Version 1.0. first public release on 2/18/90. Version 2.0 released on 07/06/90 has the following changes... New players now get 1 missile. Info display while docked at Earth has been improved. Players can now buy owned ports from each other with the sale price going to the previous owner. Added page pauses to radio message displays to prevent things from scrolling too fast to read! Fixed a bug where hitting sector mines said it caused the players to lose cloak charges but really didn't do any damage to the cloaking device! This version adds GROUND FORCES. Ground forces replace planet defense levels and can be bought at Earth, and moved from planet to planet at will. Attacking a planet now involves using missiles, or trying to force a landing with your own ground forces. If a landing is successfully forced by the attacker, the remaining (attacker's) ground forces will occupy the planet and the planet will become theirs. When a planet gets a new governor when the previous owner is dead, the ground forces are reduced to approx 1/4 of the original value. This helps balance things since a planet cannot become so powerful that it is invincable. I've listened to the criticisms about a player owning Earth making them too powerful. Now, when a player buys Earth, it is only a LEASE. They will own it until they take any earned credits off of it. When they do, Earth will revert to an unowned port. So the strategy now is to buy Earth, then hold off taking the credits from it until it has earned enough credits so the player will have turned a profit, THEN to take the credits. To help balance things out, I have reduced the cost of Earth by a factor of 10. Created a program called "LOCAL.EXE" which will allow local (non-BBS) logon to the game for multiple players. See "YTSYSOP.DOC" for more information. (Source code included!) AILIAS'S now are hardcoded to ON. I dont know who really ran the game without allowing alias's anyhow since the players enjoy playing their alter-egos. IF however you were one of the few who did not allow alias's in your game, you will have to re-init. Sorry. Editor eliminated due to too many people using it to cheat (OR were being accused of cheating by using it!) Also, it was buggy as anything and it caused many problems. The game will now change the editor password to a random value so you should erase the "YTEDIT.EXE" from your disk, as it is now useless. To allow continued changing of the game's default parameters, I have included a small program called "YTCONFIG.EXE". See "YTSYSOP.DOC" for more information. YTMAINT.EXE will no longer crash if the newspaper file grows to over 1000 (!!) lines in one day. Now it will handle a newspaper of any size. The Xannor now move (and ATTACK!) while players are online. Shhh! The players are going to be in for a big surprise! The lottery changed to a pick 6 from a pick 4. (Sounds like the goverment eh?) Added computer option 13... "Find your planets". This will display the sector number of any planets that a player is defending with ground forces. Players will no longer be able to get out of being hit by mines by dropping carrier! Players now cannot by Earth right back after their lease runs out. Now if someone hits mines they will die if EITHER they run out of FIGHTERS or HOLDS. This should prevent players from getting knocked down to having only ONE hold on purpose to be able to get super-cheap prices at Earth. Due to popular request, I've re-installed the "Re-name planet" function. Reduced the cost of buying ports by a factor of 10. When the game ran for a while, the ports were just too expensive! Added "Display Version" to main menu command. Fixed a bug in the computer-12 option where the port sectors were not being properly displayed. Players can no longer buy ridiculous amounts of turns. The game will no longer print backspaces when snoop is off! Removed "Ion Storms" to make room for more interesting features. When a sensor robot is used, it is REALLY used up, not sent out and returned to the ship as before. This should help prevent people from searching all 1000 sectors in one day. (At least, make it more expensive for them to do so!) To make up for this being a hardship on new players, I now give new ships 25 sensor robots to start instead of only 5. 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. YT Beta 2.9 has the following changes/fixes.... Changed "Find Nearest Port" to pause every screenfull instead of every "Distance" step. This makes it much less tedious to use. Change "Complete Port Report" to show which ports are owned, unowned, and are owned by the current player. DELETED the routine in YTMAINT that had the Xannor drop a mine on a randomly picked player on occasion. It was unfair and unrealistic since this player may have been under a large defense force. ADDED A NEW FEATURE ALLOWING SYSOPS TO LOCK CERTAIN USERS OUT OF THE GAME! Now you may lock anyone out of the game by placing their name in a file called "LOCKOUT.DAT". This file can be edited with any text editor. To use it, place the players REAL name AS IT APPEARS ON YOUR BBS in "LOCKOUT.DAT" and they will be denied access to the game until you remove their name from "LOCKOUT.DAT". Fixed CHAT. I broke it so it would work only once per play! Now all is well again. Fixed function in YTCONFIG for "Last day maintenance run". It was not working properly for year-end rollover. Fixed the problem with players ending up with negative credits. I THINK! Fixed the problem with users being able to stay on past their time limit if they