Version 1.0. first public release on 2/18/90. *** To keep things brief, the descriptions of changes from version 1.1 to 2.F have been deleted. This CHANGES.TXT file was getting too large! *** Version 3.0 of Yankee Trader has the following changes/fixes... Added AUTO BAUD RATE DETECT! Now there is no longer ANY need to run special baud rate conversion program. Yankee Trader now AUTOMATICALLY detects the baud rate in use on either COM port! My thanks go to Raymond Clements for sending me information on how to do this! Fixed a cheat where players were storing all their credits won from the lottery on planets then committing suicide and logging in with a new ship to play the lottery over and over and acquiring large amounts of credits. Now if a player kills themself, they wont be allowed to play until tomorrow. Greatly reduced black hole loss-of-turns damage. Fixed a bug where autopilot would hang if the sector the person was starting from was set in sector excludes. The thing I added to MAINT to reduce plague reports (in version 2.E) seemed to make matters WORSE! So I changed maint to only report on the number of ports that contracted the plague instead of a report for EACH individual port. Fixed a bug where the first port a person tried to buy per game session was for sale for FREE! Changed to local logon program for a maximum play time of 180 minutes per session from 45 minutes. Added an option on "Scoreboard" of the computer to view the OLD scoreboard rather than updating the scoreboard then viewing it. Players will be able to use this option to see how much their score has improved (hopefully! ;-) by viewing the old scoreboard before viewing the updated one. For this to work properly, it is IMPORTANT that you do not move the scoreboard from the directory defined in YTCONFIG. This shoudnt be a problem for you since you can use YTCONFIG to place the scoreboard any place you wish. Cut in half the frequency that Xannor launch missiles. Added the ability to transfer Missies, Mines & Fighters to planets. REMOVED the option to transfer fighters to another team member from the team menu. (Since this can be done by leaving them on planets now.) ADDED to the team function "Find Team Members and Defense Forces" a search for team PLANETS as well. ADDED pauses to sensor displays so they dont scoll off the screen. Updated YTMAINT.EXE so that it updates planet production each run. This helps seldomly visited planets grow properly instead of stagnating. Updated YTMAINT so that the Xannor planet has full production upon regen. ADDED sales for Shields and Ground Forces. UPPED bonus for sucessfully invading Xannor HQ from 250,000 credits to 1,000,000 credits. FIXED a bug where the display of credits earned on Earth (for the owner) was always showing as "0" credits. ADDED Ground Force Production to planets. Ground forces now grow 1% per day. SHORTENED the delays in the lottery routine. *** FINALLY *** FINALLY *** FINALLY *** Found out where all the unexplained ERROR 64 reports have been coming from! A PCBoard Sysop (Alan Brenner) pointed me to the info I needed. It seems a door conversion utility commonly used by PCBoard sysops to run DORINFO type doors was writing a non-standard DORINFO with the bits and parity information transposed! I re-wrote the DORINFO parser for Yankee Trader so that it will handle DORINFOs with the parity and bits info in ANY order. *** Version 3.1 of Yankee Trader has the following changes/fixes... Non-standard DORINFOs will be the death of me yet. I thought I had everything fixed in 3.0 but I found and fixed 2 more ways that an error 64 can occur. Wildcat 3.0 sysops will benefit from this newest fix. Again, a non-standard DORINFO was being written by yet another door conversion utility. My thanks go to Paul Naley for providing me with the information needed to correct this problem. Changed the pause routine so it eats keystrokes rather than putting them in the input buffer. This will prevent keys presses to "un-pause" the screen from giving players grief. Fixed YTMAINT so it will only run once per day. (I had left the test parameter in from the last release! Sorry.) Added EMERGENCY WARPS. A player may now invoke emergeny warp if they run into a fighter force too strong for them or are trapped in a sector. Running into a black hole now automatically invokes emergency warp. Using emergency warp uses a lot of turns and there is a risk of engine overload and the subsequent loss of all turns for that day. Added a new sound effect used for Emergency Warps. Changed Sector Avoids to hold a maximum of 30 values. This is up from a maximum of 9 before. Changed "Find Nearest Ports" to show what the port is buying and selling and at what cost. REMOVED "Complete Port Report". It was redundant since "Find Nearest Port" now performs this function. Sector Avoids moved from computer option 15 to option 7 filling in the gap left by the removal of Complete Port Report. Reduced the chances of hitting a black hole. Added "Continuous (Non-Stop) read to "Find Nearest Ports". Found and fixed a couple places where text was outputted to