ProfitPress Mega CDROM2 …eeware (MSDOS)(1992)(Eng)/ProfitPress-MegaCDROM2.B6I/BBS/DOORS/YT32.ZIP/CHANGES.TXT

Text File | 1992-03-02 | 12.8 KB | 278 lines

Version 1.0. first public release on 2/18/90.

*** To keep things brief, the descriptions of changes from version 1.1 to 2.F
have been deleted. This CHANGES.TXT file was getting too large!

*** 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 program. 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 door conversion utility commonly used by
PCBoard sysops to run DORINFO type doors was 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.

Version 3.1 of Yankee Trader has the following changes/fixes...

Non-standard DORINFOs will be the death of me yet. I thought I had everything
fixed in 3.0 but I found and fixed 2 more ways that an error 64 can occur.
Wildcat 3.0 sysops will benefit from this newest fix. Again, a non-standard
DORINFO was being written by yet another door conversion utility. My thanks go
to Paul Naley for providing me with the information needed to correct this
problem.

Changed the pause routine so it eats keystrokes rather than putting them in
the input buffer. This will prevent keys presses to "un-pause" the screen from
giving players grief.

Fixed YTMAINT so it will only run once per day. (I had left the test parameter
in from the last release! Sorry.)

Added EMERGENCY WARPS. A player may now invoke emergeny warp if they run into
a fighter force too strong for them or are trapped in a sector. Running into a
black hole now automatically invokes emergency warp. Using emergency warp uses
a lot of turns and there is a risk of engine overload and the subsequent loss
of all turns for that day.

Added a new sound effect used for Emergency Warps.

Changed Sector Avoids to hold a maximum of 30 values. This is up from a
maximum of 9 before.

Changed "Find Nearest Ports" to show what the port is buying and selling and
at what cost.

REMOVED "Complete Port Report". It was redundant  since "Find Nearest Port"
now performs this function.

Sector Avoids moved from computer option 15 to option 7 filling in the gap
left by the removal of Complete Port Report.

Reduced the chances of hitting a black hole.

Added "Continuous (Non-Stop) read to "Find Nearest Ports".

Found and fixed a couple places where text was outputted to the screen even if
SNOOP was off.

Fixed a problem that was preventing the RMT-INIT.EXE program from running.

Version 3.2 of Yankee Trader has the following fixes/changes...

ADDED the ability of the sysop to CHANGE user ALIAS's. This function has been
added to the YTCONFIG.EXE program.

CHANGED YTMaint. Before mercs were generated in groups of 2,500. This was OK
except for when huge amounts of taxes were collected. There stood a chance of
lockup during maint because there were not enough empty sectors to hold all
the merc groups! I changed it so that the mercs are spread out among 10 equal
sized groups.

FIXED a bug where Earth was not being properly displayed when a player tried
to buy it.

CHANGED YTMAINT Xannor Revenge function so that the Xannor spend 50 times more
time hunting for targets in the universe if they are in "Revnege Mode".

Changed most cases of numbers appearing in scientific notation to "normal"
numbers. (I tried to get them all but won't say that I HAVE! :-)

ADDED a new feature! Command repeats. No no NO! This is not the old control-R
feature! Now your players can repeat any command up to 30 times but placing a
"/R#" (where "#" is a number from 2 to 30) at the end of their command! An
example of moving between two ports and trading 30 times would be:

"M;555;P;1000;Y;1000;Y;M;666;P;1000;Y;1000;Y/R30"
                                            ^^^^
                                            See?

Updated instruction file for command repeats. (YTINSTR.DOC)

Added a PLANET NAME EDITOR to the configuration program "YTCONFIG".

ADDED a registration key scheme. This will allow registered sysops to show
that they registered the game. (This was added at the request of many sysops
who wanted to be able to show that they registered.) Yankee Trader is still
completely free of crippling in the unregistered version. The only difference
between the registered and unregistered versions is that the unregistered
version will show "UNREGISTERED EVALUATION COPY!" while the registered version
will show the name of the sysop who registered YT and the name of the BBS that
YT is registered to. See YTSYSOP.DOC for more information on the key file
scheme.

If you previously registered YT and you call my BBS and ask for a registration
code I will give it to you in a private message for free otherwise PREVIOUSLY
REGISTERED SYSOPS CAN GET A REGISTRATION CODE FOR ONE DOLLAR ($1.00) TO COVER
THE COST OF MY MAILING OR NETMAILING (Fidonet nodes only) YOU A KEY. Fill out
and mail me a registration form to be sure I have your address when upgrading.
I will verify that you are previously registered in my records. The price for
first-time registrations remains $20.00.