were repetedly pressing control-R to replay a macro. Changed scoreboard to show 2 points past the decimal point. i.e. 99.51% instead of just 99%. Increased the initial defense level for planets won in the Super Lottery. Added a NEW chat routine. This one looks much nicer in the color mode. Changed YTMAINT Port Plague routine so it will no longer reduce a port's production below 25 units per day. The old routine would reduce production to a minimum of -1- unit per day. This was too small and was causing ports to get wiped out! *** I -THINK- I sucessfully patched my compiler to run at 38400 baud. You will have to replace your existing BRUN30.EXE with the one in this package. Try it and let me know if it works. PLEASE?!? *** YT Beta 2.A has the following changes/fixes.... My 38400 patch works, so I have been told! (-; REMOVED the ability to buy Earth. This is likely going to an unpopular decision, but due to the problems caused by some players dominating Earth's ownership, and the complexity involved in trying to limit this (to keep it fair for the weaker players) the only real logical solution was to just make Earth a non-purchasable port! This, however, is likely to be well recieved. (-; ADDED SHIELDS! Now in order for someone to be killed by missiles/mines/fighter attacks their shields will have to be reduced to 0 units. This should add a new dimension to the game! THE SHIELDS FUNCTION IS A MAJOR REVISION! P=L=E=A=S=E TEST THIS THOROUGHLY FOR ME AND GET BACK TO ME WITH ANY PROBLEMS/SUGGESTIONS! Removed the limit on the amount of turns that could be purchased at one time. This didn't serve any real purpose since the player could always keep going back to Earth for more! Removed the routine that forced a player to wait one day before logging back in if they managed to kill themselves. This was done to save some program space after adding shields. Compiled the program optimized for SPEED instead of for SIZE as before. YT beta 2.B has the following fixes/changes... Fixed YTMAINT. It was not properly subtracting player fighters upon Xannor attacks where the fighter force was wiped out. Added MISSILE and MINE PRODUCTION to planets! Planets will now produce 1 missile per day for every 1000 total production of ore, organics and equipment. Planets will produce 1 mine per day for every 2500 units of production. IN ORDER FOR THIS TO WORK WITH DATA FILES PRODUCED FROM VERSION 2.A AND EARLIER, YOU WILL HAVE TO RE-INITIALIZE YOUR GAME! Sorry. Modifed YTMAINT.EXE for the new planet production feature. Also, moved the planet lottery to the END of maint, AFTER the Xannor move. This was because the Xannor were usually destroying lottery planets before the player ever got the chance to get to them! Dropped shield power cost to 50 credits per unit from 200 credits per unit. Added a routine to inform players when someone purchases a port from them. Version 2.C ot Yankee Trader has the following fixes/changes... MAJOR BUG FIX RELEASE! The maintenance program in Yankee Trader 2.B had a SERIOUS bug in it. It was caused by moving the planet lottery to the end of the maintenance routine. I (stupidly) zapped a pointer variable for planet records in the Xannor.Maint subroutine and so, since Xannor.maint now came before planet.lottery, whenever someone won a planet in the lottery the pointer for the planet records was wrong and it pointed instead to someplace in the sector records. When someone won a planet, a sector record would get zapped causing invalid and/or fractional (!!) warp paths to be displayed. I'm sorry but there is no way to fix the data files short of a complete re-init of your game. )-: Because of this problem I STRONGLY reccommend you RE-INITIALIZE your game if you ran version 2.B of Yankee Trader! I am terribly sorry about this folks, but things like this happen from time to time. There are no other changes to this version. I felt it was important to get this release out ASAP to fix the problem. Version 2.D of Yankee Trader has the following fixes/changes... Versions 2.B and 2.C should be erased. They both had serious bugs! Fixed the bug in 2.C where using the C;9 option on a sector with no planets caused the door to crash. Also, fixed the bug that caused the same planet to display in EVERY sector that had no planets once it was displayed. (More serious bugs! Sorry about that folks!) Fixed a bug in the missile routine dealing with attacking a ship with missiles where there were no fighters left. ONE missile would hit and the rest would miss. Fixed another bug in the C;9 function (Computer planet display) which was allowing players to fully display planets in sectors defended by the Xannor or mercenaries. Added a NEW feature! Is someone shoots missiles at another player and that player is not killed and has missiles of their own, they will SHOOT BACK at their attacker! (SHHHHH! Let the players find this out for themselves! ;-) Doubled the damage missiles do against shields. Halved the cost of ground forces. Yankee Trader version 2.E beta has the following changes/fixes... Yankee Trader version 2.D beta should be erased. The "shoot back" option turned out to be more complex to correctly implement than I originally expected. It didn't work correctly in v2.D. After long hours of work, I believe I have it working correctly. Yankee Trader versions 2.E and later will NO LONGER NEED A SEPERATE BAUD RATE LOCKING UTILITY FOR THOSE OF YOU RUNNING LOCKED COM PORTS! I "borrowed" the COM port locking routine I wrote for my new door Kannons and Katapults and inserted it into Yankee Trader. To run Yankee Trader at a LOCKED baud rate you can now start it like this: (Locked Baud Rate) V YT.EXE C:\BBS\DORINFO1.DEF 38400 If you are NOT running at a locked baud rate, the command to start Yankee Trader is still: YT.EXE C:\BBS\DORINFO1.DEF These are just examples. Of course you should use the path to DORINFO that is actually used by your system! Modified RMT-INIT.EXE to handle locked baud rates. I rewrote the little local logon program "LOCAL.EXE" so it no longer needs its own data file. If you used version 1.0 of "LOCAL" previously, you may now delete "LOCAL.DAT". Users can no longer buy turns at Earth. This is to make things more even for everyone. If you are runnng a game currently, you may want to run YTCONFIG.EXE and increase the amount of turns per day. At LEAST 250 recommended. 