The Devil's Doorknob BBS Capture (1996-2003)

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Text File | 1991-07-16 | 42KB | 814 lines

1.03 07-17-91 ---------------------------------------------------------- Maintenance Bug Release Well I guess I jinxed us by saying that 1.02 covered all known bugs! Just today a problem popped up that requires another release. If a player tries to land on an UN-defended planet they don't own, the game will terminate. Needless to say, this can make a user a bit upset as they can lose what they had recently acquired in the game. We are *REALLY* going to try and hold off for about 3 to 4 months before releasing another version of the game! (As long as another nasty bug doesn't show up!) 1.02 07-12-91 ---------------------------------------------------------- Maintenance Bug Release It seems like we're back to our old pace of releases like we were in the fall of '90. This release contains a number of maintenance bug fixes and some of them actually unveil new features! A problem with Ports getting corrupted after being attacked (and blowing up the attacker) should be fixed now. People were using this to corrupt the Stardock and Class 0 ports into something wierd like a Class 529 port. If you see any more occurances of a port mutating AFTER getting this release, please let us know here at Martech. The Photon Missile launch had the wrong graphics file in the earlier distribution package. It has been corrected and non ansi users will now get their descriptive text of the launch too. The Corporate Planet Scan while in a Citadel was altering your Current planet record so that it would appear you were on the last planet in the planet scan. This is all fixed now. If stopped by Ferrengi, you were able to attack with 0 fighters, and then run away without any loss. This has definately been fixed! :) Ships will *NOT* defend a planet in FedSpace now and the Tholian Sentinal will *NOT* retreat from an overpowering attacker. Accidental discharge of a Photon Missile (from hitting a mine, Quasar cannon or fighter attack) was preventing that damage from occuring to you. This has been hastily repaired! After all, if someone went to all that trouble to try and blow you up, you should accomodate them. Upon logoff, non-FedSpace sectors were being mistaken as FedSpace sectors. The Personal Planet Scan was left off the display menu for the Computer in ver 1.00 and 1.01! Its option "Y" and should show up now. (in the docs as well) We've received many other reports that are either 1.) about an old version, 2.) unrepeatable here! (they might exist) and 3.) blatantly false. Please remind your users to indicate what VERSION of the game they are playing if they send Email to us regarding a problem. With quick upgrade releases, its vital that they do this or we will waste time chasing problems that have already been corrected. As of this release, I am only aware of one other troublesome problem that I have not been able to repeat here. I want to ask everyone to try and help me find this bug. The result of it is that a port suddenly mutates and becomes a class greater than 9 (usually in the hundreds) and only has a dozen of everything for sale. (The sector record is getting written over the port record). Try as I may, I have NOT been able to reproduce this but I've had several reports of it. If you see it happen, right when it changes, please send me a LOG of your session so I can track this one down! I'm looking for an occurance of porting at a normal port, then coming back a little later and finding its gone crazy. Thanks! 1.01 06-22-91 ---------------------------------------------------------- Bug fix release! (ack) As with any major project, bringing out a new version always brings to light some obscure bug. Two bugs were found that caused us to immediately release 1.01. Problem 1 - Affected users - EVERYONE. The auto-upgrade of Fedspace counters failed. Extern.exe would loop continuously trying to evict a blank person from FedSpace. This could be worked-around by changing the FedSpaceShipLimit value to something like 5 but is still unacceptable to us. Problem 2 - Affected users - Wildcat! Sysops. The Wildcat interface had one lousy debugging "[PAUSE]" left in it that I overlooked. (Gary's fault! blame him! (grin)). This is now fixed. 