What is Tradewars: The New Era?
Tradewars: The New Era is a multiplayer online game of interstellar domination, with a little role-playing thrown in. Tradewars is in early development at the moment, but it's already a fun multiplayer online game.How do I play Tradewars?
It's available in my Tradewars downloads section. You can try it out alone by following the instructions in the file "ReadMe.TW" included in the download package. To play with other players, you'll need to find or create a server. You can run a part-time server with a basic dial-up connection by running TWServer.exe (also included in the download package) whenever you want people to be able to play the game. For a 24 hour server, you'll need a dedicated connection, or a MUD hosting service. A web search should turn up a few hosting services, and your current ISP should be able to provide a dedicated connection.
Where can I find Tradewars: The New Era servers?
At the moment, I'm not aware of any 24 hour servers. If you know about a Tradewars: TNE server that's running full-time and is open to the public, mail me.
How many planets are there in a typical Tradewars game?
This varies randomly from reset to reset. On average, there are about 125000 planets orbiting about 2500 stars.
Help! Tradewars 0.08 (or earlier) just sits there when I try to connect!
I don't presently know what causes this, but on some Windows systems there's a problem with blocking connect() calls. It's not the OS, since I've had reports of it on 95, 98, and NT 4, but it doesn't happen on most systems. As a workaround, the 0.09 prerelease includes nonblocking connects. If you have the problem with 0.08, please try 0.09 and let me know what happens. Unfortunately, however, the 0.09 prerelease is not complete enough to be a playable game.
Tradewars 0.08 bombs out with an assertion in twindow.c, at line 1154... What do I do?
I made the mistaken assumption that when Windows notifies a program that a window has been resized, the new size will consist of positive numbers. A discussion of a related problem in Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 leads me to believe that this occurs when minimizing the window. Subsequent testing has confirmed this. The (annoying) workaround is to never minimize the Tradewars client window. If you experience this assertion under any other circumstances, let me know. The problem is fixed in 0.09.