the screen even if SNOOP was off. Fixed a problem that was preventing the RMT-INIT.EXE program from running. *** Version 3.2 of Yankee Trader has the following fixes/changes... ADDED the ability of the sysop to CHANGE user ALIAS's. This function has been added to the YTCONFIG.EXE program. CHANGED YTMaint. Before mercs were generated in groups of 2,500. This was OK except for when huge amounts of taxes were collected. There stood a chance of lockup during maint because there were not enough empty sectors to hold all the merc groups! I changed it so that the mercs are spread out among 10 equal sized groups. FIXED a bug where Earth was not being properly displayed when a player tried to buy it. CHANGED YTMAINT Xannor Revenge function so that the Xannor spend 50 times more time hunting for targets in the universe if they are in "Revnege Mode". Changed most cases of numbers appearing in scientific notation to "normal" numbers. (I tried to get them all but won't say that I HAVE! :-) ADDED a new feature! Command repeats. No no NO! This is not the old control-R feature! Now your players can repeat any command up to 30 times but placing a "/R#" (where "#" is a number from 2 to 30) at the end of their command! An example of moving between two ports and trading 30 times would be: "M;555;P;1000;Y;1000;Y;M;666;P;1000;Y;1000;Y/R30" ^^^^ See? Updated instruction file for command repeats. (YTINSTR.DOC) Added a PLANET NAME EDITOR to the configuration program "YTCONFIG". ADDED a registration key scheme. This will allow registered sysops to show that they registered the game. (This was added at the request of many sysops who wanted to be able to show that they registered.) Yankee Trader is still completely free of crippling in the unregistered version. The only difference between the registered and unregistered versions is that the unregistered version will show "UNREGISTERED EVALUATION COPY!" while the registered version will show the name of the sysop who registered YT and the name of the BBS that YT is registered to. See YTSYSOP.DOC for more information on the key file scheme. If you previously registered YT and you call my BBS and ask for a registration code I will give it to you in a private message for free otherwise PREVIOUSLY REGISTERED SYSOPS CAN GET A REGISTRATION CODE IF YOU MAIL ME A SELF ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE. BE SURE TO TELL ME THE NAME OF YOUR BBS AND THE NAME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED UNDER!!! I will verify that you are previously registered in my records. The price for first-time registrations remains $20.00. FIXED a bug in YTMAINT where the Xannor were not killing players with 0 shields and 0 fighters. The XANNOR are now MUCH BETTER at hunting for targets. (Evil Grin!) FIXED bugs in YTMAINT and YT where the programs would go into an infinate loop when fighter groups of numbers in scientific notation would attack other groups in scientific notation. Due to rounding errors going from scientific notation to single precision numbers, BOTH fighter groups would NEVER reach zero left and the programs would loop forever trying to determine a winner to the battle. )-; I never expected battles on this scale! It's fixed now! (-; Changed YT so that a player gets credited with defeating Xannor HQ whether they do it with missiles or by going to the sector and attacking the fighters. Before they only got credit if they attacked the fighters and got NO credit if they attacked with missiles. FIXED a bug where sectors were not being properly displayed after an emergency warp escape from sector mines. CHANGED the sector mines routine so that it executes MUCH more rapidly. Now if there are large amounts of mines in a sector they go off in groups instead of ONE AT A TIME like they did before! Before when the mines went off one at a time it would take forever to finish if a strong player hit a large amount of mines! FIXED a problem where incorrect text was displayed if a player tried to sell more than a port wanted or buy more then they had. ENHANCED Planet Thrusters (Move a Planet) routine so that now it behaves like the computer autopilot. A player only has to enter a destination sector. Before, they had to get an autopilot report for the path they wanted to take, then move the planet there MANUALLY one sector at a time! (Ugh) Added checking so that a player cant hit control-R too many times and exceed maximum string length. LIMITED the amount of turns awadred for killing Xannor to the maximum turns per day as defined by you in YTCONFIG. This will prevent the really powerful players from acquiring ridiculous amounts of turns. Changed the game so the Xannor's Missiles are no longer effected by a player's sector excludes. Made the Xannor 2.5 times stronger against ground forces. Before, it would have taken 2.5 MILLION xannor to get through 1000 ground forces, now it will only take 1 million Xannor. They were too weak before. Added PORT UPDATES to maintenance. This will allow seldon visited ports to grow and will help prevent ports from being sucked dry too often from being too