1.00 06-20-91 ----------------------------------------------------------- F I R S T F I N I S H E D R E L E A S E O F T W 2 0 0 2 Game Stats: Lines of Turbo Pascal 6.0 code Compiled Size TW2002 - 21,876 EXE= 86,768 OVR= 347,445 TEDIT - 10,923 EXE= 63,088 OVR= 67,342 EXTERN - 7,401 EXE= 52,048 BIGBANG- 7,866 EXE= 33,248 The Trade Wars 2002 source code is now 881,484 bytes in size (uncompiled). Though not a very noticeable feature, Trade Wars 2002 is now compiled under Borland's Turbo Pascal 6.0 We took advantage of a few nice, new features to improve overall performance and reduce the mainline memory requirements. Of course, we also added a ton of new code, so you won't notice that its smaller! ╔═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ A MAJOR CHANGE has been made to the physical layout of the program. ║ ║ Previous versions kept the executables in your BBS directory and the ║ ║ data files in the TRADEWAR subdirectory. Now, ALL OF THE TW2002 FILES ║ ║ AND PROGRAMS are in the TRADEWAR subdirectory. The installation ║ ║ procedure should have left behind 4 batch files in your BBS dir to call ║ ║ the game with. For instance, one is called TW2002.BAT It changes down ║ ║ to the TRADEWAR subdir and runs the game. Upon exiting, it returns to ║ ║ the BBS dir. It passes all parameters such as -QBBS, /nocom /nolog, ║ ║ etc. IF you call TEDIT, TW2002 or EXTERN with a fully qualified name, ║ ║ ie TW2002.EXE, you will have to change these to .BAT! This change was ║ ║ requested by many sysops so that they could run multiple games at once. ║ ║ To startup another game, just make a copy of the TRADEWAR directory and ║ ║ make new batch files to use the appropriate subdir. ║ ╚═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ This is the first "finished" release of this project. After 4 years its about time we started to wrap this one up! We have many other exciting projects in mind, so keep your eyes open for the Martech Software label! Version 1.00 includes a "Computer Interrogation Mode" that was designed to aid other programmers developing mapping tools for endusers. This mode doesn't give away any information that the user doesn't already have access to, it just speeds things up for auxiliary databases (on the user's end). To invoke the CIM mode, enter the computer and then transmit the following 6 ASCII chars 200,201,202,203,204,205 in that order to the game. The game should now be at a ":" for a prompt. Sending "I" (w/o quotes) will cause the computer to send back the Intersector warps for EVERY sector. If the user hasn't yet visited that sector, it returns "9999 0" where 9999 is the sector number. If they have visited the sector, the line would be "9999 9999 9999 9999 9999" where the first value is the sector and the remaining are the warps leading from it. Example: 234 634 601 1000 235 0 (hasn't been there) 236 142 9 419 237 236 238 0 This display runs from sector 1 to 1000. ----- Sending "R" will dump the Port report sequence for the entire universe. The format for it is like the Inter Sector warps in that the sector number will be listed first and there will be a 0 if the player hasn't been there yet. The lines will indicate for Ore, Organics and Equipment what the current demand level is (negative indicates ????????) followed by the Percentage of max value. Example: 234 0 235 0 236 0 237 1520 100% - 2370 100% - 1010 100% 238 0 ╚═╩╬╩╝ ╚╬╩╝ ╚═╩╬╩╝ ╚╬╩╝ ╚═╩╬╩╝ ╚╬╩╝ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ╚════ Equipment Percent of Max ║ ║ ║ ║ ╚═════════ Currently BUYING 1010 Equip. ║ ║ ║ ╚════════════════ Organics Percent of Max ║ ║ ╚═════════════════════ Currently BUYING 2370 Organ. ║ ╚════════════════════════════ Fuel Ore Percent of Max ╚═════════════════════════════════ Currently SELLING 1520 Ore. Remember that this query is only good right at that moment! Once the user begins trading all of the values are old. The final option in the CIM is to find the shortest course from two points. Sending "F" will bring up a "FM > " prompt, send the from sector. Then a "TO > " prompt will appear. After sending the to sector, the system will transmit back the standard list of warp lanes between the two sectors. Sending "Q" will exit from Computer Interrogation Mode. Programmers! Though we will not release source to the Trade Wars 2002 project, we're willing to add interfaces to help you write auxiliary programs! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- On to features, fixes and changes: Unlike past editions, I do not have even HALF of the changes and new features listed here. I've been having a hard time finding the time to complete the game so one of the things thats suffered has been this README file. I have tried to include some of the major points here. Registrations have just kept us buried! (grin) We're grateful that the response is so good, I just wish there were more hours in the day. Hmmm, maybe that could be a new mod? :) The Ferrengi! ARgh, what a lot of work. I have been working to balance the little beggars so that they remain a threat throughout the life of a game but so that they do not overpower users. The chase is on now that you have this version and you will find there's a lot to the Ferrengi! I would reccomend that you do NOT alter the Ferrengi settings through use of the editor as they are in specific modes, doing specific things for a very good reason. Messing with them will give the users the appearance that they are all screwed up, so please let them run as they will. You can