1TRADER(6) Games Manual TRADER(6)
2
6 trader - a game of interstellar trading
7
9 trader [--no-color|--no-colour] [--max-turn=NUM] [GAME]
10 trader [-h|--help] [-V|--version]
11
13 Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objec‐
14 tive is to create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay
15 money, in order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).
16
18 GAME If GAME is specified as a number between 1 and 9 (inclusive),
19 load and continue playing that game. If GAME is not specified,
20 start a new game.
21 --no-color, --no-colour
23 Don't use colour for displaying the text in the game. Use this
24 option for a “retro-computing” look (as shown in the EXAMPLES
25 below).
26 --max-turn=NUM
28 Set the number of turns in the game to NUM. In this version of
29 Star Traders, NUM must be greater or equal to 10. If this
30 option is not specified, the default is 50 turns.
31 -h, --help
33 Show a summary of command-line options and exit.
34 -V, --version
36 Display version information about the program, then exit.
37
39 0 Star Traders finished without any errors.
40 1 Star Traders encountered an unrecoverable problem or error; a
42 diagnostic message will be written to standard error in this
43 case.
44
46 You can start a new game by running Star Traders without any command
47 line options:
48 trader
50 Once the game starts, you will be asked to enter the number of people
52 playing. From one to eight people can play (although, in this version,
53 they will all have to share the one keyboard and screen!). After
54 entering the names of the players, you will have the opportunity to
55 read instructions on how to play the game. Do so—and good luck in the
56 game!
57 If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify
59 that game number on the command line. For example, the following
60 starts game 4, if it was previously saved:
61 trader 4
63 If you are running under the X Window System, you might like to start
65 the game in a dedicated xterm(1) window (typed all on one line):
66 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg black -fg white -bc +sb +fbx
68 -e trader &
69 If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try
71 (again, typed all on one line):
72 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#181818' -fg '#2CAB00' -bc
74 +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #41FF00' -e trader
75 --no-colour &
76 Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:
78 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#101010' -fg '#AB7A00' -bc
80 +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #FFB700' -e trader
81 --no-colour &
82
85 XDG_DATA_HOME, HOME
86 If XDG_DATA_HOME is set to an absolute pathname (that is, a path
87 that starts with “/”), Star Traders will use that directory,
88 with a subdirectory trader, to store game files. If this envi‐
89 ronment variable is not set or does not start with “/”,
90 ~/.local/share/trader will be used instead, where “~” represents
91 your home directory, as contained in the HOME environment vari‐
92 able.
93 LINES, COLUMNS
95 Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the
96 screen. As such, it will access these two environment variables
97 if the underlying Curses library does so (see, for example, the
98 ENVIRONMENT section in the ncurses(3) manual page for in-depth
99 details). It requires a text console or window of at least
100 80×24 in size.
101 LANG, LC_ALL, etc.
103 This version of Star Traders has full support for locales and
104 will use appropriate settings. In particular, messages will be
105 displayed using LC_MESSAGES and LANGUAGE (if Star Traders has
106 been translated into that language). In addition, numeric quan‐
107 tities will be displayed using LC_NUMERIC and monetary quanti‐
108 ties will use LC_MONETARY. See the locale(7) or setlocale(3)
109 manual pages for more details on locale settings.
110 TEXTDOMAINDIR
112 If set, Star Traders will use this path as the base with which
113 to locate its message catalogs instead of the compiled-in path;
114 the relevant trader.mo files should be located in language-code
115 subdirectories (such as en_AU), in LC_MESSAGES sub-subdirecto‐
116 ries.
117
119 ~/.local/share/trader/gameN
120 Star Traders stores saved game files in the .local/share/trader
121 subdirectory in your home directory (unless overriden by the
122 XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable). N is a number between 1
123 and 9 inclusive. The game file is scrambled to prevent you or
124 others from casually cheating!
125 ~/.trader/gameN
127 If the ~/.trader directory exists, game files will be read from
128 and saved to this location instead. This is for compatibility
129 with versions of Star Traders prior to version 7.15.
130
132 None yet known...
133
135 Your comments, suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always
136 warmly welcomed! Please send these to:
137 Postal: John Zaitseff,
139 The ZAP Group,
140 Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
141 Berala, NSW, 2141,
142 Australia
143 Email: J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au
145 Web: ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
146 FTP: ⟨https://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
147 ⟨ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
148 Git: ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/git-browser/trader.git⟩
149 ⟨https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git⟩
150 ⟨git://git.zap.org.au/data/git/trader.git⟩
151
153 Copyright © 1990-2021, John Zaitseff.
154 Star Traders is free software that is distributed under the terms of
156 the GNU General Public License. You can redistribute it and/or modify
157 it under the terms of that License as published by the Free Software
158 Foundation, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
159 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
161 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MER‐
162 CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
163 Public License for more details.
164 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
166 with this program. If not, see the GNU licenses web page ⟨https://
167 www.gnu.org/licenses/⟩.
168 Even though the GNU General Public License does not require you to send
170 your modifications back to the author, it is considered “good form” to
171 do so, as this allows your modifications to be incorporated into future
172 versions of the program, allowing others to benefit from them.
173
175 The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by
176 S. J. Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic. This was modified for Micro‐
177 soft Basic (MBASIC) running under the CP/M-80 operating system by John
178 Zaitseff and released on 7th March, 1988.
179 Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the Australian-
181 designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 proces‐
182 sor, using Turbo Pascal 3.01a. Essentially, only the name of the game
183 and some of the ideas were retained in this version. Version 4.1 of
184 Star Traders was released on 1st August, 1991.
185 In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with
187 8-inch floppy drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using
188 Turbo Pascal 2.0. This version had colour added to it in the form of
189 ANSI escape sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.
190 The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run
192 on IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS. Turbo Pascal
193 6.0 was used for this. The ANSI escape sequences were slightly differ‐
194 ent under MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC supported a number
195 of extra character attributes. In other words, the MS-DOS version
196 looked worse than the one running under CP/M-86!
197 Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines
199 with VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters. The output routines were
200 recoded to use a “windowed” look. Borland Pascal 7.0 was used for this
201 purpose, along with a number of text window manipulation modules. Ver‐
202 sion 5.4 was released on 1st June, 1994.
203 In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft
205 Windows 3.1 graphical environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used
206 for this purpose. Although completely rewritten, the original algo‐
207 rithms were reused from previous versions. Version 6.0 of the game was
208 released on 15th September, 1995.
209 Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later... when
211 the game was rewritten once again, this time in the C programming lan‐
212 guage. Version 7.0 was released on 25th July, 2011 for Unix-like oper‐
213 ating systems such as Linux, with subsequent releases to add features
214 and correct bugs. Now you, too, can run this small piece of computing
215 history!
216
218 Star Traders home page ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
219Unix-like systems 19th January, 2021 TRADER(6)