IMPORTANT NOTE. THIS IS NOT A FULL PACKAGE! IT IS ONLY THE FILES NEEDED TO BRING YT20 UP TO THE CURRENT BETA TEST LEVEL. USE THESE BETA TEST VERSIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK. SINCE THEY ARE TEST VERSIONS, THEY MAY CONTAIN UNACCEPTABLE BUGS!!! YT Beta version 2.1 has the following changes... The Xannor are no longer immune to sector mines. They will hit them in MAINT. Increased the cost of Missiles by a factor of 5. This is to help offset the destructiveness of the beasts! YT Beta version 2.2 has the following changes... Added computer option 14... "Find Nearest Ports". My thanks go to Richard Vanhouten of West End TBBS (914)-858-8722 for hints on designing the linked list search engine. YT Beta version 2.3 has the following changes... Removed the routine to move Xannor while people are playing. It was huge and wasted a lot of program space. Put in its place a much smaller routine to have the Xannor shoot MISSILES at random sectors while people are playing! (Evil Grin!) Fixed a bug that prevented users from moving a planet through the Xannor HQ sector.. even if it was THEIR OWN planet! Added a 5 second pause to end of Sensor Scan so users can have time to read the information. Internal restructuring to reduce memory usage slightly. Changed the INIT program to generate a few more long warps than before. YT Beta version 2.4 has the following changes/fixes... Removed the delay at the end of the sensor scan. It was annoying! Found and fixed 3 bugs in the team function. (WHY don't things like this ever show up until AFTER versions get released?!?) Bug #1 would let more than 4 people on a team. Bugs# 2 & 3 related to the Team Captain function of banishing a team member. It didn't work because of two dumb mistakes on my part. It is fixed NOW. Because of bug #1, if you have any teams in your game with over 4 members in then I strongly recommend that you re-initialize your game so you can be sure all is well again. Sorry folks. Added Rank% for The Xannor and The Mercenaries on the scoreboard. Computer option 14 re-written to use less memory and to be even faster. My thanks go again to Richard Vanhouten. Increased the base price and maximum price of missiles and anti-cloaking devices. The game was just too dangerous with the missiles and anti-cloaks so cheap. Now there should be a better chance for people to survive longer. More restucturing to cut internal memory requirements. Changed maximum sale for missiles from 90% to 95%. Yt beta 2.5 has the following changes/fixes.... Changed missile cost to a fixed 100,000 credits with a possible maximum sale of 95% bringing the cost down to 5000 credits. No more price floating with the amount of cargo holds. Prices based on the amount of cargo holds was meant to help little guys but was greatly abused by the top players actually driving the little guys from the game! Changed mines to a fixed price of 35,000. Ditto above. Changed Anti-Cloaking to a fixed 500,000 credits for the same reason I changed missiles. There is no sale for Anti-cloaking devices. Fixed a bug in YTMAINT where radio messages to/from dead players were not properly being deleted when an inactive player was deleted from the game. Change the price to buy ports. Before it was total production + total amount of goods on the port. This was fine when the game initialized when the ports are all small, but later on as the game ran, the ports got so expensive noone in their right mind would want to buy them! Now the cost is just the total production per day. This is much cheaper! Updated the scoreboard routines for the new prices of missiles and mines. Also each port owned is now worth 50,000 points on the scoreboard. YT beta 2.6 has the following fixes/changes... Re-wrote the Xannor portion of Daily Maintenance Program to make it more intelligent. Before you could have groups of 500,000 Xannor wandering around with them only guarding their base with 5,000 or so fighters! Not too bright a policy on their part. (-; Now they guard their base much more carefully. I've also greatly increased the Xannor re-gen. These two changes should make the Xannor much less of a push-over and more of a threat. Major change to the trading routine. You no longer have to haggle prices. You are always presented with the best price and are given a "Do you accept [Y/n]" choice. I had to think about this one for some time but the reason for this was to make macro key (Command string saved key sequence) trading practical. It was fun to haggle prices, but anyone with half a brain and a calculator could always get 100% trading efficiency by looking at the port items' cost display. That and trying to use a macro to trade was terribly frustrating. As