[Plantool-developer] [Fwd: [Announce] PHost 4.0e/3.4h]

[Maurits v. R. <ma...@va...>]

Hello guys,

A new version of Phost is out. Some of it may affect stats. The most 
relevant parts of the announcement are below.

See of course http://phost.de/

Maurits


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [phostdev] [Announce] PHost 4.0e/3.4h
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 14:53:51 +0100
From: Stefan Reuther <st...@gm...>
Reply-To: pho...@ya...
To: PHost Development <pho...@ya...>

New year, new host.

PHost 4.0e and 3.4h are out now. As usual, fixes and a handful of new
stuff. This is the complete change list, items only available in the
4.0 line are marked {v4 only}.


>>> FIXES

Our topic-of-the-month is Fuel:

+ With AccurateFuelModel enabled, it was hard to have a ship end a turn
   with exactly 0 fuel. If you have 3 kt fuel on your ship, and your
   move burns 2.2 kt, you'll have 1 kt remaining on the ship after
   movement. Okay, you would say, to end with 0 kt, remove 1 kt. But
   now, PHost says that 2 kt is too little to move for 2.2 kt. This has
   been fixed so that PHost now considers rounding in all places
   correctly. You can now always "burn" up to 0.5 kt more than you have.

>>> WORMHOLES

This version wants to simplify play with wormholes.

+ wormhole scanning now happens after movement, just before sensor
   sweep. The main benefit is that once you travel through a
   bidirectional wormhole, you see the other end.               {v4 only}

+ wormhole scan util.dat records now include all information about the
   wormhole; it was missing the Ufo number and whether the wormhole is
   bidirectional.

+ there is a new option WrmScanRange, whose default value is 100 (half
   of SensorRange). A ship will scan all wormholes within that range.
   The intention is to make wormhole scanning more regular (like
   minesweep which sees all minefields in range, not just the closest
   or biggest ones). The old rules still apply, that is, you see a
   wormhole if it is within range, OR if it can be seen according to
   the old rules. To achieve the old behaviour, set WrmScanRange to
   0. If you want to make wormhole positions public, set it to a big
   value such as 10000.                                         {v4 only}

   To not make ScansAllWormholes ships useless, these see wormholes
   within twice this range.


>>> NEW & CHANGES

BUILD FIGHTERS. There is now a BuildFighters option replacing
ColoniesBuildFighters etc. which can be used to allow every race to
use 'lfm'. An option to configure the costs will follow (you probably
should NOT use that option yet. Fed or EE with cheap fighters -
unstoppable).                                                  {v4 only}

TOWING. PHost now does explicit tow loop resolution. Previously, you
could get PHost into "panic mode" where it cancels tows shotgun-like
(imagine what you do if your web browser suddenly pops up hundreds of
windows - just that's what I mean with "panic mode" :-) The algorithm
is now deterministic and documented.

In addition, there is now an option TowedShipsCooperate=Yes/No/Allies;
if this is enabled, towed ships will not attempt to overpower towee's
tractor beam. That is, your warp-3 freighter can tow a warp-9
battlestar.                                                    {v4 only}


DOCUMENTATION. Docs were improved (the 4.0d->4.0e diff consists of 50%
doc changes). There's now a chapter on tow resolution, several
mistakes fixed, etc. The v4.0 docs now have the rudiments of a
formulas document, although I'm not yet entirely happy with it.