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Text File | 1993-08-09 | 26KB | 551 lines

TRADEWARS NEW VERSION ADDITIONS/CHANGES: Version 2.3 / July 14, 1993 --------------------------- o This version of TradeWars was compiled with the new RexxPlus v1.32. The RexxPlus bug which caused TW to crash on some systems with a 68020 or 68030 (namely, the ones operating without a math co-processor) has been fixed, so ALL systems should be able to run TradeWars now! o When attacking another starship, instead of seeing the extremely vague message "Shields weakening!", players will be shown both their own shield strength percentage and their opponent's after each attack. o It seems that a few of my players trying to use the "/" command to scan adjacent sectors have actually been able to crash the system by creating a "cnet:bbs failed" message. It has been suggested that the use of the "/" key is conflicting with CNet's built in MCI-abort feature (which also is the "/" key), so all "Scan Adjacent Sector" commands have been changed to the "." symbol. o After defeating an opponent's starship, players will be asked if they want to send a message to the player they've just defeated. o Sector 1 will now be guarded by 50,000 to 100,000 Federation fighters. If a player tries to attack another player at sector 1, the Fed fighters will intervene! (Note: if the player being attacked is an OUTLAW, the Fed fighters will NOT engage the person attacking!) o After a player has entered a mine field and lost all shield strength without destroying all the mines, he will be asked if he would like to attempt an escape. He will be asked again after he has lost all his fighters, and again after he's lost 10% of his holds. o Previously, if a player entered a mine field and lost everything his ship could lose, the mines in that sector would be reset to zero and the player could continue on. Now, if he loses everything, and there are still mines present, his ship will explode and he will be killed and have to start over again the next day at Sector 1. o Mines can no longer be dropped in the Meteoroid Belt. o Ports can no longer be constructed in the Meteoroid Belt. o Combat with large numbers of fighters had become rather slow after the last "tweeking" of the attack routines. This has once again been sped up. o It was pointed out to me that if a player experienced any line noise while viewing a message from another player, he couldn't go back and read it again, so the "Reply? (y/N):" prompt after reading a message has been changed to "Again, Reply or [continue]:" (*Suggested by Mr. Clean*) o If a player towed an asteroid to a sector that already had one and turned off their tractor beam, the second asteroid would "disappear" instead of being added to the "Asteroids:" count in the sector information. Corrected. (*Bug reported by Al'anon*) o When scanning a planet, the scan report still listed "% of PDF that will Auto-Attack" This has been changed to "Will PDF Auto-Attack?" o The "Search for Team Members" command in the Team Menu has received some attention. After displaying the sector that each teammate is in, players will be shown if that teammate is Cloaked and/or is currently on a planet in the sector. Some additional information has also been added. A typical scan will look like this: Name : Captain Picard Sector : 321 (On Planet) (Cloaked) Ship Type: 9 Fighters : 9000 T Credits: 12345 Mines : 99 Torpedoes: 25 Beacons : 10 Version 2.2 / May 2, 1993 ------------------------- o The port routines have been rewritten. Port data has now been separated from the main sector data. Each port will now have its own file in the new "pfiles:tradewars/ports/" directory, similar to the way the planet data files are handled. When docking at a Class 1-3 port, players will now be presented with a menu instead of just being thrown into the trading routine. More color was also added. o Docking fees have been raised to 100 credits (up from 50). o The "*Deducting one turn for landing*" message has been changed to "Docking thrusters engaged... Impulse engines now operating at ###%". o Without the port variables, each sector data file has been reduced by 11 lines. This should make moving between sectors even faster! o More than 1 asteroid can be in a sector. o In the past, when turning on a Tractor Beam, if there was an asteroid in the sector, the program would automatically default to towing the asteroid (even if there were towable ships present). The user will now be asked "Tow asteroid? (y/N):". o The "TradeWars!" program has been moved from "pfiles:" over to "pfiles:tradewars/". o The Galactic Lottery always picked the same number 4 times! This was caused by a small RexxPlus incompatibility. The RANDOM() statements have been changed to correct this problem. (*Bug reported by Logan*) o The "<There is an Asteroid here!>" and "<## Mines in this sector!