Ubuntu Manpage: trader - a game of interstellar trading

NAME

       trader - a game of interstellar trading

SYNOPSIS

       trader [--no-color|--no-colour] [--max-turn=NUM] [GAME]
       trader [-h|--help] [-V|--version]

DESCRIPTION

       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).

OPTIONS

       GAME   If GAME is specified as a number between 1 and 9 (inclusive), load and continue playing that game.
              If GAME is not specified, start a new game.

       --no-color, --no-colour
              Don't use colour for displaying the text in the game.  Use this  option  for  a  “retro-computing”
              look (as shown in the EXAMPLES below).

       --max-turn=NUM
              Set  the number of turns in the game to NUM.  In this version of Star Traders, NUM must be greater
              or equal to 10.  If this option is not specified, the default is 50 turns.

       -h, --help
              Show a summary of command-line options and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information about the program, then exit.

EXIT STATUS

       0      Star Traders finished without any errors.

       1      Star Traders encountered an unrecoverable problem or error; a diagnostic message will  be  written
              to standard error in this case.

EXAMPLES

       You can start a new game by running Star Traders without any command line options:

              trader

       Once  the game starts, you will be asked to enter the number of people playing.  From one to eight people
       can play (although, in this version, they will all have to share the one keyboard  and  screen!).   After
       entering  the names of the players, you will have the opportunity to read instructions on how to play the
       game.  Do so—and good luck in the game!

       If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify that game  number  on  the  command
       line.  For example, the following starts game 4, if it was previously saved:

              trader 4

       If  you  are  running under the X Window System, you might like to start the game in a dedicated xterm(1)
       window (typed all on one line):

              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg black -fg white -bc +sb +fbx -e trader &

       If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try (again, typed all on one line):

              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#181818' -fg '#2CAB00' -bc +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD:
              #41FF00' -e trader --no-colour &

       Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:

              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#101010' -fg '#AB7A00' -bc +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD:
              #FFB700' -e trader --no-colour &

ENVIRONMENT

XDG_DATA_HOME, HOME
If XDG_DATA_HOME is set to an absolute pathname (that is, a path that starts with “/”), Star
Traders will use that directory, with a subdirectory trader, to store game files. If this envi‐
ronment variable is not set or does not start with “/”, ~/.local/share/trader will be used
instead, where “~” represents your home directory, as contained in the HOME environment variable.

LINES, COLUMNS
Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the screen. As such, it will access
these two environment variables if the underlying Curses library does so (see, for example, the
ENVIRONMENT section in the ncurses(3) manual page for in-depth details). It requires a text con‐
sole or window of at least 80×24 in size.

LANG, LC_ALL, etc.
This version of Star Traders has full support for locales and will use appropriate settings. In
particular, messages will be displayed using LC_MESSAGES and LANGUAGE (if Star Traders has been
translated into that language). In addition, numeric quantities will be displayed using
LC_NUMERIC and monetary quantities will use LC_MONETARY. See the locale(7) or setlocale(3) manual
pages for more details on locale settings.

TEXTDOMAINDIR
If set, Star Traders will use this path as the base with which to locate its message catalogs
instead of the compiled-in path; the relevant trader.mo files should be located in language-code
subdirectories (such as en_AU), in LC_MESSAGES sub-subdirectories.

FILES

       ~/.local/share/trader/gameN
              Star  Traders  stores saved game files in the .local/share/trader subdirectory in your home direc‐
              tory (unless overridden by the XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable).  N is a number between 1 and 9
              inclusive.  The game file is scrambled to prevent you or others from casually cheating!

       ~/.trader/gameN
              If the ~/.trader directory exists, game files will  be  read  from  and  saved  to  this  location
              instead.  This is for compatibility with versions of Star Traders prior to version 7.15.

BUGS

       None yet known...

FEEDBACK

       Your  comments,  suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always warmly welcomed!  Please send these
       to:

       Postal:   John Zaitseff,
                 The ZAP Group Australia,
                 Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
                 Berala, NSW, 2141,
                 Australia

       Email:    J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au
       Web:      ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
       FTP:      ⟨https://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
                 ⟨ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
       Git:      ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/git-browser/trader.git⟩
                 ⟨https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git⟩
                 ⟨git://git.zap.org.au/data/git/trader.git⟩

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 1990-2022, John Zaitseff.

       Star Traders is free software that is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.  You
       can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of that License as published by  the  Free  Software
       Foundation, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.

       This  program  is  distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
       the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General  Public
       License for more details.

       You  should  have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.  If not, see
       the GNU licenses web page ⟨https://www.gnu.org/licenses/⟩.

       Even though the GNU General Public License does not require you to send your modifications  back  to  the
       author,  it is considered “good form” to do so, as this allows your modifications to be incorporated into
       future versions of the program, allowing others to benefit from them.

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 dif‐
ferent 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 environ‐
ment. 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... when the game was rewritten once again,
this time in the C programming language. Version 7.0 was released on 25th July, 2011 for Unix-like oper‐
ating systems such as Linux, with subsequent releases to add features and correct bugs. Now you, too,
can run this small piece of computing history!