If you're in need of a team for VDM, please e-mail Babsy, the main coordinator of the VDM. She will be putting all the singles together into teams for the tournament.

After some light testing at home, I have so far reched this conclusion as to why it is harder to steal in the door compared to the MBBS version. The door apparently requires you to divide your experience by 30 to find the amount of holds you can safely steal, rather than 20 like the MBBS version. This leads me to believe that while it may take longer to get the required experience, the amount of money you will make will be greater since the number of busts overall will be lower.

A new helper called BattleBridge has been released! While this new helper doesn't have many features yet, it is currently only *8k*! An OS/2 Version (Whoo-hoo!) of BattleBridge is available upon requent. BattleBridge Homepage

Evolution BBS will be hosting an upcoming TradeWars Torunament called The Valentine's Day Massacre which will take place on Febuary 14th. Most of the rules for this tournament are pretty much the same as the BOTE rules, except that you don't need to be sent by a BBS You can expect the webpage to be up within 5 days. For now, I've made a txt file of the rules available here.

The Tradewars Game Server (TWGS) has finally been released! TWGS offers great performance improvements for people hosting TW games, and also gives the players the ability to set up local games to practice on! (You can even use a helper!) Currently, snail mail is the only way to register TWGS. See the TWGS site for more details. Craig Castle has also set up a webpage that discusses preformance issues which should be of intrest to people planning to host their own TWGS game. Download TWGS: https://web.qx.net/satan/tradewars/twgs100.exe https://bbs.coderite.com/TWGS.html Changes at FEN While FEN has been the king of Tradewars for quite some time now, all empires eventually fall. Hosem has posted some unfortunate news about what's been going on at FEN recently. Unfortunatelly, my view of where FEN is headed does not look as bright as it did before. Tradewars Game Server Released!

The Tradewars Game Server (TWGS for short) webpage is now "up" at https://www.azi.com/tradewars/TWGS. Unfortunatelly, The page doesn't seem to have uploaded correctly and don't expect for it to be fixed until John Pritchett gets back from his honeymoon. The Current release date for TWGS is December 6th. TWAR for Windows Rev I released Revision I is out, I suggest everyone burn your copies of Rev H as it wasn't so stable. (I know the listing below looks bad, but I don't have much time to work on this.) TWAR For Windows Webpage Murphy’s revised law: Fix one bug and cause 2 more. This fixes the F3Trade and Mapping bugs. Most of the time was spent testing and looking into bugs users found. Some I could not emulate but the ones I could I fixed. Fixed the Trading Routine that was determining the incorrect trade percentages when getting kicked out. It was going in the wrong direction causing more rejections. Fixed the Resource mover when moving colonists. It was always placing them into the fuel category. A leftover from when I was debugging. Fixed the problem in the mapper when clicking on the zoom map and causing Access Violations. Fixed the problem with people "Killing the CIM" during transmission and creating multiple Access Violations. The Manual Explore will now locate the closest unexplored sector and move there automatically. Explore no longer requires you to have adjacent unexplored sectors.

Tradewars Solace, a freeware helper created by Caxis, is now in Wide Beta testing. It doesn't offer support for SLIP/PPP conections, but if your using Turbocom, it'll work fine. Oh yea, and did I mention it's freeware? New bug in v3.09 A new money bug has been found in v3.09 of Tradewars Door. If 2 players are on a planet and keep hitting D, (Display Planet) the money in the citadel and the fighters being made increase every time the key is hit. EleqTrizi'T did some testing with this bug, and found that it is a VERY slow proccess. Even with 20 million in the citadel, the credits seemed to only increase about 4 or 5 per press, so even with 5 players, it would take an incredibly long time. This is a lot diffrent than the supposed "one player making 167,000,000 credits in a couple hours." Thanks to The Home Sector TW2002.com Down As many of you know, tw2002.com's Internet tradewars game has been down for a few weeks. However, now tw2002.com's Webpage has gone down. I talked to CWizard on ICQ about this, and told me he didn't know what was wrong.

John Pritchett recently made a Post concerning the upcoming TradeWars Game Server (aka TWGS) which has been in beta tests with sites such as tw2002.com. According to John's post, the TWGS server will be available VERY shortly, and he'll also have an on-line ordering form for both TWGS and Tradewars v3.09!

TWAR Version G up! TWAR For Windows version G is now up! If your wondering what happened to F, I didn't even bother posting it: "Version F(lop) was a mess so ditch it and install G. Some files were lost and some source files dated wrong when I moved to a new machine. This caused a bad compile and a loss of some code. All is fine now. -Doug" https://webhome.idirect.com/~twar/screens.htm What's new in Version G: Fixed the outgoing messages from Large message window. It was not sending messages immediately as in chat window. Fixed the Planet Transporter in the Colonizer for MBBS players. It was putting a "M" to initiate the move due to calling the generic MoveToSector() routine. Added a real-time Status Bar that will display "Cash", "Turns Left", "Experience", "Alignment", "Profit from the last Trade (Selling – Purchase price)", and "Time Online". The status bar follows Office97 type toolbars and can be moved around the screen to the left, right, top, bottom or float. It can be also be enabled or disabled. Added Gypsy's Big Dummy's Guide to TradeWars 2002 for any dummies out there (Kidding) or players who want to brush up on playing strategies. Thanks Gypsy. Wormhole Logo will now spin when connected to a BBS and stop spinning when offline or a loss of connection. Fixed a problem in the Blind warp not consistently working all the time. Fixed a TWarp script bug where both the Twarp protection and the Twarp script were issuing a "Y" to fire TWARP drive. Thanks Jim Conway for his detailed description. Found an interesting bug where I track the incoming sectors to any given sector (CIM memory Database). Turns out any sector can have 6 outgoing and more than six incoming sectors. This was punching holes in memory and giving "Access violation errors" On the MBBS send message it now shows the "ME:" info so you have feedback that your message was sent and generates a history of your outgoing Messages. Found a way to increase TWAR's performance by changing the way I handle incoming data. Pir8 Resets Oct 31st, my return to TW. It's official, I'm returning to TradeWars for yet one more game. This time, it'll be on pir8.net, alongside Retaliator, EleqTrizi'T, Saluki, and Maelene. You can get a list of the modifications and settings at The Home Sector. Just ask the sysop, and he'll give you 4 hours day FREE for this game! Don't be afraid to play this game just because we (seem like) we're good. If there's ever a game to learn, this is it. Pure Energy Resets November 1st Pure Energy BBS will be rebanging it's game on November 1st. This game will offer 5000 sectors, 3 day port regeneration, and unlimited turns. More news tomorrow.... Alas, too much news to catch up on after my "vacation" with Metal Gear! More tomorrow!

Metal Gear Solid comes out tommorrow. If you don't see me online, or wonder why they're no updates here during the next few days, this is why. FEN to reset in November Family Entertainment will be reseting it's Tradewars game on November 7th. Since you guys have about 1/2 a month to send in your checks for access, there should be no excuse why you shouldn't play! Unfortunatelly, I won't be playing, but that's beside the point.