why all ships can't be identified correctly

External Since: Jul 23, 2007 Posts: 3

Hi , Another player and I were wondering why it is
that sometimes various ships can't be identified and we are given a
message about unknown hull. Is this just a problem that has always
been in the game and isn't large enough to fix? Or ? thanks for
any help on this

External Since: Apr 10, 2004 Posts: 195

Hi there,

Ingo von Borstel wrote:
> BuffaloBillBrunson wrote:
>> Hi , Another player and I were wondering why it is
>>that sometimes various ships can't be identified and we are given a
>>message about unknown hull. Is this just a problem that has always
>>been in the game and isn't large enough to fix? Or ? thanks for
>>any help on this
>
> IIRC it's a problem with thost and the DOS registration. planets.exe
> cannot handle more than 50 enemy or allied ship scans. All other ship
> scans are just reported with their mass and an unknown hull.

Right. Winplan-shareware behaves the same here. There also is a bug in
Winplan-registered which causes it to not show the 50th target (or
something like that), i.e. one ship per turn will not be visually scannable.

> If you're playing in a phost game, are not using planets.exe (but VPA or
> PCC for instance and an appropriate unpack programme like those build in
> into those two alternative clients) send yourself a message that
> contains a line that reads
> bigtarges yes

Don't do that. Ever. The only thing 'bigtargets yes' does is to break
compatibility. PCC and VPA can easily find the additional targets from
UTIL.DAT, so there is no need to use 'bigtargets yes'. That command is
only needed if you want to play using VPUtil (a program which hasn't
been updated for 12 years now).

Stefan