trader/doc/trader.6

.\" *********************************************************************
.\" *                                                                   *
.\" *           Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading            *
.\" *              Copyright (C) 1990-2011, John Zaitseff               *
.\" *                                                                   *
.\" *********************************************************************
.\"
.\" Author: John Zaitseff <J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au>
.\" $Id$
.\"
.\" This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
.\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
.\" the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at
.\" your option) any later version.
.\"
.\" This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
.\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
.\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
.\" General Public License for more details.
.\"
.\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
.\" along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
.\"
.\"
.\" *********************************************************************
.\" Various macros
.\"
.\" Allow hyphenation
.hy 14
.\"
.\" Define .URL, .MTO and .FTP, then try to load the www.tmac version
.de URL
\\$2 \(la\\$1\(ra\\$3
..
.de MTO
\\$2 \(la\\$1\(ra\\$3
..
.de FTP
\\$2 \(la\\$1\(ra\\$3
..
.if \n[.g] .mso www.tmac
.\"
.\" *********************************************************************
.TH TRADER 6 "22nd July, 2011" "Unix-like systems"
.SH NAME
trader \- a game of interstellar trading
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B trader
.RB [ \-\-no\-color | \-\-no\-colour ]
.RB [ \-\-max\-turn=\c
.IR NUM ]
.RI [ GAME ]
.br
.B trader
.RB [ \-h | \-\-help ]
.RB [ \-V | \-\-version ]
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH DESCRIPTION
\fBStar Traders\fR is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the
objective is to create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay
money, in order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.I GAME
If \fIGAME\fR is specified as a number between \fB1\fR and \fB9\fR
(inclusive), load and continue playing that game.  If \fIGAME\fR is not
specified, start a new game.
.TP
.BR \-\-no\-color ", " \-\-no\-colour
Don't use colour for displaying the text in the game.  Use this option
for a \*(lqretro-computing\*(rq look (as shown in the
.B EXAMPLES
below).
.TP
.BI \-\-max\-turn= NUM
Set the number of turns in the game to \fINUM\fR.  In this version of
Star Traders, \fINUM\fR must be greater or equal to 10.  If this option
is not specified, the default is 50 turns.
.TP
.BR \-h ", " \-\-help
Show a summary of command-line options and exit.
.TP
.BR \-V ", " \-\-version
Display version information about the program, then exit.
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH "EXIT STATUS"
.TP
.B 0
Star Traders finished without any errors.
.TP
.B 1
Star Traders encountered an unrecoverable problem or error; a diagnostic
message will be written to standard error in this case.
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH EXAMPLES
You can start an ordinary game by running Star Traders without any
command line options:
.RS
.sp
.B trader
.sp
.RE
If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify
that game number on the command line.  For example, the following starts
game 4, if it was previously saved:
.RS
.sp
.B trader 4
.sp
.RE
If you are running under the X Window System, you might like to start the
game in a dedicated
.BR xterm (1)
window (all on one line):
.RS
.sp
.hy 0
.B "xterm \-g 80x24 \-fa Mono \-fs 18 \-bg black \-fg white \-bc +sb +fbx \-e trader &"
.hy 14
.sp
.RE
If you would like a full \*(lqretro-computing\*(rq green-screen
experience, try (again, all on one line):
.RS
.sp
.hy 0
.B "xterm \-g 80x24 \-fa Mono \-fs 18 \-bg black \-fg '#009911' \-bc +sb +bdc +fbx \-xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #00FF00' \-e trader \-\-no\-colour &"
.hy 14
.sp
.RE
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.TP
.BR LINES ", " COLUMNS
Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the screen.
As such, it will access these two environment variables if the underlying
Curses library does so (see, for example, the \fBENVIRONMENT\fR section
in the
.BR ncurses (3)
manual page for in-depth details).  It requires a text console or window
of at least 80\(mu24 in size.
.TP
.BR LANG ", " LC_ALL ", etc."
This version of Star Traders has rudimentary support for locales and will
use appropriate settings.  In particular, numeric quantities will be
displayed using \fBLC_NUMERIC\fR and monetary quantities will use
\fBLC_MONETARY\fR.  See the
.BR locale (7)
or
.BR setlocale (3)
manual pages for more details on locale settings.
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH FILES
.TP
.IB ~/.trader/game N
Star Traders stores saved game files in the \fI.trader\fR subdirectory in
your home directory.  \fIN\fR is a number between \fB1\fR and \fB9\fR
inclusive.  The game file is scrambled to prevent you or others from
casually cheating!
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH BUGS
The current version of Star Traders does \fInot\fR handle locales with
multibyte character sequences (such as UTF-8) correctly.  Each byte in a
multibyte sequence is treated as a separate character.  Eight-bit locales
(such as US-ASCII, ISO8859-1, etc.) work correctly.
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH FEEDBACK
Your comments, suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always
warmly welcomed!  Please send these to:
.IP Postal: 10n
\fBJohn Zaitseff\fR,
.br
The ZAP Group,
.br
Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
.br
Berala, NSW, 2141,
.br
Australia
.IP E-mail: 10n
.MTO J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au
.PD 0
.IP Web: 10n
.URL http://www.zap.org.au/software/trader/
.IP FTP: 10n
.FTP ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/
.PD
.PP
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH COPYRIGHT
Copyright \(co 1990\-2011, John Zaitseff.
.PP
\fBStar Traders\fR is free software that is distributed under the terms
of the GNU General Public License.  You can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of that License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
.PP
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General
Public License for more details.
.PP
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program.  If not, see the
.URL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ "GNU licenses web page" .
.PP
Even though the GNU General Public License does \fInot\fR require you to
send your modifications back to the author, it is considered \*(lqgood
form\*(rq to do so, as this allows your modifications to be incorporated
into future versions of the program, allowing others to benefit from
them.
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH HISTORY
The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by
S.\ J.\ Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic.  This was modified for
Microsoft Basic (MBASIC) running under the CP/M-80 operating system by
John Zaitseff and released on 7th March, 1988.
.PP
Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the
Australian-designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog
Z80 processor, using Turbo Pascal 3.01a.  Essentially, only the name of
the game and some of the ideas were retained in this version.  Version
4.1 of Star Traders was released on 1st August, 1991.
.PP
In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with
8-inch drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using Turbo Pascal
2.0.  This version had colour added to it in the form of ANSI escape
sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.
.PP
The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run on
IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS.  Turbo Pascal 6.0
was used for this.  The ANSI escape sequences were slightly different
under MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC supported a number of
extra character attributes.
.PP
Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines
with VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters.  The output routines were
recoded to use a \*(lqwindowed\*(rq look.  Borland Pascal 7.0 was used
for this purpose, along with a number of text window manipulation
modules.  Version 5.4 was released on 1st June, 1994.
.PP
In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft
Windows 3.1 graphical environment.  Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used
for this purpose.  Although completely rewritten, the original algorithms
were reused from previous versions.  Version 6.0 of the game was released
on 15th September, 1995.
.PP
Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later... when the
game was rewritten once again, this time in the C programming language.
Version 7.0 was released on @@@ for Unix-like operating systems such as
Linux.  Now you, too, can run this small piece of computing history!
.\" *********************************************************************
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.URL http://www.zap.org.au/software/trader/ "Star Traders home page"
.\" *********************************************************************
.\" End of file