300 - 400 is a good figure to start with. Adjust this depending on your users screaming level! (-; Don't go TOO high however as there is a way for them to earn turns built into the game. Players are now granted 1 TURN for every 250 Xannor killed ship-to-ship. Before they were given one CREDIT for every Xannor killed. Users can now play YT as many times per day as they wish. They now are limited by the amount of TURNS rather than the amount of PLAYS per day. Moved the LOTTERY away from game startup to the port at sector 1. (EARTH) This should help prevent the users beating your hard drive to death logging in and out several times in order to play the lottery (as nearly EVERYONE did before!) The amount of times a user may play the lottery is now controlled in YTCONFIG. Modified YT-INIT, RMT-INIT, YTMAINT and YTCONFIG for the new scheme for lottery and turns. Yankee Trader no longer uses the file "YT-DAY.DAT". If you are upgrading from an earlier verion of YT, you may now delete this file from your game's directory. YT will no longer report "ERROR 24" (Device time outs) with 300 baud callers when you run at a locked baud rate. Before it would report the "error" and continue. Now it just continues! (-; The "error" was caused because the modem's buffer was full and it took too long for it to clear at 300 baud. ADDED A NEW COMPUTER OPTION (#15) - SECTOR AVOIDANCE. (Yeah, finally Al!) Now the players can set up to 9 sectors that they do not want to pass through using the autopilot. The autopilot will attempt to find an alternate route that will not pass through sectors marked "to avoid". If no path is possible while avoiding those sectors, the player will be informed. (The best part of this new feature is I found a way to do it with ZERO effect on the speed of the autopilot! ;-) I never attempted it before because I have spent YEARS optimizing the autopilot and didn't want to ruin its performance.) Missiles and Robots will also avoid the sectors the users define. If they cannot get to their destination without passing through a locked out sector, they will self destruct. The instructions file "YTINSTR.DOC" updated for computer option 15. Be sure to move in the new instructions! Re-allowed purchase of Earth for a fixed price of 5,000,000 credits. New planets now have a ground force level of 1 and show as belonging to the purchaser. Before the player had to place at least one ground force there themselves in order to "claim" it. This resulted in many players not placing any forces on their new planet and being unable to find it using the computer option "find your planets". (Not a good thing!) Changed YTMAINT so that ports with a total production greater than 300,000 units per day (a truely HUGE port!) will ALWAYS contract a plague. Before there was a random chance of the plague if production was too high. This resulted in a rather L-O-N-G list of plague ports in the newspaper every day once the game ran for a while which wasted newspaper space. This change will reduce the amount of daily plague reports. HOWEVER, the FIRST time you run the new maintenance you will likely see quite a L-O-N-G list of plague reports since ALL the large ports that were lucky before will be struck. This will settle down in a few days resulting in less plagues daily eating up newspaper space. Fixed a bug where ALL a players fighters were being used when they attacked another player's ship's shields instead of the amount the player SPECIFIED to use. *** I've tried to provide you all with a version that will not have serious bugs like the last few. Sorry about those other ones. Also, I'm sorry to have made you all wait so long for this version. I took a little longer this time to try to provide you and your users a better game. Al *** 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 programs or to pass the locked baud rate using the method described in the update docs for version 2.E. 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 utility called RBBSCONV that allows PCBoard sysops to run DORINFO type doors is 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 which will fix Yankee Trader, but other DORINFO doors MAY also have problems with RBBSCONV. If someone can contact the author of this utility about this I'm sure they will be grateful. In the meantime, I suggest using Door Master which is a fine door converter program that handles MANY different BBS conversions. The current version (that I know about at least) is 4.03 and may be downloaded or file requested from me any time but ZMH. File name is DM403.ZIP. My thanks go to Alan Brenner for providing me with the information to solve this mystery! (Heck, with a name like Alan, he's GOT to be a great guy! ;-)