VGA Planets HOST 3.22 - HOST Version 3.22.047 New in this release: Host 3.22.047 additional Loki check after auxbc.ini to support Sphere Host 3.22.046 Fixed: Another intercept math error Fixed: Ship to ship transfer problems between ally ships Host 3.22.043 Fixed: Intercept math error New: Warp wells pull in ships with speeds greater than 1 and on an intercept mission Host 3.22.042 Changed: Ships with and intercept mission and a speed of 0 are allowed to intercept. The change in 39 to block this was a bad idea, it broke several add-on that use intercept with speed 0 as a targeting command system. Host 3.22.041 Blocked: If a firecloud hits a web minefield and stops, it can not be used as a chunnel target. Removed: If a planet is taken over from another play the friendly code is randomized. Host 3.22.040 Blocked: A very big cheat, a big hole that client side programs could have taken advantage of Host 3.22.039 Fixed: Ships with and intercept mission and a speed of 0 have their missions reset to nothing New: Two levels of alliance between players. ff and FF, if you use the ship friendly code ff to set an alliance with a friend they can travel through your mines and not fight with you, but no data will be sent to them. If you use the ship friendly code FF to set an alliance with a friend they can travel through your mines and not fight with you, plus they can see all your ships and all the ships that they can see. When you get your message about the FF / ff allies it will read like this: FF / ff Allies Empire 1 yes / yes << That means you are normal first level ff allies with no data sharing Empire 2 YES / yes << You are sending ship data to empire 2, they are not sending any to you Empire 3 YES / YES << You are sending data to empire 3 and they are also sending data to you Empire 7 yes / YES << You are not sending data to empire 7, but they are sending ship data to you Ship Friendly Code: ffx Set a first level alliance with race x (Valid codes: ff1 ff2 ff3 ff4 ff5 ff6 ff7 ff8 ff9 ffa ffb ) Ship Friendly Code: FFx set a level two alliance with race x that shares data on your ships and ships that you see with your friend. (Valid codes: FF1 FF2 FF3 FF4 FF5 FF6 FF7 FF8 FF9 FFa FFb) Host 3.22.038 Fixed: Contact data bleeding through to other players when it should not be Host 3.22.037 New: Sends a message telling you who your FF switch allies are New: Produces a new format of RST file, Format 36 New: Any ship that your FF ally has you will be able to see. Any ships that your FF ally can see you can see its location also. Host 3.22.036 Fixed: Q ships and freighters unable to get into a fight Changed: HCONFIG Switch: "Allow VPA Extra Features", If this switch is on VPA players can use their extra features that host normally does not allow, like intercepting ships they can not see on their scanners and transporting cargo to an enemy ship and then reloading cargo onto the ship. These are all things that Winplan does not allow you to do, but VPA does. Host 3.22.035 Fixed: Tech upgrades being ignored Fixed: Error 63 crash while reading a TRN file New: Hack that allowed the uploading of EXE files inside a TRN blocked Host 3.22.034 Fixed: Host not letting you upgrade your torp tech and letting build new high tech torps in the same turn Fixed: You were not able to beam colonists off the planet and at the same time build a great number of defense outposts New: Planet friendly codes are ONLY randomized if the planet is defeated in ship to planet combat Host 3.22.033 Fixed: Bug interduced in release 30 that caused ship to ship transports to fail Host 3.22.032 Cheat Block: Cheat programs that allow transfers from a ship to a firend's cloaked ship. Host 3.22.031 Fixed: Error 63 Cheat Block: Blocks the cheat programs that allows players to build ship parts beyond the base's tech levels Host 3.22.030 Note: see HOST 3.22.024 below for note on starbase fix friends cheats New: When building new structures on a planet any colonists on any ship YOU own in orbit or in transit from the planet counts toward the building limit of the planet. Yes, you can beam people down, build and beam them off in the same turn. The TRN file has all new ship commands before planet commands so the ship's current colonist loadout will be correct before the build structure command is given. Cheat Block: You can only intercept ships that are in scan range of your ship. You can not intercept ships you can not see. Cheat Block: If the sum of the cargo on a ship plus the sum of the cargo in transit to another ship is greater then size of the ship's cargo hold something "bad" happens. (Winplan and planets.exe DOS do not allow this to