VGA Planets Assistant (VPA)

The VGA Planets Assistant is a 3rd party-developed DOS client. It honours Tim Wisseman’s registration codes; to be allowed registered functions with VPA you need a registered version of Dos Planets or Winplan.VPA is widely heralded for it’s speed and it’s setup, with one central starmap displaying all ships, planets, bases, storms and minefields and a column to the right where orders for the selected objects can be given. People switching from Winplan to VPA will find it awkward at first, but judging by it’s enormous fanbase among who are a fair number of former Winplan-users, I guess it grows on you.Perhaps the most beautiful thing about VPA is that it allows things the official clients (Winplan and DOS Planets) don’t allow. When exchanging RSTs with your allies, VPA gathers all the information in it’s one central map whereas the official clients only let you play from one RST at a time. Because of this VPA allows you to intercept ships that only your ally can see, for example. The ability to un-build mines, defenses and factories you have built during the turn, a built-in battle simulator and a minefield simulator are some of the other things that make VPA a very popular client.

There are some downsides to VPA however. It relies extensively on message filtering to gather information, such as minefield sizes and locations. Unfortunately, this does not always result in correct minefield information such as in Winplan. Secondly, VPA at itself does not support the UFO interface which is used by addons to display things like wormholes, asteroids, subspace anomalies and jumpgates. But there is an easy fix for this: hosts can run the UFO4VPA addon, which sends UFO data in a workable format to VPA users.

Additional information: Sonic Hedgehog's Using VPA.