLs are stored in a small .DAT file.
    That way they do not have to be generated each time, and they
    can't change mysteriously. I've seen a couple of posts on that.
    Many thanks to Albin Gersich for the .EXE to create the MSL.TXT
    file.

14. A flag was put in to allow EXTERN to only run once a day.

15. Code added to find and correct if two Players are in the same 
    ship number. "Two Players, One Ship" problem. (Ship Records Bug)
    Nowhere near a complete fix, but it helps a lot.

16. Unmanned ships are evicted from FedSpace.  It'll give a player
    (and anyone else!) a chance to reclaim it.

17. Puts text messages in the appropriate files for EXTERN actions.
    
18. Restocks ports until full (at 20 days since last use).

19. If player turns are less than 0, or greater than the turns/day, then
    sets the player turns to 0. Minimizes 32,000 turn bug.

20. Clear/organize TWSMF.DAT (message) file. Delete unneeded messages.

21. Make sure #Ship Destroyed# Player is at Sector 0. Otherwise Phantom
    Ships are displayed.

22. Limits daily Port production to 3250 *only* if Port is unused for 
    greater than 10 days. This allows Megaports, while correcting some
    other port problems. Also makes a minimum daily rate of 75.

23. Planet #1 (Terra) is ignored by all routines. There is no reason to
    even look at Terra in EXTERN. 

24. Added routine to prune the TWOPENG.DAT file to the Log Limit
    specified in the configuration.

25. Made sure that if a Player is in a ship, that it's active and owned
    by them or their Corp.
 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bugs fixed (9A):
1. When a Port finishes construction, many times the TWOPENG.DAT and
   TWGAME.LOG files have many extra lines added. Fixed pointer.

2. Some boards apparently did not get all the files. There should be:
   EXTERN.SCH  EXTERN.TXT  EXTDOC.TXT  TW_MSL.EXE  EXTINSTL.BAT

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bugs fixed (10): 
1. Occasionally wiped clear ports in FedSpace.

Please let me know of any problems/weirdness encountered. Also, user
comments on what could be changed to improve the game are welcome.
craig.healy@chowda.com