happen, no program should allow this, because if the target ship is full the transfering ship will end up double loaded. . . now I know the source of the double loaded ship bug reports that came in a while back and lead to cargo trimming cheat block code.) Host 3.22.029 Removed Cheat Block added in 3.22.028 Fix: Normal Building Decay restored HOST 3.22.028 Fix: Privateers no longer immune to NUK in fueless ships with weapons New: Intercepting ships can be sucked in by warp wells Fix: You can intercept your cloaked ships Cheat Block: All buildings that are over the max allowed are deleated, this must be done to stop people with cheat programs from building too many buildings. HOST 3.22.027 Fix: A planet with no defense outposts can not NUK attack Fix: Glory ships can no longer destroy lizard ships with just 100% damage. Fix: Problems with ship building queue using PBP's fixed. A high PBP race that was not building could sometimes block other races from building. Fix: Able to handle 32K TRN files with messages to the host New: A Privateer ship robbing another ship also takes the fuel that is being transfered to another ship or planet New: You are allowed only one cloned ship per planet, period. HOST 3.22.026 Fix: Minefield data was being not being set correctly and was causing conflicts with some addons. New movement math, should run faster. Low speed movement should work better. New movement code written By: don@robomaster.com (Don Friesen) Fix: Minefield sometimes not showing up on the map fixed Fix: Web minefield sometimes blocking the laying of other minefields fixed Fix: Transfering ALL your fuel to a planet no longer causes ALL the cargo to be lost. Fix: When chunneling ALL the fcode charactors must be a number ( 001 to 500 ) Using a letter in any one of the 3 spaces will cause the code to NOT trigger the chunnel. Fix: Chunnel jump message fixed Fix: Cloning is only blocked by a Firecloud if the ship has 50 or more fuel and is at warp 0 New: No PBP's are awarded for colonizing a planet. Fix: "pb" problem fixed, it was only allowing you to use it to build at most 6 ships. Fix: Ion storms causing minefields to not show up fixed. HOST 3.22.025 Fix: Minefields destroy mines bug fixed. Some web mines were being destroyed even with the mines destroy web config turned OFF. Fix: When a ship is intercepting another ship the ships waypoint is set to the ship that will be intercepted just before the Tow movement begins. This is so ships can not break tows with a long waypoint, yet use intercept to move a very short distance. HOST 3.22.024 Fix: Minefields destroy mines bug fixed. High ID normal mines were not destroying lower ID web mines. Distance error was also causing some mines to overlap. Both programs have been fixed. (Math error in host.) Fix: Intermittent low speed movement error for ships going warp 1 inside of a warp wells. (Math error in host.) Cheat Stopped: Check added to make sure that when you are fixing a ship from a starbase that the starbase is really under the ship. (People were cheating by fixing ships from distant starbases using a 3rd party player side program.) Also you can not fix another players ships with your base. Crash Guard: Check added to make sure new ships being built have engines. Some 3rd party player side program was letting players build ships with no engines to fill ship slots. This would sometimes crash host or host side addons. Fix: New cloned ships were getting the friendly code of the ship that last had that slot and was destroyed up until the end of the turn. The code then changed to what it should be and placed in the new RST file. New: A Firecloud at a starbase with more than 50kt of fuel will stop all cloning at the starbase. Cheat Stopped: Check to make sure no starbase has more than 60 fighters. A player side cheat program was allowing more. New: PBP queue changed slightly. If one player has the most PBP points and they were not using them it was blocking other players with more than 21 points from using theirs. Change so that after the player with the most PBP points builds the other players get a chance if they have 21 or more. ** Remember PBP are only used if there are more than 450 ships in the game. Crash Guard: Check added so that players can not build ships with 0 type X beam weapons and crash host. (New 3rd party player side program was doing this.) Crash Guard: Check added so that players can not build ships with 0 type X torp tubes and crash host. (New 3rd party player side program was doing this.) HOST 3.22.023 Fix: If a ship that is being intercepted is destroyed all ships that were intercepting that ship will not begin intercepting the