trader/NEWS

**************************************************************************
*                                                                        *
*              Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading              *
*                 Copyright (C) 1990-2018, 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
browse  the Git repository on  The ZAP Group  web server  at the following
location: https://www.zap.org.au/gitweb/trader.git


Version 7.13 (not yet released)
-------------------------------

(No news yet)


Version 7.12 (24th August, 2017)
--------------------------------

Updated the Serbian translation, with thanks to Мирослав Николић.


Version 7.11 (18th June, 2017)
------------------------------

Bug fix:  some architectures (such as ARM, PowerPC and S390)  treat "char"
as "unsigned char",  and this caused  b64decode()  to fail while loading a
saved game.  Changed the relevant type from "char" to "int" to fix this.


Version 7.10 (2nd June, 2017)
-----------------------------

Added a data directory that contains a desktop file and appropriate icons.
Adjusted the game constants for more dynamic play:  allow the share prices
and returns to change a bit more frequently and more rapidly.  Tweaked the
colours in the example monochrome retro-computing command lines, including
adding an amber monitor version.

Added a Serbian translation, with thanks to Мирослав Николић.  Updated the
Danish, French, Swedish, Hungarian, Norwegian Bokmål  and  German transla-
tions, in that order,  with thanks to Joe Hansen, Frédéric Marchal, Anders
Jonsson, Balázs Úr, Johnny A. Solbu and Philipp Thomas respectively.

Updated translatable strings  to overcome a limitation of  msgfmt(1): if a
string starts or  ends with a new-line character,  its translation must do
so as well.  This has an impact on labels in particular.  Also changed the
help text string  "Page N of M"  to allow  translations of the form  "Of M
pages, this is page N", and all quoted strings using the obsolete GNU form
`like this' to 'this'.  In addition,  newer versions of  lib/getopt.c have
different strings.  All translations have been updated as a result.

Removed the obsolete  Gnulib gettext module  and updated to the latest Git
snapshot of Gnulib.  Updated the dependency version numbers  for Autoconf,
Automake and Gettext.  Also updated all macros from the Autoconf Archive.

Migrated the source code repository  from Subversion  to Git.  Updated the
documentation to suit,  and also listed  specific required version numbers
for the Autoconf and Automake tools in the INSTALL file.


Version 7.9 (5th January, 2016)
-------------------------------

Updated the Danish translation, with thanks to Joe Hansen.


Version 7.8 (10th September, 2015)
----------------------------------

Changed the name of the seventh company from "Gemeni Inc" to "Gemini Inc":
a spelling mistake  that has been present  since 1990!   Special thanks to
Anders Jonsson for pointing this out.

Added the Swedish translation,  with thanks to Anders Jonsson.  Minor code
changes were made to accommodate this language.  Incorporated changes made
by the translators for German, French and Norwegian Bokmål, in that order,
with thanks to Philipp Thomas, Frédéric Marchal and Johnny A. Solbu.  Also
updated all references to GNU Gettext to version 0.19.5.


Version 7.7 (18th August, 2015)
-------------------------------

Added the  Hungarian translation, with  thanks to  Balázs Úr.   Minor code
changes were made  to accommodate this language.  Also added documentation
in the file INSTALL to translate Star Traders into another language.


Version 7.6 (13th August, 2014)
-------------------------------

A minor release to fix compilation bugs under Cygwin: the libiconv library
must be listed AFTER the GNU Portability Library on that platform.

In addition, the minimum and maximum share return values were changed from
-10% to -15%  and 20% to 25%  respectively.   This gives more incentive to
borrow money from the  Interstellar Trading Bank,  whose interest rate can
reach a maximum of 20%.


Version 7.5 (24th May, 2014)
----------------------------

Rewrote the  file input and output  routines  so that saved games  are now
stored  in a much more reliable  (scrambled) ASCII format.  However, saved
games from older versions will no longer load:  the workaround is to start
the older version of  Star Traders with the "--dont-encrypt"  command line
option, load the relevant game and save it again straight away, change the
second line in the game file  from "File API 7.2"  to "File API 7.5", then
run the new version of Star Traders.

Added translations  for Norwegian Bokmål,  Danish  and  Esperanto (in that
order),  with thanks to  Johnny A. Solbu,  Joe Hansen  and  Felipe Castro.
Updated auxiliary files  to the latest versions  available from the Gnulib
GNU Portability Library and the GNU Autoconf project.


Version 7.4 (9th May, 2012)
---------------------------

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...