For links to stuff on this site, see the Information page.
Key sites
Lots of useful content, regular updates
The official VGAP4 site. Download the free Beta, latest Host, view the online Help files etc.
The Planets Wiki. A collaborative resource with mountains of data. Online bug reporting, playing tips illustrated with code fragments, race info. Started and hosted by Jochen.
Saarland Outpost. Shipcalc utility, some real gems of info here; a searchable, alphabetical VGAP4 glossary with tips; a history of VGAP4; heaps of documentation in German. Looks beautiful, too. By Andreas Benne. Contains a mirror of the now vanished Claudius Muller's site, which includes an index of Host changes organised by subject - much easier to search than trawling through 196 host release notes.
VGAP4 Info Org: Olly Harlow's multifacted website. It contains a wealth of information, including VGAP4 International - a multilingual site with documentation in German, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Finn; this includes the famous Newbies' Guide, with lots of helpful explicit screenshots. Also there's Crayon World, providing Free Graphics Stuff for people who wish to design race packs or just draw VGAP artwork. Has neat stuff like example files to help you create ship graphics; large montages of space battles between VGAP ships; animations; and a huge ship recognition chart which can be printed out. Other interesting bits include the banter collection, Acronym List, An outsiders's view of VGAP4, and a race survey where people voted for and discussed third party races, which had some very interesting insights in the comments. (Olly has a somewhat iconoclastic approach to indexing which is why I've included so many direct links to the interesting bits.)
Drewhead's, this is where most people play! Drew supplies a server which does the hosting for games. It also has several online forums where people discuss stuff. Meet people from all over the world, learn about their cultures, and kill them. Great fun.
Spanish guides and links: Spanish forum: mail vgaplanets4_es-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. See also: http://faqplanets4.ath.cx/. FAQ Planets IV en castellano: El primer FAQ del Planets 4 totalmente en castellano. Muchisima información y todas las guías traducidas. Todas las reglas y muchos trucos. Para aprender a jugar y para jugadores avanzados. Host automático de partidas y mucho más: links, utilidades...
RCWorld Universe - the other major VGAP4 game hosting site. Players have rankings, and several concurrent games, and a billboard for VGAP4 discussion. It is the oldest VGAP4 hosting site and still hosts some version 3 games. Ricki Rohr keeps it very up to date with the latest Hosts and regular news.
GRG Zone, by Cody Nelson, is aimed at helping beginners get started.
The VGAP community
The VGAP4 Newsgroup. This is a major forum for information exchange, and if your software can handle it I recommend you download the News to a reader like Outlook Express by clicking on this link: news:alt.games.vgaplanets4. You can also access it instantly online through Google Groups (that is a direct link to the online version of the newsgroup). The most popular way to access News groups is offline via your ISP, but not all news servers carry it, and of those that do, not all will permit outsiders to access it. So Sidewinder made a list of links to news servers here, and hopefully, one will work for you.
The VGAP mailing list. Subscribe by mailing here. Currently running at 10-25 posts a week, this moderated list replaces an earlier unmoderated one which got clogged with spam. On signing up, Oliver, who runs it, will contact you to confirm you are not a spambot trying to harvest the subscribers' email addresses! Topics cover rule questions-and-answers, discussions about how to structure the game to patch abuses or add fun features, and strategy discussions.
Drewhead's and RCWorld Universe have very active forums (see 'Key Sites', above)
Other sites of interest
Stuff worth seeing, but not regularly updated. For clarity, I'm not repeating links to third party race sites, which you'll find on the race page.
For other game hosting sites, see Tim's site.
Roger 'The Pyro' Norris' site, which has several utilities he wrote. ScriptZ0r is what most hosts use to set up a game (by fine tuning a universe), I class it as essential. [Black No. 1 updated it with Roger's permission to include the latest starting ships, available off this Wiki page.]VediVici helps you track the progress of a game and can produce a 'movie' of a game (as seen through your scanners) showing how the different empires expand and contract, which is pretty cool, but as yet it is more decorative than truly useful, unless you really need to know what the enemy was doing 2 turns ago at Canopus. VediVici requires your PC to have VB.Net installed (a 20MB download). Scriptpolisher is for fine tuning scripts. Clustergen is a sophisticated map making utility which uses fractals and 'attractors' to generate interesting maps of any size and density you want.