>" lines have been changed to the standard Sector Display format. Mines will now show who dropped them. The "Territory:" line has been deleted. The territory will be displayed in parenthesis after the sector number. A fully loaded sector will now be displayed like: Sector : 1 (Federation) Beacon : Welcome! Port : StarBase 1 Planet : Earth Ships : There are 2 other ships here! Fighters : 10000 belonging to the Federation Mines : 99 belonging to Team 1, Masters of the Universe Asteroids: 2 Warps : 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 850 Version 2.1 / April 21, 1993 ---------------------------- o TradeWars has now been compiled with the Rexx Plus Compiler. I am officially licensed by Dineen Edwards Group (makers of Rexx Plus) to release all compiled TW code and the necessary runtime programs and libraries needed. o Ship Classes have been greatly enhanced! Weapon Type and Shield Type have been eliminated as separate upgrades and are included with Ship upgrades. The 999 fighter limit is no more! Each ship upgrade can carry up to 1000 more fighters. (Example.. A Class 1 ship has a max of 1000 fighters, Class 2 has a 2000 max, etc..) A new "Ship Catalog" has been added to the StarBase menu so players can see the capabilites of each new ship. o Players will now receive a small "trade-in" price when they sell their old ship to get a new one. o Sectors and the PDF can now hold up to 9999 fighters. o Photon Torpedoes have been added as a new ship weapon. o Starship-to-Starship combat has been re-written. Players now will be presented with a Battle Menu in which they can choose to look at Ship Info, Fire Phasers, Fire Torpedoes, or attempt an escape. Ship Class determines how many times the player's Phasers/Torpedoes may be fired each "round". A Class 4 ship can launch 4 Torpedoes or fire its Phasers 4 times, a Class 7 ship: 7 Torpedoes, 7 Phaser-fires, etc... o When a new player joins the game and selects his ship's name, the program will now check to make sure someone isn't already using it. (This will prevent two "U.S.S. Enterprise"'s for example.) o It is now possible for planet owners and team members to retrieve fighters from the PDF (see below). o When creating a planet, the player will now be asked whether or not he wishes to make it a Team Planet. If so, all members of his team will be able to pick up/drop fighters in the PDF, evict other ships, change the military reaction level, and take/leave credits in the vault. If not, only the planet owner can use the above commands (team members will be allowed to still Add to the PDF, but not take from it). o A new "Seize Ownership of Planet" command has been added to the Planet Menu. If a player selects this option, and successfully defeats the PDF fighters, he will become the new owner of the planet and will be presented with the chance to rename it and to make it a Team Planet. o Another new command, "Change Planet Characteristics" has been added to the Planet Menu. Only the Planet Owner can use this command (even if it is a team planet). Right now, there are two options here: Change planet name & toggle Team Planet on/off. Eventually, more commands will be added. o Some limits on planet colonists have been added. If a planet does not have a city, a maximum of 7500 colonists will be allowed. Planets with a level 1 city can have up to 10000 colonists, and planets with a level 2 city will be allowed up to 20000 colonists. o If a player deposited credits into any account other than his own, the game would subtract the credits and inform the other player that ### amount of credits were added to his account, but that player's account was never saved after the credits were added, so they would basically DISAPPEAR. Bug corrected. o TradeWars once again uses the player's unique CNet Serial Number to find their account. If they have changed their handle since their last game play, the handle will be automatically changed to the new one. o A bit of attention was given to the Port & Trade routines in an attempt to make the haggling prices less predictable. o When displaying a sector, the game will now only show the info which applies to that sector. For example, in the past, the program would display "Ships : None", "Fighters: None", "Port: None", etc. Now, those lines will be totally skipped unless there actually are ships, fighter, ports, etc in that sector. o If a player selects the "O" (Beacon) command from the main menu, and a beacon is already in orbit, he will be presented with several options. If the beacon was placed by him, he will be allowed to change the message or retrieve the beacon. If it is not his beacon, he will have the ability to destroy it. Beacons that were originally in the game (such as the "Welcome!" beacon in Sector 1) cannot be destroyed, changed, or retrieved. o Two new commands have been added to the Main Menu to simplify game play. "[*] Identify Ships in Sector" will quickly do a low-level scan on all vessels in the same sector as the player. "[/] Scan All Adjacent Sectors" is self-explanatory. Note, however, that in all previous versions of TradeWars, scanning a sector would add it to the player's "explored" map list, and would, from then on, allow him to warp to that sector. Now, since scanning can be accomplished so quickly, the player must actually move into a sector before it will be added to his "explored" list. o Fighter-to-fighter combat (during battles again other players, sector fighters, or the PDF) has been totally