PlanetsCentral

Thanks for you effort.

• Run amaster -t -d ../../../game01/
  Seems to run ok, only thing I notice at the top of amaster.log is

  Create universe for PHOST4 game...
  Reading file : pconfig.src, section : %PCONFIG
  Reading file : amaster.src, section : %AMASTER
  Warning: Those parameters were not read from config file.
  Warning: Setting them to default values.

  Not quite sure what that warning is saying, since apparently it does find and read at least amaster.src in the game directory.

If those are combat parameters (e.g. BeamRechargeRate): those are in shiplist.txt. I guess, AMaster does not know that yet. The split into pconfig.src / shiplist.txt was introduced in PHost 4 to make it clear that a particular shiplist should always be played with a particular set of combat parameters - but all other parameters can be freely configured. You need to copy the shiplist.txt file from the PList archive.

This also explains the following warning:

• Despite using /phost/config/complete.src there's a bunch of combat-related settings that default commented-out in pconfig.src leading to lots of WARNING: pconfig.src: default value used: messages:

• There is a default wormholes.txt in the PHost distribution, but at quick glance it seems to contain two hardcoded wormholes as an example. Is there some kind of utility that generates/randomizes wormhole locations? It wouldn't be hard to script something up if there isn't, but I would have thought there was something already available for this?

AMaster can do that (CreateWormholes=Yes, WormholeNumber=xxx); also see here.

I also noticed significant differences in the default values between /phost/config/complete.src and /phost/config/simple.src
Best illustrated with an online diff tool: https://www.diffchecker.com/G2zeHj1g/
Obviously there's lots of stuff missing from simple.src but there are several things that are toggled differently by default, a few significant examples:

It's been a long time that we did this, but one idea was that simple.src should also produce a beginner-friendly game. That is at least the reason for disabling remote-control in simple.src.

--Stefan