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Text File | 1992-03-06 | 17.4 KB | 409 lines

GLOBAL WAR Copyright 1989-1992 Joel Bergen ProVision BBS (206) 353-6966 HST (206) 353-2494 300/1200/2400 bps Fidonet 1:343/65 Jump to the end of this document to see what's new in this version. Be sure to read SYSOP.TXT for instructions on how to install Global War for the first time. The file REGISTER.TXT contains information on how to register your copy of Global War. The file WAR.CFG contains information on how to configure Global War. IF YOU ARE UPGRADING FROM ANY PREVIOUS VERSION OF GLOBAL WAR: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Your existing games will continue uninterrupted, and you can enjoy the new features of Global War version 2.40 if you follow these steps: 1. Unzip this archive into a temporary subdirectory (hopefully you've already done this!) 2. Copy (replace) all of the files in your Global War subdirectory with the new ones contained in this archive EXCEPT the following files: WAR.BAT (or whatever you called your batch file that starts GWar) WAR.CFG 3. Temporarily save your old WAR.CFG file by renaming it to something else. 4. Copy WAR.CFG to your Global War subdirectory. 5. Edit the new WAR.CFG file using your old one as an example. You'll notice several new items, and some old ones are gone. Detailed explanations for the new options can be found at the end of WAR.CFG. DO NOT try to use your old WAR.CFG file or you'll get runtime errors and may even lose data! 6. Delete any WARxx.REC files that you may have. (Type DEL WAR*.REC while in your Global War subdirectory) 7. If you have a color monitor, copy WAR.CLR to WAR.IMG. If you have mono, copy WAR.MON to WAR.IMG. Then you can delete WAR.CLR, WAR.MON, and your old WAR.CFG from step 5. 8. Read the end of this document and WAR.CFG to see what new features have been added. VERSION INFORMATION: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ver 1.0 First public release of Global War Ver 1.1 Added "/P" switch to read PCBOARD.SYS. (v14 only) Fixed the "7 commendation" bug. If a player had 7 commendations the game sometimes did not select the proper set to exchange for armies. For example, if a player had: 3 from the King 2 from the Queen 2 from the General The game would take the 3 from the King instead of the 2 1-1-1 sets. Fixed a bug where, if a player began a turn shortly before midnight and concluded it after midnight, he'd lose a day. Ver 1.2 Improved error messages to help diagnose incorrect installation problems. Fixed a bug where, if your hardware time clock fails, the game will refuse to run rather than giving you umteen zillion armies (since it's been 9 years since your last turn). Ver 1.3 Added support for HST modem owners by providing a locked baudrate option in WAR.CFG. Ver 1.4 Team play. When a player begins a new game he may designate the game as a Normal game or a Team game. Special new rules apply to team games and are documented in TEAM.DOC, which your players can read from within the game. Players can select their partners by password-protection. Carrier loss recovery. If a player loses connection during his turn, the game is saved in a file called WARxx.REC. If the player calls back his turn will be resumed right where he left off. This helps players with line noise or call waiting and also prevents players from cheating by hanging up and re-taking their turn when things don't go well. If a different player calls and takes his turn before the player who lost connection does, the original game will be used and the WARxx.REC game will be deleted. A new Globe Map now displays the entire world on the screen at one time, including every country and who occupies it. Many thanks to "General" Gary Gordon for this fine idea and all the effort he put into drawing this map. Players may select minimum and maximum number of players when beginning new games. New /I command line switch for Wildcat! reads CALLINFO.BBS. See SYSOP.TXT New /R command line switch for RBBS reads DORINFO1.DEF. See SYSOP.TXT New /D command line switch reads DOOR.SYS. See SYSOP.TXT Configurable points for won games. In WAR.CFG, you can set the number of points winners will receive for winning various types of games and how many points are required for a rank advancement. "Forgotten" games are now automatically deleted. A "forgotten" game is one in which there is no activity (turns taken, etc) in a certain amount of time. See WAR.CFG F5 key now hangs up on the caller, F10 enters chat mode. Entire continents now cannot be allocated to one player when a game begins. Game status screen has been speed up considerably. 4 and 5 player games have been made more fair. There are 42 countries in Global War, which is not evenly divisible by 4 and 5, causing some players in 4 and 5 player games to get shorted 1 country and 3 armies. The game now accounts for this and gives these players additional armies. Bulletins. You may create a file called BULLETIN.ANS which can contain any news or info for Global War players. This file may be an ANSI or ASCII file and is displayed right after the copyright notice. New COMM routines. Global War now has buffered, interrupt driven communications routines which should work much better than the previous polled routines, especially on XTs. Use of a fossil driver is not recommended, unless absolutely necessary (i.e. you are using COM3, etc). Bug fixes: Runtime error 201s when excessive online time received from BBS fixed. Also problems with momentary