trader/NEWS

**************************************************************************
*                                                                        *
*              Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading              *
*                 Copyright (C) 1990-2012, John Zaitseff                 *
*                                                                        *
**************************************************************************

Star Traders 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).

The following history is presented in reverse chronological order.  If you
would like to  see a list of detailed changes to  this project, you should
consult the Subversion repository for "trader" on The ZAP Group web server
at http://www.zap.org.au/services/svn/.


Version 7.4 (not yet released)
------------------------------

For the  first time since  the CP/M-80 version  of Star Traders,  the game
algorithms  have  been carefully  reviewed  and  revised.  In  particular,
companies may now have negative returns, making players lose money on such
shares.  This  may encourage  players to use  the "Sell shares"  option at
appropriate times...   In addition, changes  in share prices,  returns and
bank interest  rates have  been made much  "smoother", less prone  to wild
variations.  These  new algorithms were  first modelled using  Gnuplot and
Perl before being implemented in C.

The "configure" script now prints  a prominent warning if a wide-character
version of Curses,  such as NcursesW, is not  available when compiling the
game.  It  is a warning and not  an error as single-byte  locales (such as
US-ASCII and ISO8859-1)  do not require NcursesW, even  if the compilation
environment itself is a multibyte one (such as UTF-8).

The Russian translation has been  updated, with thanks to Vladimir Tsarkov
and Pavel Maryanov.  Translations for French, German, Finnish and Croatian
have been added (in that  order), with thanks to Frédéric Marchal, Philipp
Thomas,  Jorma Karvonen and  Tomislav Krznar.  Special thanks also  to the
Translation Project,  which brings free  (open-source) software developers
and translators together.


Version 7.3 (16th March, 2012)
------------------------------

Star Traders has been  translated into Russian.  In addition,  a number of
bugs with internationalisation  have been fixed.  The  "default value" key
(originally "=" or ";" as the first key-press in any input field) has been
incorporated into the language translation files.


Version 7.2 (29th August, 2011)
-------------------------------

Star  Traders has  been internationalised!   As part  of this  update, all
input and output routines have been rewritten to handle multibyte strings.
English  (Australian, British,  Canadian  and US)  translations have  been
included.  Translations  for other languages (and  corrections to existing
languages) are more than welcome!

Game files  are now stored  in UTF-8 format  (once decrypted!) and  can be
loaded under  any locale with  automatic character set  translation.  This
does mean,  however, that  game files  from versions 7.0  and 7.1  of Star
Traders will not load under this release.

The program now  better handles terminal resizing events  (for versions of
Curses supporting  such events).   It also tries  to restore  the terminal
environment correctly when receiving a terminating signal.


Version 7.1 (29th July, 2011)
-----------------------------

A minor updated  release to fix configuration problems  on some platforms.
In particular, some systems could  not find the Curses libraries or header
files, so the  Autoconf macro that performed the  search was rewritten and
extended.


Version 7.0 (25th July, 2011)
-----------------------------

Released the first version of Star Traders for Unix-like operating systems
such as Linux.  It requires a text  console or window of at least 80x24 in
size.  The code is written  in the C99 programming  language as a learning
exercise for a  number of software tools and  libraries; the algorithms in
the  original Pascal and  Visual Basic  versions are  reused for  the game
logic.

Note that versions 7.0 and 7.1 of Star Traders did NOT handle locales with
multibyte character sequences  (such as UTF-8) correctly.  Each  byte in a
such a  sequence was treated  as a separate character.   Eight-bit locales
(such as US-ASCII, ISO8859-1, etc.) worked correctly.


Early 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.

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.

In 1992,  it was recompiled for  the NEC Advanced  Personal Computer (with
8-inch floppy 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.

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.  In other  words, the  MS-DOS version  looked worse
than the one running under CP/M-86!

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 "windowed" 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.

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.

Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later...