mirror of
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153 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
153 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
**************************************************************************
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* *
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* Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading *
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* Copyright (C) 1990-2014, John Zaitseff *
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* *
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**************************************************************************
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Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objective
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is to create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay money, in
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order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).
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The following history is presented in reverse chronological order. If you
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would like to see a list of detailed changes to this project, you should
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consult the Subversion repository for "trader" on The ZAP Group web server
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at http://www.zap.org.au/services/svn/.
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Version 7.5 (24th May, 2014)
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----------------------------
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Rewrote the file input and output routines so that saved games are now
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stored in a much more reliable (scrambled) ASCII format. However, saved
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games from older versions will no longer load: the workaround is to start
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the older version of Star Traders with the "--dont-encrypt" command line
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option, load the relevant game and save it again straight away, change the
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second line in the game file from "File API 7.2" to "File API 7.5", then
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run the new version of Star Traders.
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Added translations for Norwegian Bokmål, Danish and Esperanto (in that
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order), with thanks to Johnny A. Solbu, Joe Hansen and Felipe Castro.
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Updated auxiliary files to the latest versions available from the Gnulib
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GNU Portability Library and the GNU Autoconf project.
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Version 7.4 (9th May, 2012)
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---------------------------
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For the first time since the CP/M-80 version of Star Traders, the game
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algorithms have been carefully reviewed and revised. In particular,
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companies may now have negative returns, making players lose money on such
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shares. This may encourage players to use the "Sell shares" option at
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appropriate times... In addition, changes in share prices, returns and
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bank interest rates have been made much "smoother", less prone to wild
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variations. These new algorithms were first modelled using Gnuplot and
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Perl before being implemented in C.
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The "configure" script now prints a prominent warning if a wide-character
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version of Curses, such as NcursesW, is not available when compiling the
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game. It is a warning and not an error as single-byte locales (such as
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US-ASCII and ISO8859-1) do not require NcursesW, even if the compilation
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environment itself is a multibyte one (such as UTF-8).
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The Russian translation has been updated, with thanks to Vladimir Tsarkov
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and Pavel Maryanov. Translations for French, German, Finnish and Croatian
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have been added (in that order), with thanks to Frédéric Marchal, Philipp
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Thomas, Jorma Karvonen and Tomislav Krznar. Special thanks also to the
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Translation Project, which brings free (open-source) software developers
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and translators together.
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Version 7.3 (16th March, 2012)
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------------------------------
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Star Traders has been translated into Russian. In addition, a number of
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bugs with internationalisation have been fixed. The "default value" key
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(originally "=" or ";" as the first key-press in any input field) has been
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incorporated into the language translation files.
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Version 7.2 (29th August, 2011)
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-------------------------------
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Star Traders has been internationalised! As part of this update, all
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input and output routines have been rewritten to handle multibyte strings.
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English (Australian, British, Canadian and US) translations have been
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included. Translations for other languages (and corrections to existing
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languages) are more than welcome!
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Game files are now stored in UTF-8 format (once decrypted!) and can be
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loaded under any locale with automatic character set translation. This
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does mean, however, that game files from versions 7.0 and 7.1 of Star
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Traders will not load under this release.
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The program now better handles terminal resizing events (for versions of
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Curses supporting such events). It also tries to restore the terminal
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environment correctly when receiving a terminating signal.
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Version 7.1 (29th July, 2011)
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-----------------------------
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A minor updated release to fix configuration problems on some platforms.
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In particular, some systems could not find the Curses libraries or header
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files, so the Autoconf macro that performed the search was rewritten and
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extended.
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Version 7.0 (25th July, 2011)
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-----------------------------
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Released the first version of Star Traders for Unix-like operating systems
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such as Linux. It requires a text console or window of at least 80x24 in
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size. The code is written in the C99 programming language as a learning
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exercise for a number of software tools and libraries; the algorithms in
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the original Pascal and Visual Basic versions are reused for the game
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logic.
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Note that versions 7.0 and 7.1 of Star Traders did NOT handle locales with
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multibyte character sequences (such as UTF-8) correctly. Each byte in a
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such a sequence was treated as a separate character. Eight-bit locales
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(such as US-ASCII, ISO8859-1, etc.) worked correctly.
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Early history
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-------------
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The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by S. J.
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Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic. This was modified for Microsoft Basic
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(MBASIC) running under the CP/M-80 operating system by John Zaitseff and
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released on 7th March, 1988.
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Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the Australian-
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designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 processor,
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using Turbo Pascal 3.01a. Essentially, only the name of the game and some
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of the ideas were retained in this version. Version 4.1 of Star Traders
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was released on 1st August, 1991.
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In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with
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8-inch floppy drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using Turbo
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Pascal 2.0. This version had colour added to it in the form of ANSI
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escape sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.
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The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run on
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IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS. Turbo Pascal 6.0 was
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used for this. The ANSI escape sequences were slightly different under
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MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC supported a number of extra
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character attributes. In other words, the MS-DOS version looked worse
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than the one running under CP/M-86!
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Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines with
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VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters. The output routines were recoded to
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use a "windowed" look. Borland Pascal 7.0 was used for this purpose,
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along with a number of text window manipulation modules. Version 5.4 was
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released on 1st June, 1994.
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In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft
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Windows 3.1 graphical environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used
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for this purpose. Although completely rewritten, the original algorithms
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were reused from previous versions. Version 6.0 of the game was released
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on 15th September, 1995.
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Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later...
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