alter their regeneration rate from the editor, but please leave the individual Ferrengi settings as is. Also, there is so much TO the Ferrengi that I am not going to list it in this document. We will leave the discovery of their activities up to you and your users! (evil grin). On General Editor Screen Two, you now have the option of turning on a flag that will display the location of the Stardock in the (V) Game Status Display. If you don't want to waste time exploring to find the Stardock at first, then turn this setting on and everyone will know where it is. Purchasing Class 0 items (Fighters, Shields, Holds) is now allowed from within the Shipyards on the Stardock. "It Just Made Sense". Holographic Scanners now can perform both functions. (Density too) Evil players will not be allowed to keep StarShips now. Photon Missiles can be Hazardous to your health! Don't carry them around all the time, they might go off! :) ANY player ship parked in the same sector with one of their planets will defend that same planet from someone trying to invade it. TriCron had a lockup bug if someone with a real long Trader name was the champion. It now only displays the first 25 characters of the Champion's name. ************************************************************************* * NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE * ************************************************************************* * Version 1.00 is shipped with Photon Missiles DISABLED! They are a * * very powerful item and you will have to make a conscious decision to * * allow them in your game! The Photon Missile duration is set to 0 in * * the TEDIT General Screen Two. If you wish to allow Photon Missiles, * * change this setting to a positive number. * * * * When in effect, Ships and Planets w/o shields are virtually helpless * * against any kind of attack or invasion. Make sure you want to allow * * this powerful a weapon into the game. Alternatively, setting the * * duration to a small number (like 10 seconds!) can lure players into * * "getting caught with their pants down"! :) * ************************************************************************* Sysops can disable the use of Aliases if they so desire. Citadel Treasuries now gain 4% interest per day. When changing your name or starting out you cannot use a name that is a subset of someone else. We had some people sneakily getting away with murder that way. For instance, if you wanted to send Email to John Smiths, someone could change their name to John Smith and when the Email prompt asked if you wanted John Smith, most users would send the Email to that user (telling where stuff is or what the password to the team is). Hopefully this has been cleaned up. Colonist amounts in any one category cannot exceed 2000. (groups) Starports will forget about who robbed them every 14 days. Support for the generic standard, DOOR.SYS has been added to increase the number of systems that TW2002 can run under. The option to use the Door.Sys interchange file is -DOOR. Three important changes have been made to prevent users from cheating the game by teaming up to kill each other off (one positive player, one neg) and reap in the huge bounties. The steps to prevent this abuse are as follows: Number One: You cannot join a Corp that is of an opposite alignment from yourself. Number Two: Your fighters will automatically shutdown if you send them out to attack someone on your Corp. You will have to have the CEO punt that member off the Corp First. Number Three: As a user gets progressively killed more often, the bounties offered on them (neg players) will decrease in an linear fashion. Simply put, if someone tries the "buddy" system to rack up credits, the bounties will peter out on them. Additional code has been included to self-correct potential problems with corrupted databases. If you have a sector or port (or whatever) that consistently crashes the game (error codes 100 or such) then you may need to use the TWZAPPER utility to clear that record in the TWDATA database. You can find the TWZAPPER utility on the Loft if nowhere else. After using it you will HAVE to recreate the record you wiped with TEDIT. Course displays and sector warpdisplays now indicate unexplored sectors in red. This greatly helps when you want to explore new territory. When self-destructing, you can abort the display by hitting the space bar (as with every other display in TW2002). This now aborts the Self-destruct as well! When towing someone, if you destroy them, they do NOT come back from the dead via your Tractor Beam anymore. So users will not get to kill them over and over and over... (I just heard some gumbling, didn't I!) :-) Radiation half-life on destroyed ports has been greatly shortened so some of that debris will become bearable within a reasonable amount of time now. You can destroy a port and then build a new one within a week or