************************************************************************** * * * 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) ------------------------------ @@@ Revised game algorithms: negative returns now allowed. @@@ configure now warns if NcursesW not found. @@@ Updated Russian translation; thanks to Vladimir B. Tsarkov and Pavel Maryanov. @@@ French translation; thanks to Frédéric Marchal. @@@ German translation; thanks to Philipp Thomas. 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...