small. ADDED a display of ground force productivity to the planet display. The Xannor now shoot back with more missiles when fired upon. The amount of fighters killed by missiles was unrealistic. Fighters lost to missiles has been reduced. The amount of damage done to shields by missiles was unrealistic. Shields lost to missiles have been increased. FIXED a bug I found in the two init programs. They were not always finding ALL the isolated sectors during warp verification. CHANGED YT-INIT.EXE (Initialization program) so that it automatically runs game maintenance upon completion. Sensor robots now report planet's ground force level. Before, they only reported a planet's name. FIXED a bug in YTMAINT where not all dead players were being removed from teams when killed by the Xannor. COMPLETELY rewrote the Cloaking routine. Now cloaking is expressed as a percentage of maximum possible cloaking. Someone at 100% cloak is now completely undetectable unless a player buys an anti-cloak. Someone at 90% cloak will be detectable 1 in 10. Someone at 10% cloak will be detectable 9 in 10! etc. Cloaking slowly decreases as a player plays and will be reduced 5% per day by maintenance. All I can say about this rewrite is 'WHEW, what a chore!' but I believe that it is much more realistic than the old method. CHANGED Anti-Cloaking so the purchaser of the anti-cloak gets uncloaked too! FIXED the routine where Xannor shoot back when fired upon so that they ONLY hit the person who fired on them rather than whoever was in the same sector as the person who attacked the Xannor! Weak players were using this loophole to kill much stronger ones by getting the Xannor to kill them off! (They would fire ONE missile at the Xannor and the Xannor would fire 1 to 100 BACK hitting the wrong target in many cases!) Changed YTMAINT so that port and planet plagues do not kick in until ports and planets are much bigger. Especially with ports, plagues were coming too often! ADDED FILE LOCKING. Yankee Trader will now exit gracefully if more than one person tries to play it at the same time on different nodes. SHARE MUST NOW BE LOADED IN ORDER TO RUN YANKEE TRADER! Changed YT-INIT & RMT-INIT so that the minimum production of an item at a port is 1000. Before it was -1- which was a bit too small! Fixed YT missile routine so that if the ground forces on a planet are reduced to 0 by a missile the planet becomes "un-owned". *** Version 3.3 of Yankee Trader has the following changes/fixes... Fixed the team function "Banish a Team Member". Only the Team Captain should have been able to use it but ANYONE on the team could use it! Fixed the display of Cloak Energy Percentage in the "Info" display so it shows whole numbers only. You can no longer buy mines and missiles at Earth. Now you must get them from planets. Since planets produce them so well and so cheaply, noone was really buying them any more anyhow. This will also raise the importance of owning good planets. There was an "urban legend" floating around YT players that having money in a planet's bank increased productivity on that planet. This was completely false. HOWEVER I thought, "Hey, that's not a bad idea!" so I made it so with this new version! (-: Fixed a bug in move-planet where the routine was not exiting when a planet blew up when being moved! This often caused multiple explosions! Fixed info display of shields. This was still showing up in scientific notation. Added a much improved message line editor to computer radio option. Doubled the size of RS232 input buffer. This should help prevent lockups when players use special terminal programs and dump their command buffer into the door. Added a MOTHER SHIP for the Mercenaries. You may buy PLASMA BOLTS from the mother ship for 5,000,000 credits each. Plasma bolts are VERY powerful weapons which you fire like missiles. Unlike missiles however, plasma bolts do not have the benefit of computer control and will hit ANYTHING in their path.. including the person who fired them if they fire at their own sector! They are like firing a bullet. They go until they run out of energy or hit something. (Cloaked or not!) Missiles, with their benefit of computer control, are smart enough not to hit friendly targets. The benefit of plasma bolts is that they can do great damage to an enemy if fired with care. Added a new sound effect for Plasma Bolts. The player instructions file has been updated to reflect the change in status of sector mines and missiles and to add plasma bolts. Make sure you copy the new YTINSTR.DOC into your game directory if you are upgrading from a previous version. Improved the player [ Info ] display. Added COLOR to the newspaper display from the computer. Planets now lose ground forces if they contract the plague. Sensors now show black holes in adjacent sectors. Fixed a problem on Earth when buying cloak energy after buying an anti-cloak. The game thought you had no cloak energy and would allow you to buy more even though you had cloak energy already. (It was just temporarily disabled.) The INFO display will now display you cloak as "FAIL" if you