rewritten! It should be much more realistic now... If 700 fighters go up again 10, all 10 will more than likely be destroyed with little or no losses to the 700. Any player with his CNet ANSI variable turned on (through CNet's ET command) will be able to "watch" the battle as the numbers are updated. o The number of fighters in the Klingon/Romulan patrols and the homeworld/border locations have been greatly beefed up due to the new ship classes that can carry more fighters. o I got sick of looking at the maintenance log, as I'm sure some/most of you have as well, so I made a toggle for it. Default is OFF, but you can change it on line 1 of the _config.data file. o Maintenance will now scan all player files for corrupt data fields. If it detects any problems, it will list the file name and line number in a "warning" file. o When a player with CNet Maintenance access enters the game, he will be shown whether or not an errorlog, sysoplog, or "warning" list exists, and will be asked if he wants to read them if they do. He will also be shown the date of the last successful Nightly Maintenance. This should ALWAYS read as today's date. If it doesn't, then you either have a problem with your BBS Events file, or the actual "TwNightlyMaint" program. It is VERY, VERY important that Maintenance be ran each and every night at midnight!! o Haven't seen any bug reports on this, but the potential for TW crashing existed if a Sysop set up TradeWars for the first time and someone tried to enter the game before TwNightlyMaint had a chance to run once. Now, if someone tries to play, and the "_date.data" file doesn't exist, the player will be informed "Sorry, TwNightlyMaint must be ran before game can begin!" o When getting a Port Report for a Class 0 (StarBase) port, the game was still listing the selling prices in the TradeWars 1.0 format!! Corrected. o When a player destroys some fighters in a sector belonging to another player, a message will now be added to the "The following happened to you since the last time you were on:" file listing who destroyed how many fighters and in which sector. o On the same note, if a player destroyed SOME but not all of the fighters in a sector belonging to another player, the correct number of fighters remaining in the sector would not be listed when that other player logged on and used the "LOCATE ALL FIGHTERS" command. It would still show the original number. This has been corrected. o The price of buying addition turns has greatly increased. o Cloaking energy remains priced at 5000-6000 credits/day, but that price will now be multiplied by Ship Class! o The increased cloaking energy prices for larger ships listed above was intended to keep people with, for example, a Class 9 ship from being able to buy months worth of energy. It was NOT intended to cause players to be crippled by the Borg more often, so I made the Borg ship visable to all Sector Scans. o The "% of PDF to Auto-Attack" option was listed for Level 2 city owners, but the actual attack routines were never implemented. After some rethinking of this command, I asked my players, "If you wanted the PDF to auto-attack, why would you want any amount less than 100% to attack?" Since they agreed with me that there isn't much logic behind having, say, 5% to attack, I decided to change this command to an ON/OFF toggle. If turned ON, 100% of the PDF will automatically attack when a non-teammate attempts to land on the planet. o Internal TradeWars messages were occasionally turning up mixed into some of my UD file descriptions. CLEAREDITOR commands have been added after every message save to keep this from happening in the future. o If a player encountered a Worm Hole on their LAST turn of the day, turns remaining would be shown as -1 and would effectively give the player unlimited turns for the remainder of the day since routines checked the "turns" variable against "0" and would continue counting down (-2, -3, etc..) All routines have been re-written to check against "<1" instead of 0. If any number is detected less than 0, it will be changed back to 0. (*Bug reported by Night Stalker*) o When a player displays a Port Report, if he is the port's creator, he will now be told how many credits have been collected from docking fees since his last visit. Version 2.06 / October 23, 1992 ------------------------------- o The messaging system has been totally re-written to take advantage of the new Arexx commands that allow the use of CNet's editors. o Players will now have 10 lines per message instead of 5. o When a player receives a new message, he will now be prompted with "Reply? (y/N):" after viewing the communication. Replying to "Broadcasts to All" is also possible. Version 2.05b / October 22, 1992 -------------------------------- o A bug existed that would cause ALL attempts at a Warp Escape to fail, no matter what percent chance the game told them they had of escaping. Corrected. o When attacking a planet, the PDF would almost always win (and, in fact, lose very few fighters) no matter how many fighters the player attacked with. I rewrote the random statement to hopefully make it more "random" that it apparently was! This is