two. Jettisoning a Mixed Cargo, (Colonists and trading goods) will now jettison ALL of it in one step. Level FIVE (5) Citadels Yeah, you heard me! (grin) The Level Five Citadel is a Planetary Shielding System. It utilizes conventional ships shields to protect your planets from invaders. Its the only known countermeasure to the disruptive effects of the Photon Missile. Try one! You'll like it! QUASAR CANNONS! (*** Major Strategic Change ***) The Quasar cannons have been slightly redesigned in a way that will change player's strategies tremendously. In previous versions, the Qcannon had only one control level. It fired the same amount on intruders in the sector as it did on intruders trying to land. The odds were much higher in the atmosphere than in the sector but weak players could deplete your Qcannon's fuel by getting themself blown up daily! Now there are two (2) settings for the Qcannon. One setting is the reaction level for intruders into your sector. The 2nd setting is the reaction level for an intruder trying to land on your planet. I think that everyone can grasp the significance of this change! On planets, the Planetary Report has been changed to Display Planet (R to D) to keep a similar approach with Display sector. Destroy planet is now Z. When Big-Banging, the galactic bank is now cleared! (oops) The Flagship and the Starship have had a name "swap" of sorts. They're now the Corporate Flagship and the Imperial Starship. This is actually more in line with what I originally planned on calling them, just got confused somewhere down the line! Ships! You Just Might Notice that there are a bunch of new ships in the game. Aborting the Cineplex prompt screen used to leave the user waiting to choose a movie (without the aid of the prompt screen being displayed). This is fixed. For RBBS systems, I inadvertantly mixed up the Ansi/Ascii/Mono flags through the system interface file. ANSI and ASCII users should now get full color. Titles have been added to the display routines for Other Traders and Aliens. I hadn't realized how bad the handicap was for mono users trying to determine who's a pirate. Now everyone has their appropriate title so its ok. When you're blown up by corbomite devices, that sector is marked to avoid. The Corporate menu has been added inside the Citadel. Port upgrade prices have been changed to reflect the actual costs. A bug with stealing product from a port thats buying it has been fixed. If External maintenance doesn't run for 3 days, the Sysop will start to get warning messages when he/she logs into the game. The display of what the game is running "Under" now specifies the BBS name rather than the type of BBS. I changed this since many BBSes use converters to run doors and thus this field was showing incorrect information. 0.98 12-01-90 ----------------------------------------------------------- Game Stats: Lines of Turbo Pascal 5.5 code Compiled Size TW2002 - 19,631 EXE= 85,408 OVR= 307,805 TEDIT - 9,809 EXE= 124,664 EXTERN - 6,394 EXE= 45,856 The Trade Wars 2002 source code is now 804,864 bytes in size (uncompiled). Well, enough users asked for it that I relented and greatly enhanced the Avoids feature. Voids are now saved between sessions. The disk file that stores 1000 sectors for all 150 players is under 20K in size so I didn't waste much of your harddisk space. Voids are displayed as you enter the game, and you just play normally as usual and they take care of themselves. Before anyone asks, we did not put the Ferrengi Combat routines in this version. We are saving that, the Photon Missiles and a few other choice bits of code for release 1.00 Not long now, you should have it early in January if we can find enough time. Some users were getting messages about another player destroying xxx shields and xxx fighters when nothing had really happened. This was an error caused by the addition of the Aliens system. It has been repaired. Feedback. I like feedback. I like to know what happened while I was out of the game. Much more feedback has been added to the encounter routines. You will get a considerably more detailed report from your deployed fighters about whats going on. You will also get feedback from Quasar cannon firings and mine detonations. When you get blownup online, you no longer (should) lose your credits. Mines! If you find someone else's mines, you will be immediately prompted if you want to avoid that sector now. Even when doing a Long Range Scan with a Holo Scanner, you will have this option. Also, if you encounter mines that do not go off while in Autopilot, the Autopilot will shut down in that sector so you can scan around to see if its safe to continue. SingleStep Autopilot mode has been added. This will allow you to plot a course, move one sector and automatically stop (to scan for instance). So many displays and reports have been upgraded that I can't remember all of them. The (V)iew Game