trader6

Usage

Overview

Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objective is to create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay money, in order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).

Options

GAME

If GAME is specified as a number between 1 and 9 (inclusive), load and continue playing that game. If GAME is not specified, start a new game.

--no-color, --no-colour

Don't use colour for displaying the text in the game. Use this option for a “retro-computing” look (as shown in the EXAMPLES below).

--max-turn=NUM

Set the number of turns in the game to NUM. In this version of Star Traders, NUM must be greater or equal to 10. If this option is not specified, the default is 50 turns.

-h, --help

Show a summary of command-line options and exit.

-V, --version

Display version information about the program, then exit.

Exit status

0

Star Traders finished without any errors.

1

Star Traders encountered an unrecoverable problem or error; a diagnostic message will be written to standard error in this case.

Examples

You can start a new game by running Star Traders without any command line options:

Once the game starts, you will be asked to enter the number of people playing. From one to eight people can play (although, in this version, they will all have to share the one keyboard and screen!). After entering the names of the players, you will have the opportunity to read instructions on how to play the game. Do so—and good luck in the game!

If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify that game number on the command line. For example, the following starts game 4, if it was previously saved:

If you are running under the X Window System, you might like to start the game in a dedicated xterm(1) window (typed all on one line):

If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try (again, typed all on one line):

Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:

Environment

XDG_DATA_HOME, HOME

If XDG_DATA_HOME is set to an absolute pathname (that is, a path that starts with “/”), Star Traders will use that directory, with a subdirectory trader, to store game files. If this environment variable is not set or does not start with “/”, ~/.local/share/trader will be used instead, where “~” represents your home directory, as contained in the HOME environment variable.

LINES, COLUMNS

Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the screen. As such, it will access these two environment variables if the underlying Curses library does so (see, for example, the ENVIRONMENT section in the ncurses(3) manual page for in-depth details). It requires a text console or window of at least 80×24 in size.

LANG, LC_ALL, etc.

This version of Star Traders has full support for locales and will use appropriate settings. In particular, messages will be displayed using LC_MESSAGES and LANGUAGE (if Star Traders has been translated into that language). In addition, numeric quantities will be displayed using LC_NUMERIC and monetary quantities will use LC_MONETARY. See the locale(7) or setlocale(3) manual pages for more details on locale settings.

TEXTDOMAINDIR

If set, Star Traders will use this path as the base with which to locate its message catalogs instead of the compiled-in path; the relevant trader.mo files should be located in language-code subdirectories (such as en_AU), in LC_MESSAGES sub-subdirectories.

Files

~/.local/share/trader/gameN

Star Traders stores saved game files in the .local/share/trader subdirectory in your home directory (unless overridden by the XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable). N is a number between 1 and 9 inclusive. The game file is scrambled to prevent you or others from casually cheating!

~/.trader/gameN

If the ~/.trader directory exists, game files will be read from and saved to this location instead. This is for compatibility with versions of Star Traders prior to version 7.15.

Feedback

Your comments, suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always warmly welcomed! Please send these to:

Postal:

John Zaitseff,
The ZAP Group Australia,
Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
Berala, NSW, 2141,
Australia

Email:

⟨[email protected]⟩

Web:

⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩

FTP:

⟨https://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩

⟨ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩

Git:

⟨https://www.zap.org.au/git-browser/trader.git⟩

⟨https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git⟩

⟨git://git.zap.org.au/data/git/trader.git⟩