only a temporary "fix". Look for the fighter-to- fighter combat routines to get a MAJOR facelift within the next few updates of TradeWars. Version 2.05a / October 18, 1992 -------------------------------- o NOTE: You ***MUST*** be running version 2.37 or higher of CNet in order to run this version of TradeWars. o I've started replacing the QUERY statements with the new PROMPT command which allows the limiting of the number of characters allowed to be entered at each prompt. (i.e. When asked for a 4-digit number for the lottery computer, ONLY four digits may be entered.) o Ken changed the STARTEDITOR command to CALLEDITOR, which caused an error whenever someone tried to change their Hail Message. Corrected. Version 2.05 / October 3, 1992 ------------------------------ o NOTE: You ***MUST*** be running version 2.31 or higher of CNet in order to run this version of TradeWars. The code uses several new Arexx commands only available in CNet 2.31+. o CNet's editor is now used via the new LOADEDITOR, SAVEEDITOR, etc. commands for the "Change Hail Message" command in the Communications Menu. If the user already has a Hail Message, it will be loaded into the editor. I'll be converting the inter-user messages to this method in the next update of the code. o The CHANGEWHERE command was used to display "TradeWars!" in the user's "Where" field on the WHo list (or Control Panel) instead of the normal "pfiles:TradeWars" o TwNightlyMaint has been moved from PFILES: to PFILES:TRADEWARS/ o TwMaint has been moved from PFILES: to PFILES:TRADEWARS/ o TwMaint is now written in C (thanks to SpaceMan), which greatly increases its operating speed. It also creates a sector "map" of the universe for use with the Sector Finder. o As mentioned above, the Sector Finder uses it's own "map" file so it doesn't have to open each "tws###" universe file while trying to compute a path. I think you will find the Sector Finder is now operating at BLAZING speed! (Again, many, many thanks to SpaceMan for his EXCELLENT work on this part of the program!) o The "TwMaint" program will now be spawned from "TwNightlyMaint", so it is no longer necessary to run "TwMaint" from your BBSEVENT0 file. o Documentation files have been built into the Player Editor. When you select to edit one of the stats, a brief explanation of the variable will be displayed to you, along with any limits which may apply. o The "L=List Players" command within the Player Editor has been slightly modified so that all active player names will be displayed on one screen without the top names scrolling off. (Note: this will NOT display properly to any Remote Sysops calling without ANSI terminals.) Version 2.04c / July 25, 1992 ----------------------------- o For some odd reason, the "Name change noted.." routine was also in the "twmain" file (should have only been in the "TradeWars!" one), so the game was creating a NEW account under the new handle, then renaming the OLD account to the new handle as well. If you were running 2.04a and noticed some duplicate player names in the rankings, that was the cause. o The size of the "TradeWars!" program has been greatly reduced, which makes for faster loading. o Blank player accounts are now skipped during the "Loading Player#" routines, making the delay at that point in the game shorter. Version 2.04a / July 19, 1992 ----------------------------- o Sector Avoids have been added to the game. Players may add and remove sector numbers from their "Avoid List." Any sectors on the list will be automatically avoided during Sector-Finder/Auto-Pilot path creations. o An EXCELLENT new Sector-Finder routine has been written in C by Spaceman. This *greatly* increases the speed of the path creation and also handles the new sector avoids. o The data-load after the "Accessing StarFleet Records..." line has been re-written to shorten the delay at this point in the program. Note, however, that in order to increase speed, TradeWars will no longer recognize handle changes by a user. (i.e. - In the past, if a user named "Joe User" changed his handle to "The Man", the game would automatically detect the change, would say "Name change noted..." and load in his correct player file. Now, TW will create a new player file for "The Man" and "Joe User" will also still be listed in the game records.) TradeWars will go back to the OLD system after version 2.1 (when the player file structure will be re-written). In the meantime, I would suggest limiting access to CNet's "EU" command to high level users only, to keep players from creating multiple accounts in TradeWars in order to get an unfair advantage. o Commodity production on a planet was only calculating the amount produced for *ONE* day, no matter how many days it had been since a ship had landed there. Version 2.03c / July 5, 1992 ---------------------------- o When attempting to pick up fighters from a planet, it was looking at the number of fighters that were in the sector instead of the number of fighters on the planet and using that as the MAX you could pick up. (I.E. - A player had 200 fighters on the planet, and there were 30 fighters guarding the planet's sector, TW would only allow him to pick up 30 fighters