have activated an anti-cloak. Before it showed 0%. The Xannor are now 33% better at finding cloaked targets. Yankee Trader NOW WORKS ON COM3 AND COM4! Yes, I finally obtained the info I needed to add COM3 and COM4 support to YT! My thanks go to Brad Garner of Arlington, Texas for providing me the information I needed! Added some code to try to prevent error 14 (Out of String Space) crashes when a player hits control-r too many times in a row to replay saved commands. Turned the cursor on on the local console. Yankee Trader now works on ANY baud rate between 75 and 115200 baud! This should make you sysops with the newer, lightning fast modems happy! (-: (And now the old 75 baudders can use it again... hehe!) Players now only get 1 turn for every 1000 Xannor killed. Before it was one turn per every 250 killed. *** Version 3.4 of Yankee Trader has the following fixes/changes... A planet now has the chance of having a civil war if it has too many ground forces. (Over 1 Million.) Fixed display telling users that the game is active on another node and telling the sysop that share must be loaded. Earth can no longer be owned. Ownership of Earth gave too much power to a player or a team which made them almost invincible. This had the effect of discouraging other players. Raised the base cost of holds to 2500 from 500 credits. They were too cheap before. Changed the "Salvage" routine to award a portion of mines, plasma bolts and ground forces also. Before only holds, cash, missiles and robots were awarded. Also changed the game so that "Salvage" runs whether a player kills another using fighters, missiles OR plasma bolts. Before only attacks using fighters triggered the salvage routine. Raised the cost of planets from 25,000 to 250,000 credits. They were too cheap before. Chnged Salvage to report to the newspaper what a player gets for killing another. FIXED a bug where players were not being awarded the ports of those they killed! Also changed the routine so it writes to he newspaper how many ports that are awarded to the victor. FIXED a bug where a player was not effected by a black hole if they started playing in a sector containing one. ADDED plasma bolt production to planets. 1 PB is produced per day for every 250,000 total production of ore, org & equ and 1 per day for every 10 million credits in the bank. REMOVED the mercenary mother ship. It was not needed any more since plasma bolts are now produced by planets. Another reason for removal is because the mother ship took a lot of program space for a limited feature. ADDED hi-lighting to "Info" display for cargo in holds. ADDED Port cost display to "Find Nearest Port". This will allow easier searching for ports to buy. The display also shows whether or not a port is owned and who owns it if it is owned. FIXED Anti-Cloak routine so it doesnt show dead players as being uncloaked! DECREASED missile and mine production on planets. FIXED and CHANGED ground forces production on planets. Due to a misplaced bracket ground forces were growing MUCH too quickly! Also even after fixing the formula it was still too generous. The formula should have increased ground forces 1% per day PLUS 1% for every million in the planet's bank. The NEW formula is 1% growth per day PLUS 1 unit of growth for every 10,000 credits in the bank. This produces a much more reasonable rate of growth! If you have a game running where the ground forces have gotten out of hand you may wish to re-init the game to return the game balance to normal. (Alternately you can just wait for the "Civil Wars" to knock them down!) DECREASED the amount of fighters each plasma bolt destroys. Before ONE would destroy 1 - 2 MILLION fighters which was OK when plasma bolts were hard to come by but made defense fighters worthless once I added plasma bolt production to planets! Now one bolt destroys an average of 10,000 fighters. FIXED a minor bug in YTCONFIG. Added to YTMAINT a feature that causes ports to switch to selling whatever they have the most of. This is a little more realistic than it was before and should make trading more interesting as the ports change around! Changed the formula for Xannor vs. planet ground forces. Now it takes an average of 500 Xannor to remove 1 ground force unit from a planet. ENHANCED "Find Nearest Ports" some more to allow players to show ALL ports, their ports, their team member's ports, enemy ports, un-owned ports or ports buying OR selling any particular cargo type. (You'll like this one!) ADDED a feature to the team function. Whenever someone joins, quits or ENTERS AN INVALID PASSWORD for your team a message is now sent to all team members! Now your players will know if someone tries to hack their team password! Greatly reduced plasma bolt damage for all items. The damage done was too great considering that the bolts are now a lot easier to come by. Re-did planets to update ANY time that they are encountered or displayed. Before they were not always up to date on their productivity causing them to display incorrectly (too low of production and items) or making them too easy to destroy beause