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Talk to Ron Harwood. I'm pretty sure he was the original author of the game and he may still tinker with the online version.
Best place to get in touch with him that I know of is at http://www.blacknova.net/ (They develop an online version of TradeWars2000)
You can also get the source code and setup a game on your own from that site.
Or for some fun just join mine at http://www.frodoslair.net/blacknova/

http://blacknova.net/ has been doing this for years......and it is open source!

...play it at BlackNova.Net ;)

I have written a web-application (game) in PHP... and a friend who is a java snob (he feels no other language is worthwhile any more... and I have to listen to it... :P) constantly is saying thing like "well in java - that problem doesn't exist because [insert long winded arrogance]", or "loose types are a short path to hell - and that's where you're headed with PHP" and "PHP isn't a real language anyway - no one would use it at an enterprise level"...

Pointing out that Yahoo is now using it as their default language - and that Rasmus (author of PHP) actually was hired by Yahoo as a result is simply dismissed as bad judgement on their part.

It's like arguing religion or politics... :P

So I just sit back and listen to the tirade - and try not to egg him on...

some web incarnations of tradewars using php and mysql
(all based on http://sourceforge.net/projects/blacknova/) :

digirave.net
blacknova.net
upperdarkness.net
comments: alot of development going on. one of the most active projects on sourceforge. still i don't think nearly as complete/addictive as the original tradwars yet but supports more users on the good side.


another open source tradewars variant using php, postgres which was hot but slowly losing steam:
merchant empires: advancedpowers.com

not to mention the original tradewars still being developed as a pay telnet server

There is an online version of Tradewars written in PHP. Check out http://www.blacknova.net/. I wasted three or four days on it, but it didn't grip me like the original.

Black Nova Traders is a take off on the old BBS game of Tradewares.
Turn based definetly slows the pace down, but it allows many people (100's) to play in the same game.
Its not quake, netrek, or even nethack, but it has its place.

--

Don't the flycast ads pay much?

I know mine don't... but i thought that was 'cause I had a few hundred users seeing thousands of pages per month each... you must have thousands seeing one or two a day...

Don't get me wrong, I love PHP - I wrote "BlackNova Traders" using PHP and MySQL... and the language rocks for web programming... but that was its intended use.

I don't want to see PHP lose its focus and purpose - it isn't a general use language... if you want one, there are plenty (C/C++, perl, and even java for example). PHP is meant for dynamic kick-ass web-page creation.

Well you could check out BlackNova Traders a web-based tradewars game...

We can at least have some hope they will do a good job in the organization of it. Young coders may be fine at the actually writing of a line of code, but a lot of the younger programmers seem to not have the level of organization needed to keep the code maintainable.

As far as all you people who say "security through obscurity is required to prevent cheating", I say that's just because the games weren't thought out properly and designed for it. I know that Blacknova has had a few problems with cheating in the past, but access to the source code wasn't needed. There were simply bugs in the program that could be exploited. Access to the code has only helped them, so that they can have assistance in figuring out how to plug the holes.

And sure people who know how to program well can alter their clients to make them more efficient, but people already do that (I recall external macroing to be very effective in UO). What needs to happen is that the server is secure and actually enforces the rules of the world. To often coders have put a lot of the rule checking in the client. That may let you run the server on less powerful machines, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to cheat and then you'll have to start checking it anyway. (eg: quake 2 proxys like speedbot) Better to start out doing the correct checks than just hope nobody will ever figure it out.