carrier loss kicking players out of Global War back into BBS should be fixed. Ver 1.4a Minor bug fix: Completed team games in which a player was a survivor were erroneously being counted as still being active, thus preventing the player from signing up for the maximum number of games allowed until the completed team game was auto-deleted. Ver 1.4b Global War 1.4's new buffered interrupt-driven communication routines were limited to 9600 baud. This limit has been raised to 38400 baud. This only affects HST owners running locked baudrates in excess of 9600 baud. Ver 1.4c Added Xon/Xoff software handshaking. Ver 1.4d Fixed lost character problems with dual standard HST's at high locked baudrates. GW -finally- appears to be working flawlessly at 38400 baud with the HST using either hardware or software handshaking. Ver 1.4e Bug fix: if a player hung up while signing up for a new game, the game could be inadvertantly saved and possibly corrupted. COM3 and COM4 now supported. Fossil driver no longer required. DEL key now functions as backspace. Ver 1.5 THIS VERSION MAKES ADDITIONS TO WAR.CFG! REPLACE YOUR OLD WAR.CFG WITH THE NEW ONE INCLUDED. EDIT THE NEW WAR.CFG AS DESIRED. Now includes GWTerm. GWTerm is a special terminal program that GW players can use to display maps instantly on their screen. Typically, the GW player will shell to dos from their favorite terminal program and execute GWTerm prior to playing Global War. Global War will send out special escape codes to instruct GWTerm to draw maps at high speeds. This significantly speeds up game play, allows for much more detailed maps to be used, and will make it possible for computers that cannot support ansi graphics to play the game. Graphics mode is also possible with future versions of GWTerm. Players may also use their mouse to select menu options and countries. Improved chat. The chat routine in version 1.4 was very crude. This version is somewhat better. Hitting F10 now turn chat request on. You will have to wait until the player hits a key before chat mode is entered. When chat mode is ended, this key is used to continue the game. Max time per day. In WAR.CFG there is an option to limit the amount of time a player can spend in the game. Up until now this value was per session, now it is per day. This prevents players from exiting and re-entering the game to gain more time. Instant local maps. The maps stored in WAR.IMG are displayed when GW is played locally, exactly as they are when a caller uses GWTerm. Aliases are implemented. When a player begins a new game, he has the option of making the players names Hidden or Known. The Hidden name option causes all players to be referred to as "Player 1", "Player 2", etc while they are alive in the game. M:essages function has been modified to better facilitate reading and writing multiple-line messages. A new alternate scoring method. See WAR.CFG. Ver 1.6 THIS VERSION MAKES ADDITIONS TO WAR.CFG! REPLACE YOUR OLD WAR.CFG WITH THE NEW ONE INCLUDED. EDIT THE NEW WAR.CFG AS DESIRED. Added support for multi-node BBSs Scoring is now completely configurable in WAR.CFG. Bug fix: If a player began his turn, conquered a country, lost connection, called back and resumed the game, and then quit without conquering another country, he would not be awarded a commendation. News may now be read from a specified number of days back. Maximum games allowed raised from 99 to 255. Ver 1.6a Added "(Y,N)" prompts to facilitate better mouse support in GWTerm Ver 1.6b Bug fix: If player captured country then hung up, he was awarded commendation, and was then awarded another when they called back and resumed turn. Increased time delay to 1 second for GWTerm handshake to help "Obsolete error" problems on slower XT's and multitasking BBSs. Ver 1.6c More GWTerm handshake tweaking Ver 1.6d "Players Allowed to Begin new games?" option in WAR.CFG has been expanded to disallow joining any game. Setting this to Yes causes the door to function in "Demo mode" Added ability to read old messages player has previously sent. Added ability to Quit from news report menu. Bug fix: (Finally found this bug!!) If a player lost carrier during a game, called back and lost carrier a second time, the player's Last Played date would become corrupted. This would cause runtime errors during the "analyzing games" phase later on. Global War is now DESQview and DoubleDOS aware. Ver 2.0 Added /S command line switch to support Spitfire BBS software. See SYSOP.TXT All new 3d maps. Color and Monochrome versions. Number of armies on each country now displayed on Globe Map. GWTerm users must upgrade from GWTerm 1.x to GWTerm 2.x Local mouse support. Sysop may now play using MicroSoft (or compatible) mouse. Unlimited Fortifications are now allowed. This feature is Sysop configurable allowing One, Unlimited, or Player Selectable fortification options in both Normal and Team games. Added a Maximum Days Since Last Turn option to WAR.CFG to limit "TimeBomb" play (players who don't play for many days and collect massive armies when they finally return). In team games, if a player's partner does not play for a certain number of days (configurable), the player may now take his partner's turn for him. See WAR.CFG All screen I/O is now done via direct screen writes. Screen I/O is much faster and ANSI.SYS is no longer required. Sysops using DESQview on a 286 based machine will not experience any bleedthrough. Bug fixes: GW would refuse to run if "Use Fossil" was selected in WAR.CFG but no Fossil