at once!) o The "Jettison Cargo from Holds" command has been moved from the main menu to the Computer menu. o A new "Quick Move" command has been added to the main menu. Typing "+" takes the player directly to the "Move to?" prompt. o After choosing "Escape" while being under attack from sector fighters, players are now presented with several options instead of simply being thrown back into the sector from which they just came. They now will be able to attempt to escape to any one of the adjacent sectors, or to any sector in the universe by use of a Warp turn. (NOTE: When attempting an escape to an adjacent sector, a player may only escape to a sector which does NOT also contain enemy fighters.) o Bank commands have been changed from numbers to letters to follow the menu structure of the rest of the game. o "Organics" and "Ore" were shown backwards when looking at the "Player/Ship Info" listing. o When dropping commodities from your ship onto a planet, the MAX number of commodities you could drop was incorrectly set to the amount already on the planet instead of the amount in your holds. o I found a small problem with the Hail Message. A player could change his Hail Type to Auto or Response without having actually made a Hail Message, which would cause a "File not found" error. Checking has been added to make sure the player has created a Hail Message before he is allowed to change his Hail Type to anything besides Off. o Also, if a player had a Hail Message and was deleted by game maintenance, the next new person to get his player number would also "inherit" his Hail Message. A routine has been added to delete any old Hail Messages when a new player signs on. o It has come to my attention that entering a number like "40-" at some prompts will cause the game to crash. I've corrected the problem in a couple of places, but if you see this occurring, please leave me a message and let me know what prompt the player was at when it happen. o The help file on Cloaking Devices and Meteoroid Belts incorrectly stated that a player needed at least "four" shields to enter the Meteoroid Belt. They actually need at least 10 shields. Help file text corrected. o Special thanks to The Duke for his detailed help in Beta testing TW 2.03 (he found and reported the majority of the bugs which have now been corrected in 2.03c!). Version 2.03 ------------ o The "radar" feature has been eliminated. It really wasn't all that helpful, and as Perry pointed out to me, they don't have radar on starships, they have scanners... Thus, radar has been replaced by the "Scanner" feature, and a new option from the Main level, "Scanner Menu" has been added. More on this in a minute... o The "Message" and "Re-Read Broadcasts to All" commands have been removed from the Computer Menu and have been placed in the new "Communications Menu" from the Main level, along with a new command, "Send Message to All Team Members." o Hailing Options have been added! These are also accessed via the Communications Menu. Players can make a 5-line "Hail Message", and set their "Hail Type" to Auto, Response, or Off. Auto-Hail means that the player's hail message will automatically be shown to any other ship that enters the sector where their ship is currently located. Response-Hail will only show their message when another ship hails them via the new "Hail another Ship" command from the Main level. o The sector-displayer has been changed around a little. Instead of displaying: Ships : The USS Example, a class 1 Cruiser, Captained by Whoever of Team 2, and accompanied by 200 fighters. The USS Testship, a class 2 Deluxe Cruiser, Captained by Someguy, and accompanied by 125 fighters. It will now simply list: Ships : There are 2 vessels here! Why the change? Mainly, TradeWars has been running on my system for about 4 months, and there is an INCREDIBLE traffic jam in Sector 1! Setting through those long-descriptions for 12 ships wasn't all that much fun! It also fit in with the new Scanner feature. o The Scanner Menu. The commands are: Identify ship(s) in this sector, Scan Planet in this sector, Scan adjacent sectors, and Scan a Port anywhere in the universe. Identify other ship(s) in this sector-- The player will be prompted with "(N)ormal or (D)etail Scan? ". If normal scan is selected, they will be shown the "Ships:" listing exactly the way it used to be in the sector-displayer. What they get from the detail scan will be determined by what type of scanner they have. For example, a ship with a level 1 Scanner will see little more than the Normal scan info. But a vessel with a level 9 Scanner will see just about everything, including the other ship's number of shields, weapon class and amount of trading credits they have with them. Scan Planet in this Sector-- Again, Scanner type will affect what information is reported back. Level 1 Scanners will see only what is displayed when a ship lands on the planet, while a Level 9 Scanner will show the amount of fighters in the PDF, percentage of PDF that will auto-attack, and number of credits in the vault (if there is a city). Scan Adjacent Sector & Scan a Port Anywhere in Universe-- Same as the Computer Menu commands.