new ship that is built with the same ID number. Fix: If a ship that you are intercepting moves beyond intercept\par range ( 200 ly ) Your ship will no longer loose fuel, the intercept lock will be lost. HOST 3.22.022 Added: An HCONFIG Switch to allow/disallow the Loki from decloaking Bird Men ships. HOST 3.22.021 Bug Fix: Web mine drop using the "miX" friendly code was not adding a new minefield when the ship was already in a web mine field belonging to theirselves. Bird Men: Bird Men learn a new trick . . . The Loki can no longer detect a cloaked ship owned by the Bird Men Bug Fix: Ships have a limited intercept range of 200LY. Bug that was causing ships intercepting ships at ranges of more than 200LY to not move and burn fuel has been fixed. Ships will now just stop moving and burn no fuel when a ship it is intercepting goes beyond 200 LY. HOST 3.22.020 Bug Fix: Error that caused some ships to sometimes not fight fixed. This bug was only in version 3.22.019. HOST 3.22.019 Changed: X,Y waypoint trimming moved to after movement. Will not effect game play in any way. Trimming reduces waypoints to less than 170 LY, so that PLANETS.EXE 3.00 will not crash when it views the game file. This allows player side DOS based movement changers to set waypoints of greater than 170 LY after PLANETS.EXE is exited and before MAKETURN is run. Shareware WINPLAN.EXE can now do exact hyperjumps. ***Note: Using a 3rd party program to change a waypoint to something greater than 170 LY and starting PLANETS.EXE again will crash PLANETS.EXE. HOST 3.22.018 Bug Fix: Error that caused Scanner messages to show only the message header has been fixed. HOST 3.22.017 New: Host writes a file named CLOAKC.HST before running auxbc.ini (500 ints of cloak flags and 500 ints of shield levels) (The cloak flags are read back in after auxbc.ini is done.) Bug Fix: Error that prevented new mines being added to existing mine fields after the 500 ship limit is reached has been fixed. HOST 3.22.016 Anti-Cheat: 3rd party program that allows player to store colonists in a transporter beam has been counteracted. Anti-Cheat: Nameless cheat program from Russia counteracted. Bug Fix: Loki anti cloak bug fix, the Loki was uncloaking distant ships by mistake. Bug Fix: Two small movement error bugs fixed. Host 3.22.015 FIX: You can not clone a ship that is being towed NEW: PBP's are not used until there are more than 450 ships in the game NEW: "PBx" code does not work until there are more than 450 ship in the game NEW: You must be within 200 ly of a ship to intercept it. REDONE: You can now see ally minefields on the map FIX: Fed super refit free tech one engines bug fixed NEW: Starting Ion storms are weaker (1 to 100 max power) Host 3.22.014 FIX: Problem in host 3.22.013 that caused missions on some ship to reset to nothing has been fixed. Host 3.22.013 FIX: HOST will not use more than 15 file handles at once. This should prevent ERROR 67 on older OS's that limit all programs to having no more than 15 files open at once. Host 3.22.012 New: Uses 20280 bytes less memory than 3.22.011 New: Uses LANG.PLN language module so that languages other than english can be used by host in the future. Changed: Small change to birdmen spy / explore. If two ships are in orbit the low id ship will not block the high id ships use of super spy when the low id ship has a mission set to something other than super spy. Host 3.22.011 NEW: Which ship is built by PBP's can be ordered by using planet friendly codes "PB1" "PB2" "PB3" "PB4" "PB5" "PB6" "PB7" "PB8" "PB9". A planet with the code "PB1" will build a PBP ship first. (PBP = Priority Build Points) Changed: Build queue has been changed. 1. PBP now ignores the normal queue. 2. PBP does not effect the normal queue. NEW: Your mines will not destroy ally mines. FIX: A data error caused by 3rd party player side helper program that causes host to crash with an error 6 have been blocked. A data filter has been added to host. Host 3.22.010 Bug Fix: Ships were unable to beam up minerals from unowned planets with the same ID number. I.E. Ship 455 could not beam up stuff from planet #455. New: Check added to make sure ship has a cloaking device before allowing it to cloak. A computer player is cloaking ships that are not suppose to cloak. This blocks that computer player from doing that. Also a 3rd party player side program was allowing players to cloak any ship. This blocks that program from doing that as well. Changed: Ally functions Ship to planet / planet to ship combat. 1. If ship is ally, ATT and NUK do not attack. 