driver was loaded. Fixed GWTerm handshaking problem that was causing GWTerm 1.7 to report that it was "obsolete". Fixed problem that was causing GW to lock up when used with Hayes 9600 baud modems. Player's names are no longer case sensitive. Added new random number generator. Actually there are now 3 random number generators (the 1st one randomly selects which one of the other two will be used to generate the random number). This was done at the request of many players who felt that the old one was not random enough. Ver 2.1 Fixed 2 bugs discovered hours after v2.0 was released. Looping problems with HST modems when not using a fossil, and runtime error 201 when executed locally using /noflow switch. Ver 2.2 Switched to completely new low-level comm routines (PibAsync) since there were still reports of problems with the non-fossil routines on some hardware setups (notably Hayes 9600 baud modems, IBM PS/2's and Lantastic LANs). Spaces can now follow Sysop name on line 2 of war.cfg. Ver 2.3 Fixed potential problem with COM3 and COM4 not initializing properly using Global War's internal comm routines. Although nobody has reported any problems as of yet, a call to initialize COM3 or COM4 was inadvertantly left out, which could cause problems if the port had never been initialized since bootup. This may very well be impossible, but I thought I'd fix it nevertheless. Also removed the check for a valid comm port number from 1-4 when using a fossil driver, since some fossil drivers allow comm ports up to com16. Ver 2.31 Found out the hard way that the X00 fossil driver locks up when a call is made to flush the output buffer when there's no carrier. This version fixes the problem. Ver 2.32 Sorry, folks. This is another minor bug fix. I'm working on another major upgrade, but a few bugs were discovered in version 2.31 which prompted this quick fix. Bug fixes are: 1) baud rates 9600 and above weren't being recognized when reading Callinfo.BBS. This prevented Wildcat BBS sysops from using the door with high speed modems. 2) Team game, partner hasn't played for a while, other player takes his turn and wins the game: upon completion of his turn, the player would still be allowed to take his partner's turn (he shouldn't be allowed, since the game is over at this point). Doing so would corrupt the game. 3) Any sort of error during startup would display an error message, and then promptly clear the screen before the sysop had a chance to read it. If you're running version 2.31 of Global War, simply replace your WAR.EXE file with the new one included in this archive. Ver 2.40 Here's the long awaited major upgrade I promised. New features: Configurable Fortifications. Instead of One or Unlimited, the number of fortifications in each game may now be set to any number. Non-Sequential Play option. In previous versions of Global War, turns always consisted of a Deployment phase, followed by an optional Attack phase, and ended with an optional Fortification phase. This type of game is now called a "Sequential Play" game. A new "Non-Sequential Play" option is now available. This option allows players to freely mix the three phases at will. For example, players may start out by Attacking, then Fortify, then Deploy a couple armies, then Attack some more, deploy some more, and so on. Surrender Option. This option will allow a player to surrender to another player. When a player surrenders, all of his countries, armies, and commendations are turned over to the player he surrenders to. The surrendering player loses a configurable number of points. Fortification across connected countries. Players may fortify directly from one country to any other country provided they occupy all the countries in between. For example, a player may fortify from Alaska directly to Mexico if he also occupies Alberta and W. US. Support for Genesis Deluxe BBS version 4.0. Genesis Deluxe creates a CALLINFO.BBS file which is different from the more standard Wildcat CALLINFO.BBS file. A new /G switch has been added to read the Genesis version. ie WAR /G c:\gbbs\CALLINFO.BBS For Genesis Deluxe support, contact: Prism Software, Box 267, Hannibal NY, 13074 Late Night BBS (315) 592-7300 HST Added support for WWIV version 4.20's new CHAIN.TXT format which now supports DTE baud rates. Sysops may prevent selected users from beginning or joining any new games by adding the user's name to a file called LOCKOUT.WAR. Players are now able to check player status, change maps, etc while cashing in a set of commendations. Rankings (winners.war) may now be reset (deleted) automatically when a player reaches a certain number of points. See War.Cfg. BTW, this was the only item in Global War that required Sysop intervention. Now Global War should run indefinately with no effort on the Sysop's part, not even any nightly maintenance. Game asks for confirmation when player quits fortifying. Configurable IRQ/Base addresses for COM1 - COM4. (see war.cfg). /C option now handles more than 2 names. ie WAR /C 0 1 60 W. C. Fields Added option in war.cfg to display up to 5 seperate ansi/ascii bulletins, available at the Global War main menu. Local mouse support may be disabled in War.Cfg. Changed Iran to Iraq. Ver 2.41 One week after version 2.40 was released, a small bug was discovered. The count of the number of active games a player is in was not being decremented after the player surrendered, which would prevent the player from joining a new game after he surrendered in a game. This version fixes this problem.