they were not as strong as they should have been. FIXED a bug in the plasma bolt routine. They were not always killing other player's ships when they should have been. CHANGED the interest in planet banks from 5% to 1% per day. CHANGED port ownership so that you get 1% of what YOU spend at your own ports as well as ALL of what others spend. Before you got NOTHING when YOU traded at your own ports. This makes port ownership more valuable. *** Version 3.5 of Yankee Trader has the following fixes/changes... Mutter mumble mutter mumble. The day AFTER I released YT3.4 my players discover a BUG. Doggone it. Well, 3.5 fixes that bug! *** Version 3.6 of Yankee Trader has the following changes/fixes... *** Beta 1 FIXED how ground forces were working on Planet Xannoron. The game was assuming that the planet was owned by a dead player instead of the Xannor! FIXED the display of credit production (interest) in the planet display. It was till showing the old 5% value instead of the new 1% interest value. CHANGED Repeat command function to be a maximum of 20 times from 30. This is because it was still occationally possible to crash the game due to an "out of string space" condition while using the repeat command "X" times function. *** Beta 2 Fixed a problem introduced in beta 1 where the Xannor were not attacking planets. DECREASED plasma bolt production modifier so that each 25 million in the bank to raises PB prod 1 unit per day. Before PB prod was raised 1 unit per every 10 million in the bank. INCREASED plasma bolt damage to 25,000 fighters destroyed per bolt from 10,000 defense fighters per bolt. *** Beta 3 Fixed a bug where players could display planets that were not their own or team members if the just dropped defense fighters in the sector! *** Beta 5 Fixed a bug where the game would say you had no Plasma Bolts if you had no robots! *** Beta 6 REMOVED sensor robots. (WHAT!?!??) Relax, I've added a new type of scanner called a "Danger Scanner". A danger scanner will automatically stop a player's ship before it enters a sector where there is a dangerous situation. Danger scanners are fairly expensive (250,000 c.) and also can be destroyed if a player's ship takes damage. The reason for removing sensor robots is because they made it TOO EASY to search the universe. Removing them from the game should make the game more challenging and the danger scanner will offset the loss of the robots for safely moving about. REVISED the instructions for the Danger Scanner. Make sure you copy the new instructions into your game directory! Added a new SOUND EFFECT for the Danger Scanner. Changed the lottery routine so it will no longer accept LETTERS instead of numbers. Also changed it to hilight the numbers that match. *** Beta 7 ADDED "spies". Spies search the universe at random and report any non-friendly forces or planets that they find. Spies can be hired at Earth for 10,000 credits per turn. Added a new sound effect for spies. Added the ability for players to change the name of ports they purchase. In case someone enters something rude, I've also added a function to YTCONFIG.EXE to change port names. *** Beta 8 Rewrote "Spies" function to make it a little less crude. Fixed a bug where Xannor planet's ground forces were not keeping people out! *** Beta 9 Fixed computer option 11. It was not stopping if a player selected "E" to end the display. *** Beta 10 Changes turns awarded for killing Xannor to be the max turns allowed per day. This way a player can never have more then the maximum turns allowed. Also changed it so that one turn is awarded per every 200 Xannor killed, it was 1 per 1000 before. Reduced the base cost of cargo holds to 500 credits and the cost of planets to 25,000 credits. I originally raised them because it was too easy for a killed player to get back into the game. I overlooked that cheap planets and holds made it FUN and less discouraging for players who were just killed or were just starting out. Changed YTMAINT. Small groups of fighters (less than 100 or so) stand a chance of defecting and joining the mercenaries. This is to prevent players from dropping a fighter in each sector and clogging up the game! Changed the "low turns warning" to start flashing at 50 turns instead of 40 as it was before. *** Beta 12 Added an option to planets to increase their productivity by spending credits. (ONE unit each of ore, organics and equipment for each 1000 credits spent.) *** Beta 13 Added a function what the "Main Command" prompt where players can rename their ports. This is useful if a player decides to change the name later or if they inherit ports from others. (Kill them in battle.) *** Beta 14 REMOVED the requirement that share must be loaded. SHARE has caused grief for a fair number of sysops. If you are runing multi-node and you have problems because share is no longer used by YT please let me know. If you run multi- node and your problems are SOLVED by my removing the requirement of having share loaded, please let me know too! CHANGED plasma bolt damage to 25,000 shields, 250 mines 50,000 fighters for each one launched.