Status from the main menu has some important new display items. Robbing ports! (Actually Stealing Product from ports, Robbing isn't done). Now your negatively aligned players can steal product off the Starports. They have to have a low enough alignment first, -1 won't cut it. Aww, forget it. I was going to make the Store Hours Sysop definable, but I don't think they're worth the effort. So I removed Store Hours from all of the shops on the Stardock. Let your nightowls know about this! Trade Agreements between planets and ports were originally designed to only offer 1/3 of the comparable price of trading normally. We decided to make this a bit more generous, its now 60% of comparable Ship Trading Price. When trading at ports, there is an additional display that shows the Port's Current capacity as a percentage of their maximum capacitiy. This will help traders tell when a port has been beaten down to the ground. (The port margins vary based on the activity level of the port.) If you knock off someone with a Bounty and then Examine Bounties in the Police HQ, it will say that the Bounty is "Yours to Claim". This way users will know when they have a bounty they can collect. There is now a field in the General Editor Two that specifies the Security Level required for a user to have Sysop Access. This should default to 32000 on your system. Set this value to whatever your Security level is as a Sysop. The functions that are enabled if you're a Sysop are maintenance things such as erasing the Bathroom Wall and the Conversations in the Tavern. There are no special benefits that give the Sysop any advantage in the actual play of the game. I detest that approach. (Like in Brazil, Arena, etc where the Sysop gets better odds than everyone else). Class 0 ports now display the max holds you can buy. The price per hold is a little cheaper. If users think the prices on holds are screwy, remind them that the price increases based on the number of holds you have. Attacking Colonists on planets now decrements your fighters correctly. Default amounts have been added to take/leave product on planets and also take/leave colonists on planets. If you're dumping whats in your holds or loading your ship to the max, you can just hit return now and take the default. Some of you just *might* notice that there is now a 10th ship! (grin) The Havoc GunStar has been added to the armada. This is a ship approximately the size of a Missile Frigate. The major difference is that this ship can be equipped with a Trans Warp drive. Expect Mercenaries and pirates to want to run about in these ships. Users can now Tow other Traders as long as the other trader has no fighters on them. Costs for towing are based on the sizes of the ships involved. Towing will work with the Autopilot but not with TransWarp drive. There is now an option in the Computer to toggle ANSI on/off. Some general cleanup and polishing was done to the planet routines. Traders cannot load Colonists or products if they're out of turns. Many defaults have been added into the planet section to speed up play. A secondary [Pause] will now display (remote only) if the user waits for more than ten seconds. The secondary says [Press Space or Enter to continue]. This should help the new players that are confused the first time they are presented with a [Pause] Fighters will now report any incursion into their sector. Even defensive fighters will report if someone stuck their head in to "look around". Sysops can now send mail as Themselves, The Federation, The Ferrengi, The player's Shipboard computer or as a blank, unidentified source. If there are any errors installing the Overlays into EMS (especially if you don't have EMS memory) you will see feedback messages as the game loads. Watch carefully, they fly by quickly. If you have at least 1 meg of memory, consider installing an EMS driver if you don't already run EMS. Trade Wars 2002 will execute much faster and smoother with EMS memory available. The EMS40.SYS driver that PC Magazine puts out will use your extended memory from 640k to 1meg on ATs as Expanded memory. We include EMS40.SYS in the TRADEWAR subdir if you're interested in adding it to your CONFIG.SYS as a device driver. The line in your CONFIG.SYS would be: DEVICE=EMS40.SYS (Make sure to copy the EMS40.SYS driver to your root dir!) That rampant 209 error that was cropping up when the game exited turned out to be a problem with QEMM's EMS driver. That has been resolved and you should *not* see the 209 error anymore. If you do, there is a file problem with your TW2002.OVR Density Scanners now show the number of warps leading out of each scanned sector. And the LongRange scan has been added to the possible options when you pause on an AutoPilot course. The Corporate Planet listing has been tweaked some to include Planet types and the level of Citadel (if any) on each listed planet. Planet Types are now displayed in parenthesis () to the right of planets in the regular Sector Display routine. You may have noticed the Planet Types starting to show up in various places. Different Planet Types will be a feature of TW2002, release 2.00 Please DON'T ask anymore about them, you will find out in the future. 