soon as you got you macro string set up OK, the prices would change and you would have to do it ALL over again! This change should make "power trading" tactics more practical and more enjoyable for the players. Changed to lottery to only record wins of 100,000 credits (4 digits) or more to the newspaper. Before I was recording matched of 3 digits or more to the newspaper which was cluttering it up. I've also increased the TOP prize for matching all -6- digits to something really substantial! (-; Re-wrote the Autopilot function again. It is now 100% faster!! While testing it took from 0 (REALLY 0!) to 220 milliseconds to find and display a path! The 220 milliseconds was for a path 66 sectors long on a 10MHz AT! Changed the initialization program to make the ports initial production larger. This is so they do not get sucked dry or saturated too quickly by players using macro-key trading techniques. Changed the Plague function to kick in sooner for ports and planets in maintenance program. This will help prevent wharehouse production levels from reaching scientific notation levels. (-; Fixed a bug that prevented a person from leasing Earth after they got killed if they were the previous owner. Yt 2.7 BETA has the following changes/fixes... Applied the autopilot sppedup to YTMAINT which should speed up maintenance processing some. Fixed the scoreboard routine in YT and YTMAINT so it doesnt get a division by 0 error generating the scoreboard if there are no living players in the game. Adjusted YTMAINT plague routine so a port has to have at least 100,000 total production before it has a chance of contracting the plague. Changed YT-INIT so that the Xannor HQ is placed in a random sector rather than in sector 85 every time. Re-wrote Control-R replay of saved commands to work a little better when the player hits control-R multiple times in a row. (What a bother that turned out to be! I ended up re-writing the whole input routine from scratch!) REMOVED "Computer malfunction". It was irritating and didn't really serve any useful purpose in the game. The Xannor will no longer shoot missiles when the current player has a score of under 2,500,000. This gives the little guys a break. Re-wrote the "The Xannor have moved their headquarters!" routine in YTMAINT to be a little more intelligent. (As far as the Xannor's actions are concerned.) Speeded up "Find Nearest Port" routine a bit. Added a NEW program, RMT-INIT.EXE. This goes with the NEW Main Menu Command "Initiate Genesis". This new program/function will allow the PLAYERS to re-init the game. You define using YTCONFIG how many ports a player has to own to be able to use the Genesis Function. The default is 200. The maximum is 300 (ALL the ports) and the minimum is 20. The amount you define will determine just how often you wish your users to be able to re-start the game. (If you do NOT wish your players to be able to re-start the game, set the amount of ports needed to init the game to "999". What RMT-INIT.EXE does is read in your previously defined defaults and uses them and runs an initialization. It will run with NO intervention when called from the GAME by a PLAYER and, since re-using your old defaults for a re-init is convient, it will also run if started from the DOS prompt. If you run it from the DOS prompt, it will ask you if you really want to re-start the game using your old defaults. What RMT-INIT.EXE will NOT do is run an init from scratch. The old data files from a previous initialization MUST be present in the current directory before RMT-INIT.EXE will run. When a player "Initiates Genesis", RMT-INIT.EXE will re-init the game, then return the player to your BBS system. The Xannor now shoot missiles if attacked. YT v2.8 Beta has the following fixes/changes..... Well, the warning at the top of this document has finally come true.. version 2.7 HAD AN UNACCEPTABLE BUG IN IT! The was a problem with the new RMT-INIT.EXE program which caused it to not initialize the proper amount of planet records. (I accidentally re-used a variable. )-; IF YOU RAN THE OLD RMT-INIT.EXE AGAINST YOUR GAMES DATA FILES YOU WILL HAVE TO RE-INITIALIZE YOUR GAME USING YT-INIT.EXE! RMT-INIT.EXE is fixed but it cant fix the damage its younger brother did. You will have to re-init from scratch using YT-INIT.EXE. Really sorry about that one folks. The Xannor now shoot missiles back AT you if you shoot missiles at them and don't wipe them out. More re-writes to the Xannor routines in YTMAINT. They are a bit more intelligent yet. Since so many files have been updated from the last official release version 2.0 and this beta 2.8 version, I am including the ENTIRE package of files this time, instead of just the update files.