Mapmaker, by Bob Andrews. Create square, circular etc maps of up to 10,000 stars to your taste. Keeps players familiar with the standard maps guessing, and everyone wants to create their own universe. Has the easiest method of customising the position of single stars I've come across.- Before you use this utility you need to be aware that the map files it generates used to have slight problems with one obscure map utility, which expected the header at the start of the map to be in a slightly different format, but this is thought to have been resolved now.
Peter Chamber's website has several things of interest. Firstly there's a map printing utility, 'map2ps.exe' which allows you to print the map you're playing on. You can print it with an overlaid grid, on 1 sheet of A4 or 9 (so there's no need for an A2 sized printer), separates the names of stars if they're likely to overwrite, and contracts greek names like "alpha" into Greek letters to reduce clutter. Incidentally this is built into Diplomat which gives it a more user-friendly GUI. Then there's a Real-Life starmap you can use in VGAP4, (known as the Yale map after the astronomical database he derived it from). Play VGAP4 in a realistic starfield! (See screenshot from Master.exe) A 1010-star circular galaxy, where each star is in the position of a real star. Starnames are of the form: "Dorsai (Alpha Centaurus B)", ie a fictional name and the name of the true star at that position. A .txt file is included in the download with interesting and relevant info on real-world starmaps. For 8 players or less I would recommend the "Yale Lite" map, a cut down version of about 500 stars, otherwise the 1010-star map makes the games too long. There's also his Starview utility, a Java applet but it kind of foundered due to the limitations of Java based graphics. Finally, there's the IMT race pages, with tongue-in-cheek essays on 'life in IMT', spoof adverts etc!
Osgoroth's Complete list of Command Codes. In English, Castellano and Català.
The Planets4 League. Osgoroth and his friends have put together an annual series of games where you can compete and get a ranking. This list of names is worth browsing to see if anyone you know is near the top of the League...
alkirej's web based combat simulator. Why use Diplomat on your own PC when someone else offers a customised interface and the ability to run something similar, remotely on their server? Great for people at work..?!
Old sites
There have been a lot of sites created over the years in a burst of enthusiasm, which haven't been updated for some time. That does not mean they have no useful information any more.
Sidewinder's site- a host of info including a rather old Bug List, Table Of Ship Devices And What They Do, and the incomparable VGAP4 Tables by Sandy Schoen. Although most of the site is now out of date, the Tables - compiled around 1999 - are still referred to by experienced players for choosing weapons. Sidewinder was a major mover and shaker in the early Beta tests.
Jumpgate Event Horizon- A German site (with English mirror pages) featuring game hosting, a Web forum, and a very complete set of links (particularly for VGAP4 resources in the German language). The best feature of this information-based site is that it is building up a significant amount of documentation ordered alphabetically by subject. This is in the Glossary section. Has not been updated since 2003 .
Red Crusader's Starbase Gamma had useful race comparison data, but hasn't been updated since 2000. Note the Ork race description!
Yeti's VGAP4 database - the lists of weapon properties, ship devices, hull stats and other stuff is very well organised. Also an analysis tool, waypoint / tax calculators, and compilations of assorted ship, Device etc information
Admiral Quixote's Solport - the Admiral collected some snippets of information not found elsewhere. This site includes a concise How-To-Play VGAP4 guide in the form of a small downloadable PDF file.
Rick's World [No longer exists?] has some utilities: Map Editor- add/change/delete/move/rename planets on the map. It will also create random maps or maps from scratch. He's experimented with other tools, but there are others that do the same jobs: Script creator - place bases, ships, minefields, fighter wings, and Pods on the map (but Roger Norris' ScriptZ0r dominates this niche). Race / Ship viewer - view info directly from race packs, and the Game data viewer - view Engine Specs, Beams Specs, are both more or less duplicates of Tim's own 'Raceview' utility which you can find on his website.
Klaus Breuer's VGAP4 Mapper, a map making utility
You might have noticed a distinct duplication of utilities by now. It's because Tim hasn't been too forthcoming with information on how the game data is structured. People know how to tweak maps and, to some extent, races. But unlike the predecessor game, VGAP3, there are no 3rd party utilities to add race powers etc directly to Host yet. The reason is partly that VGAP3 was plagued by 'cheat' utilities, and partly that Tim has not yet quite finalised the data structure for Version 4 so he does not want to get tied down yet because of something a 3rd party's done. Meanwhile, code writers are cutting their teeth on what is known.
