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**************************************************************************
* *
* Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading *
2012-03-14 11:36:23 -04:00
* 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)
------------------------------
@@@ Updated Russian translation; thanks to Vladimir B. Tsarkov.
@@@ French translation; thanks to Frédéric Marchal.
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.
2011-07-25 03:02:16 -04:00
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...