0.97 10-29-90 ----------------------------------------------------------- Game Stats: Lines of Turbo Pascal 5.5 code Compiled Size TW2002 - 18,744 EXE= 82,496 OVR= 296,253 TEDIT - 9,134 EXE= 118,859 EXTERN - 5,943 EXE= 55,808 The Trade Wars 2002 source code is now 740,186 bytes in size (uncompiled). As of this date, we have 132 Registered TW2002 systems. With version 1.00 we will be releasing a new encryption code to all registered sysops to help curb the unauthorized distribution of Registration Codes. (Thats stealing, in plain English). If you know of any Sysops that are running TW2002 with a STOLEN registration code, please tell them for me that I think they are low lifes and I lose a lot of interest in programming games when I hear about people ripping us off like that. I spend many evenings and most of my weekends working on this project and feel that $15 is only a token amount of money for what you get. At the very least if they won't pay, they shouldn't play. The Autopilot dropout problem (After porting or doing a port report) has been fixed. You should cleanly drop out of Autopilot if you get blown up. When running the game in local mode with the local screen secured, you can now see color. Support for several new BBS systems have been added to the game: -RYBS switch for RyBBS system -PHNX switch for Phoenix BBS system -GENE switch for Genesis Deluxe system -WILD switch for Wildcat BBS system -RBBS switch for RBBS system The local status line has been cleaned up some more, St means Shiptype. The Known Universe display has pauses and stops when you abort the display. A problem with being able to attack Good Aliens in fedspace has been fixed. All writes to the WWIV Sysop's Log have been removed. Instead, the game now creates a file called TWGAME.LOG in the TRADEWAR subdirectory that contains all of the info previously written to the Sysop's Log. I did this so that systems other than WWIV can still read the game logs. Using the \NOLOG option disables the writes to this log. You must put the \NOLOG option on EXTERN as well as TW2002 to completely shut down this facility. A problem with Escape Pods landing in defended territory has been fixed. Escape pods should land in a sector without fighters or mines. The CinePlex Videon Theatres in the Stardock are nearing completion. I believe they are now showing some shorts. When playing Tri-Cron, your remaining time left is checked each game. Players will be dropped out of the game when their time is up. Control K from the local console was locking up some systems. It now works with all systems but it only punts the user from TWs, not off the BBS. When we get our new Modem routines in, then you will be able to kick users all the way off the system. A few new ANSI screens were delivered from Videon and they are in place in their respective parts of the game. EXTERN.EXE is not designed to be run by a remote user. DO NOT run it as a Begin-Day event. It should be run as a system only task in your scheduler or timed event system. I will change that in the future so you can use it as "something to show the users" in a NewDay or Begin-Day event. THE FERRENGI are coming along nicely! They are starting to poke their noses into sectors with fighters, mines and Q-cannons. If you remember, the old ferrengi were not seen by mines and Q-cannons. Not anymore, the Ferrengi Assault Traders are vulnerable to all three hazards now. Ferrengi will start conversing with online players they run across either in this release or the next. (Depends how much I get done tomorrow). Messages regarding Corporate assets, such as "Joe Blow destroyed 241 of your Corporation's fighters in sector 231" will now go to ALL Corporate members, not just the C.E.O. This covers messages such as Fighters, Mines and other important intrusions. I had many requests to open this up like this, but be warned that its gonna eat up some more Harddisk space. It shouldn't take too much, but you might want to reduce your numbers of days till an inactive player gets deleted. When a player gets deleted their messages get deleted as well. Try sending yourself a message sometime while you're playing. You'll get an idea of what it'll be like to get messages while you're playing. The Ferrengi will be taking Mine damage and attacking deployed fighters if the odds are in their favor. Online users will get online messages regarding such attacks if its their assets involved. Finally, a bug with attacking a Pirate in Fedspace if they're the last trader listed has been fixed. 