FIXED a bug in YTMAINT where the Xannor were not killing players with 0
shields and 0 fighters.

The XANNOR are now MUCH BETTER at hunting for targets. (Evil Grin!)

FIXED bugs in YTMAINT and YT where the programs would go into an infinate loop
when fighter groups of numbers in scientific notation would attack other
groups in scientific notation. Due to rounding errors going from scientific
notation to single precision numbers, BOTH fighter groups would NEVER reach
zero left and the programs would loop forever trying to determine a winner to
the battle. )-; I never expected battles on this scale! It's fixed now! (-;

Changed YT so that a player gets credited with defeating Xannor HQ whether
they do it with missiles or by going to the sector and attacking the fighters.
Before they only got credit if they attacked the fighters and got NO credit if
they attacked with missiles.

FIXED a bug where sectors were not being properly displayed after an emergency
warp escape from sector mines.

CHANGED the sector mines routine so that it executes MUCH more rapidly. Now if
there are large amounts of mines in a sector they go off in groups instead of
ONE AT A TIME like they did before! Before when the mines went off one at a
time it would take forever to finish if a strong player hit a large amount of
mines!

FIXED a problem where incorrect text was displayed if a player tried to sell
more than a port wanted or buy more then they had.

ENHANCED Planet Thrusters (Move a Planet) routine so that now it behaves like
the computer autopilot. A player only has to enter a destination sector.
Before, they had to get an autopilot report for the path they wanted to take,
then move the planet there MANUALLY one sector at a time! (Ugh)

Added checking so that a player cant hit control-R too many times and exceed
maximum string length.

LIMITED the amount of turns awadred for killing Xannor to the maximum turns
per day as defined by you in YTCONFIG. This will prevent the really powerful
players from acquiring ridiculous amounts of turns.

Changed the game so the Xannor's Missiles are no longer effected by a player's
sector excludes.

Made the Xannor 2.5 times stronger against ground forces. Before, it would
have taken 2.5 MILLION xannor to get through 1000 ground forces, now it will
only take 1 million Xannor. They were too weak before.

Added PORT UPDATES to maintenance. This will allow seldon visited ports to
grow and will help prevent ports from being sucked dry too often from being
too small.

ADDED a display of ground force productivity to the planet display.

The Xannor now shoot back with more missiles when fired upon.

The amount of fighters killed by missiles was unrealistic. Fighters lost to
missiles has been reduced.

The amount of damage done to shields by missiles was unrealistic. Shields lost
to missiles have been increased.

FIXED a bug I found in the two init programs. They were not always finding ALL
the isolated sectors during warp verification.

CHANGED YT-INIT.EXE (Initialization program) so that it automatically runs
game maintenance upon completion.

Sensor robots now report planet's ground force level. Before, they only
reported a planet's name.

FIXED a bug in YTMAINT where not all dead players were being removed from
teams when killed by the Xannor.

COMPLETELY rewrote the Cloaking routine. Now cloaking is expressed as a
percentage of maximum possible cloaking. Someone at 100% cloak is now
completely undetectable unless a player buys an anti-cloak. Someone at 90%
cloak will be detectable 1 in 10. Someone at 10% cloak will be detectable 9 in
10! etc. Cloaking slowly decreases as a player plays and will be reduced 5%
per day by maintenance. All I can say about this rewrite is 'WHEW, what a
chore!' but I believe that it is much more realistic than the old method.

CHANGED Anti-Cloaking so the purchaser of the anti-cloak gets uncloaked too!

FIXED the routine where Xannor shoot back when fired upon so that they ONLY
hit the person who fired on them rather than whoever was in the same sector as
the person who attacked the Xannor! Weak players were using this loophole to
kill much stronger ones by getting the Xannor to kill them off! (They would
fire ONE missile at the Xannor and the Xannor would fire 1 to 100 BACK hitting
the wrong target in many cases!)

Changed YTMAINT so that port and planet plagues do not kick in until ports and
planets are much bigger. Especially with ports, plagues were coming too often!

ADDED FILE LOCKING. Yankee Trader will now exit gracefully if more than one
person tries to play it at the same time on different nodes. SHARE MUST NOW BE
LOADED IN ORDER TO RUN YANKEE TRADER!

Changed YT-INIT & RMT-INIT so that the minimum production of an item at a port
is 1000. Before it was -1- which was a bit too small!

Fixed YT missile routine so that if the ground forces on a planet are reduced
to 0 by a missile the planet becomes "un-owned".