2. If planet is NOT ally of ship the ship will attack planet if PE = planet race or KILL Mission set, even if SHIP is an ally of the PLANET. (Old Way: If both ship and planets allies no combat was possible. If only one side was an ally of another side the ally setting did nothing) Checked: The ally system for the minefield sweeping, mine hits and ship to ship combat has been checked and seems to be working. If you spot any odd ally function behavior please report it. NEW: If a planet has a friendly code set to "dmp" or "bum" it can not unload cargo from ships belonging to other races using the starbase mission "unload ships". NEW: The code "lfm" can be used over a planet that has you set as an ally. NEW: Super spy reports number of supply on a planet. NEW: A Bird Man ship will not try to change a planet's friendly code during a Super Spy mission if it uses a friendly code beginning with the letter "X", case does not matter. NEW: Blockage of the use of a 3rd party player side helper program that allows players to cheat by building any number of factories they wish, no matter what the population of the planet is. Host 3.22.009 Bug Fix: If a player declared another player an ally his planets could not be attacked. Now only if both players have declared each other allies will the planets not be attacked. New: The Glory device is no longer triggered by ally ship. Loophole Closed: You no longer get PBP's for capturing a ship. People were trading groups of small ships back and forth in galactic PBP sewing circles. Host 3.22.008 NEW: You can see your allies minefields but you do not sweep your allies minefields. NEW: If a ( 3rd party computer player program* ) sets a ships warp speed to -330 this host will reset the warp speed to 0 to avoid an "error 6" overflow error in host. (-330 ^ 2 exceeded max int) *NOTE: The Author of the 3rd party program in question has stated that it is impossible for this bug to exist in his program therefore the Author does not want the name of the program made public, because I have made a mistake in claiming such a bug exists. Without a hard proof of such a bug feels that the name of the program in question should be withheld, pending the discovery of the true cause of the bug. But if you are using a 3rd party cplayer program and your host crashes from an "error 6" this host will fix it. HOST 3.22.007 NEW: Locking alliance codes. If a ship sets its friendly code to "ffX" where X is the race code ("123456789ab") that race becomes an ally race. Your mines will not effect them and your ships will not attack theirs. Your ships will never attack their planets. The alliance can be canceled with the ship code "eeX". Once a alliance is set it will stay set until it is canceled. You can see and sweep your friends mines. Web drain will not effect you. The switch ONLY takes place when a ships friendly code is changed. If all your ship friendly codes have been "ff1" for that last few turns and one ship changes its friendly code to "ee1" (Note: it is the only ship changing its code this turn) then race 1 will no longer be considered an ally. The alliance information will show up in the Priorty Build Points message. After the race name, if you see a "!" they have marked you as an ally, if you see a "+" you have marked them as an ally. I.E if you see: Lizards +! : they and you are both friends. HOST 3.22.006 BUG FIX: If the host sets ION storms to 0, they are removed and do not "ghost". They were showing up in winplan when they are not really there. BUG FIX: Ships can not use the friend code "NUK" or "ATT" to avoid being attacked by a planet. BUG FIX: If a person with the greatest number of build points does not build a ship the next race with the second greatest number of points over 20 will build a ship instead. BUG FIX: If a planet population drops to 0 due to riots it is now marked as unowned the same turn. BUG FIX: PBP no longer causes the ship build queue to "stick" on a single base for more than one turn. HOST 3.22.005 NEW: AUXBC.INI Hook file. It runs right before combat if it is found at the path given to host. You edit it as you would a batch file. BUG FIX: The Onyx Class now heats planets to 100 deg. It was only heating planets to 99 before. BUG FIX: Ion storms kill no more crew than you have on the ship. The ion storm messages were in error. They were claiming to kill more crew than was on the ship. NEW: The Resolute and the Darkwing have advanced cloaking devices. They do not burn any extra fuel to cloak as all other cloaking ships do. They can cloak in an ion storm, they are the only ships that can cloak in an ion storm. HOST 3.22.004 Thanks to the efforts of VGA Planet Host Mark Johnsen, the following very hard to find bug has been found. FIXED: A bug that