0.96 10-14-90 ----------------------------------------------------------- Game Stats: Lines of Turbo Pascal 5.5 code TW2002 - 17,808 TEDIT - 8,387 EXTERN - 5,843 The Trade Wars 2002 source code is now 727,040 bytes in size (uncompiled). This was a quick release due to an incompatibility with the PibAsync routines with some slower UART chips. We have returned to the older communication routines which are rock solid, not as fast, but error free. Aliens can now be attacked! Yep, go to it and knock out some of those 8-armed alien traders. More than a few players proved to me that the Trading Port prices were too predictable. That has been taken care of! (grin) Also, the prices have been expanded a bit so that people can make money a little faster now. Watch for those blue light specials! Class 0 ports now run a much slower cycle on prices than before. A user will NOT be able to just "sit there" waiting for the best price. More Pauses have been added to various displays to prevent data from scrolling off the screen. The Sysop's Status line is now a static 25th line display. CTS/RTS Hardware handshaking has been added to the General Editor One. Due to Sysop's request, I have started adding the abilities to generate external Score boards. At this time, the individual Trader Ranks are done. If you go into the General Editor section two, you will be able to specify a drive and path to put the two files in. TWTRADER.ANS (Ansi version) and TWTRADER.TXT (text version) will be created in whatever subdirectory you specify. Putting them in the Gfiles section is nice. Bear in mind that this will slow down the display of the player rankings somewhat. Its not real noticeable. You can disable this option by leaving the field in the General Editor blank. If a Trader ran into something that destroyed his or her ship while in Autopilot, it used to continue them on the Autopilot course unless they told it to "Stop in this sector" (the one they retreated to after getting blown up). This made for many unhappy players, as they would not notice what they did and immediately warp back into the sector that the player had just lost a nice ship in. Boom! There went the Escape pod and the player was screwed. Well, now if they get a ship destroyed while in Autopilot, it will retreat to the previous sector and shut down. 3 new (old) options have been added to the Citadel menu. (S)can sector so you can see your sector before entering it. [after spending the night] (C)omputer brings up your ships computer. (I)nfo shows your personal info. ANSI fullscreen Tri-Cron has been improved so a player can stay on the screen to play multiple games if they so desire. It seems some non-motivated players were cheating the game by running down their alignment and having friends collect the bounties on them. The bounties generated by the Feds have been changed so that experience is the primary factor in the value of the bounty. Tell those lazy bums that were using this cheat to go out and trade and earn a decent living! (grin). Along those same lines, the Trader has been touched up to prevent Maxint rollover abuse on the prices he charges. Players could piss him off, then get his price high enough that it would roll negative. They would then be charged this negative amount. Sigh, when will players stop trying to find the easy way out? Oh well, I guess it helps to bullet proof the game anyway. 0.95 10-7-90 ----------------------------------------------------------- Game Stats: Lines of Turbo Pascal 5.5 code TW2002 - 16,671 TEDIT - 7,595 EXTERN - 5,073 The Trade Wars 2002 source code is now 688,128 bytes in size (uncompiled). Yes the game is growing quickly! And as to release version 0.95, here's what we have in store for your users: ALIENS! Ack! Ppthpthp! Yes! There are now NPC (Non-Player Characters, Computer Generated and Driven that is) Alien Traders roaming the Universe trading away. They cannot yet be attacked, but soon, very soon. The Aliens, as well as the Ferrengi Assault Traders and the Federation Ships are all now MOVING IN REALTIME! Yep, players will notice them warping in and out of the sector they're in while playing. Very soon, the Ferrengi will start attacking realtime as well. (Ferrengi and Feds cannot be attacked at this time either, its only fair, they won't attack back!). There are two important additions to the Sysop's editor for these functions. They are the settings for the movement odds for the Aliens and the Ferrengi. If you have an older machine or a slow harddisk, then you should set these odds up to about 1 in 40 or so. If you have hot hardware, move it down to 1 in 15 or 20 and watch the traffic move! When you first install this release, the Alien horde (size depending on the age of your game) will emerge from the Stardock sector and move outwards from there. Don't worry if you see dozens of them at first, they will thin out quickly. We have thrown out the old Async modem routines and replaced them with the PibAsync routines. These new routines offer output buffering in addition to the standard input buffering. The critical code is all in assembly language so this version does run faster. Also, these modem routines throw out characters that are created by framing errors (line noise), so there is some Line Noise elimination in .95. Sysops can now secure the local screen while remote players are on. See the General Section One of the Sysops Editor. If the local display is on while remote users play, Sysops now have a Chat mode available to them. Control T enters Chat and Escape exits. There is also a "Kick em off" option available to the Sysop. This is Control K. