So Far, So Good

First, an update on last week's spoofing analysis. I conducted some experiments and found that lines of text from the game can be read from the network in separate reads. Even the Command prompt can be split up. The splits seem to always occur between ANSI codes and printable text. With ANSI off, the splits occur where the ANSI codes would be. This shoots down my hope of being able to depend on spoofable messages arriving in a single read and being detectable by their trailing context. So for the time being, at least, Weapon M is only recognizing messages with ANSI on.

The last development version I sent to my $50 backers contained a serious bug, so I'll be sending out another soon. As I mentioned in a recent post, I had to quickly and unexpectedly convert the database from using a ODBMS to using serialization. The relationship of object references was such that attempting to serialize a database with more than 1000 sectors resulted in a stack overflow. I've fixed this by making the database structure into a tree.

Weapon M ran its first scripts back in June, and its first useful scripts a couple weeks ago. This weekend, I wrote the first script that interacts with the database in a meaningful way. It's a non-interactive ZTM script that uses a very simple and naïve algorithm, plotting courses in the CIM from 1 > 2, 2 > 3 . . . n > 1. I wrote it not only to see if the script system and database were working properly, but to get a first estimate of what kind of speed Weapon M is capable of.

The results were encouraging. On one server, it consistently plotted 5000 routes in about 325 seconds, which is a little slow. But on another, it plotted 5000 routes in 215 seconds, which is on par with the fastest ZTM speeds I ever achieved using SWATH or TWX. The run times of repeated ZTMs of the same universe were consistent to within 1%. With a good buffering strategy, the practical limiting factor seems to be the speed of the server, not the speed of the client. Of course, the ultimate benchmark will be credits-per-hour in unlimited turn games. I'm confident that with its transparent access to the database and the power and flexibility of Java, Weapon M will be able to meet or exceed the performance of the best existing cashing scripts.

I was planning to set up a host and bug tracker this week, but now Amazon Payments is telling me that it may take 5-7 business days to transfer funds to my checking account, which currently contains about $8. So that may have to wait one more week. Meanwhile, I'll be sending out more alpha builds via email.