caused a Tim Continuum attack for cheating when the player was not cheating. The bug triggered when a player lost one or more fighters for some unknown reason. This was a never should happen event that happened from time to time. HOST 3.22.003 NEW: Newly built ships are given a random ID number ( 1 to 500 ) NEW: Ion storms move faster, powerful storms now move at least warp 8. FIXED: Bug that caused ships with very little fuel that were intercepting ships that were intercepting other ships to be thrown hundreds of light years has been fixed. HOST 3.22.002 FIXED: The WEB mine hit messages were giving the player the starting position of the ship. It has been fixed and now gives the position in space that the mine was hit. FIXED: Fuel burn rate of ships on an intercept mission fixed. Some ships were burning too much fuel and other were burning too little. It should now match the burn rate of ships moving normally. HOST 3.22.001 ADDED: A data filter that keeps ships with type 0 engines from crashing HOST. (Problem caused by third party "cplayer type" programs) HOST 3.22b Bug Fixed: A problem with ships running into "ghost" WEB mines fixed. HOST 3.22a Bug Fixed: Bug that prevented the "noc" planet friendly code from working has been fixed and tested. Changed: Universal minefield friendly code rules: The old minefield friendly code rule now applies again (Rule 1) Rule 1: Minefields have friendly codes. The minefield's friendly code will be the same code as the planet that is owned by the owner of the minefield that is nearest the mines center. So if you laid a minefield at Nixon and you own Nixon and Nixon's friendly code is "Q1m" the minefield would have a code of "Q1m". Any starship with that friendly code would be able to travel through the minefield and not activate any mines. If the planet's friendly code is changed the minefield's code will change to match it. The minefield friendly code takes effect as soon as the mines are dropped. Any ship in a web minefield that has a friendly code that matches the web minefield will not be drained by the web field. A ship will not minesweep a minefield with a matching friendly code and it will not show up on starmaps or in messages. Rule 2: A planet with a friendly code beginning with "mf" will cause ALL mine fields belonging to your race to have this code as the mine field universal friendly code. If you set more than one planet's friendly code first two letters to "mf" the highest ID planet will be used to set the mine field universal friendly code. The character following "mf" can be any letter or number. Example: If one of your planets friendly code is set to "mfK" then all your mine fields will have the universal friendly code of "mfK". Rule 3: If a Birdman ship sets the friendly code of any enemy planet using the super spy mission to a friendly code beginning with the letters "mf" and the planet has more than 30 defense outposts the planet will use an ion discharge overload to knock the ships out of cloak. Rule 4: A ship can use rule 1 or rule 2 to safely pass through a minefield. Both rules are in effect. The ship can use the "local" friendly code or the "universal" friendly code. HOST 3.22 Bug Fix: Bug that caused host to crash during the beaming / transfer stage. New: 1000 UFO data base can be read and sent to WINPLAN Bug Fix: Rebels ice planets can support 9,000,000 colonists on ice planets. (In host 3.20 and 3.21 they could only have this many on temp 1,2 or 3 degree planets. New: Planet friendly code "noc" disables Config message listing being sent as a message. New: Host will not change starbase mission back to mission 1 if the starbase mission is set to 0 New: Universal minefield friendly code setting. A planet with a friendly code beginning with "mf" will cause ALL mine fields belonging to your race to have this code as the mine field friendly code. If you set more than one planet's friendly code first two letters to "mf" the highest ID planet will be used to set the mine field friendly code. The character following "mf" can be any letter or number. Example: If one of your planets friendly code is set to "mfK" then all your mine fields will have the friendly code of "mfK". ***Note*** This Host update requires HOST 3.2 support and data files, if you are missing the file VPH35.DLL and the other HOST support files you can not use this host until you get them. The common name for these support files are HSTSUP32.ZIP. HOST 3.16 (only for remember of 1994/04/07) HOST 3.15 (only for remember of 1994/02/24) HOST 3.14 (only for remember of 1994/01/17) HOST 3.13d (only for remember of 1993/12/10) HOST 3.00f (only for remember of 1993/05/16)