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS WILL NOT ONLY KICK THEM OUT OF THE GAME, IT WILL BOOT THEM OFF THE BBS! Undoubtedly you will find this handy if you catch a user cheating and want to "Kick em off". Now on to game internals: A fix has been added to prevent users from running up their alignment and experience by attacking with one fighter at a time. Its now pro-rated on the number of fighters used in the attack. Hold cost have been scaled down quite a bit. They still work on a scale that raises the price based on the number of holds you currently have. A Deployed Mine scan has been implemented. Option K from the Main menu. You can List Aliens just like List Traders, from the computer menu, option H. Pirates' names show up in red in the sector displays, good guys are still in Cyan. Scout Marauders have been upgraded to add the capability of having a Density Scan - Long Range Scanner. The processing time of the Density Scanner has been improved sufficiently to no longer need a turn to operate it! MINES! Mines will now go off in multiple groups depending on the mass in the sector. The Corporate Planet Scan now only shows planets that are CLAIMED by your corporation. It used to show planets that were defended by your Corp's fighters. If you get blown up or blow yourself up in an Escape Pod, you no longer lose all of your experience and alignment. You only lose half of each now. If your ship has Corbomite devices on it and someone destroys your ship, the Corbomite devices will prevent them from salvaging anything from it. Very soon, Pirates will be able to make big bucks salvaging junk off of destroyed ships in cooperation with the Undergrounds Salvage department. The Lost Trader's Tavern and the Hardware Emporium have expanded their hours due to popular demand. They are now open 24 hours a day. Photon Missiles cannot be purchased anymore. We will open them back up when they are ready to be used. If you trade your ship in, you will get credit for any P-Missiles you have on it. The Galactic bank now has an upper limit of 50,000 credits for depositors. Speaking of the Tavern (I know, I wasn't). ALL menu options are now done in it. Go in and have some food and drink and join in a friendly conversation with other Traders. While you're there, ask the Old Trader about some things (he's getting smarter all the time) and by all means, try your hand at Tri- Cron! Many, many other things have been added, changed, fixed and improved. I just don't remember what they all are. Also, many thanks to those of you that have registered the game! To this date we have 84 registered systems! 0.94 9-16-90 ----------------------------------------------------------- Release .94 now adds a personal journey log. This system records where a Trader has been. The "I" option in the computer (Inter-sector warps), is now available only for sectors you have visited. The "R" option in the computer, (Port Report) is the same. The main displays have been altered a little and changes have been made to help speed the play of the game. Pirates will be displayed in Red. Evict Other Traders from a Citadel is fully functional. (All planetary options are now done). Major changes have been made to the Ferrengi, and very soon you will see a completely re-designed Ferregni system. Also, when a remote user is on, Sysops will see a local-only status line above the Command line in the game. There are many more new and changed items in this release, I just can't remember them all. Its been a long day. Tell your users that there are many, many more ways to get Experience and Alignment changes now. P.S. If you reach the required limit to get a Federal Commission, you can now buy the Corporate Starship. Fully functional. 0.93 8-29-90 ----------------------------------------------------------- Many new features have been added to release .93 The area-specific help files are in place so you can read the docs about the menu you're on without having to read all the way through the whole thing. You should see many visual changes and additional information in the planets. The planetary trade agreements are done. In the computer section, one can list the current set of 'Avoids'. There are many more new things out there, so go find em and good luck trading!