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There are still some descendants of Trade Wars out there (besides tradewars). Better in many cases. Here is one I spent a few years on.

StarShipTraders

As a Sun system administrator and a military strategist on SST, I think they should call it, simply, Sun Tzu. I would take offense of use of the hyphen. heh.
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...by making up the URL's as I go along. In a multiplayer strategy game it is important that players not be able to simply look into the other sectors to see who is/what is hiding there. Not being a complete fool I didn't just make any URL resolve directly to the game sector in question. You have to log in, get issued a 'ship' and navigate to that sector.

Of course, I'm not a professional webmaster who knows all sorts of sophisticated web stuff, so it wasn't a problem for me. I guess it's much more complicated if you know what you're doing.

BTW, I'm wondering what part of 'Uniform Resource Locator' these yahoo's don't understand.

You've hit on the central concept of Starship Traders. Relative to these modern games, however, it's hopelessly simple. It relies entirely on the other players to make it interesting. While there is a fledgling graphical interface, the vast majority of players still use the more refined text interfaces, either browser or telnet.

Starship Traders is normally thought of as a web mode game, but it has its history in Czarwars, a BBS door game. It still supports telnet on port 23 for the 'Continuum of Chaos' persistent-universe game at StarshipTraders.com.

My kids love the Sims... and they are something of warmongers. Yeah, they would play Sim War.

But if I were making a strategy game, it'd be exactly like this. I wrote it precisely because I thought the Trade Wars scenario would make an excellent strategy game -- and no game of that genre worked for me. It is very much a strategy game, although everything is set in a rather abstract scenario.

Traditionally, SST has been played through a telnet client or a web browser, but a graphical client is in the works and is available for Linux and Windows... I don't know whether it will ever replace the web interface or the telnet interface (which I still prefer).

...In the single Continuum of Chaos game. Seriously, the game is played in a universe consisting of one million sectors, each of which corresponds to a web page -- with multiple sub-pages. Google and the other engines can't really index it because it requires a log in. Further, even if they did log in they would run out of Antimatter long before they got through even a tiny fraction of the pages.

Meybe all that research doesn't apply to slow moving strategy games that resemble MUD's more than doom. Still, I've learned how to run a scam, and sometimes I manage to avoid one. ;)

The criticisms of this review are valid but could benefit from a different perspective. I started writing a networked, 3D game client in the spring, my first such attempt. If I had discovered this book a month earlier, it would probably have saved me a week or more. It did save me some time. I could find no other single source that covered what I wanted to do.

A short overview and a brief technical introduction to virtually every technology I have used so far is in this book. When you are struggling with your first 3d game client, this book offers valuable perspective that can save you from wasting a lot of time just trying to figure out what to use. If you are attempting, as I was, to write your first 3d, networked game client, consider this: is a week (or two or three) of your time worth 50 bux? (I think that's what I paid) If so, take a look at the book.

If you are an experienced programmer in most of the technologies covered in this book and already have a good perspective on each of them and what they are useful for, don't buy it.

If you fall in between the extremes above and think that the book isn't for you, wait for something else or dig up the info for yourself -- as I mostly did. ;) But, in the absence of much competition, this book may have some value if you want to write code -- and save a little time -- right now.

(The client I'm working on is not yet released in source form but will be when I get it cleaned up a bit. It is here and is used to play the web game Starshiptraders which has historically been playable only with a browser or telnet.)

I think I remember seeing something about that also -- but I never saw it actually up and working. My related game, Starshiptraders has been up on the web -- as well as telnet -- for over four years. Early versions (until June of 99) were called Tsarwars, however.

Heh... I did write my latest online game in C, but my new (non-game) websites are in PHP. It's remarkably appropriate and flexible for writing web applications, especially DB-driven ones.

My game doesn't actually have a client -- players use web browsers and telnet clients -- but the game has benefitted substantially from 'cheating'. In starship traders, there isn't really any way to cheat, per se, other than running more than the legal limit of ships. Bug exploitation and imbalances in the game, for example, are legal gameplay. My goal has been to fix those imbalances and bugs as they are discovered, and the game is much more robust as a result.

Now, if only I could find the time to write the ever-postponed java client...

The HTML Manual of Style, Larry Aronson, Copyright 1994, Ziff-Davis Press, documents Post in just the way I use it in both of my database-driven websites. One of them has been on the web since 1996, incidently, accepting posts and applying them to its database. ;)

Check it out!

starshiptraders.com (this one supports telnet and http, supports lots of players and games, and is available to play -- I wrote this one), Tradewars, The New Era (you can download this one and run it yourself), and "Galactic Domination", which I've logged in to but don't have permission to make public -- it's under development.

140,000 pages per day is a pretty small, load.

Obviously, but the main part of the point was that it is 99% idle during the peak loads. I doubt ASP/VBScript could implement starship traders, run 17 separate 64,000 sector games with hundreds of players each, and still be 99% idle on a Celeron 366. ;)

My favorite change going into 2.4 is the halving of the filesystem caching structures. Instead of a read buffer and a write buffer, there is a single buffer. That makes the buffering data files use far less memory. Systems like mine will benefit greatly from this because the key to good performance at my site is getting all the game files in memory to avoid the awful penalty of disk IO. ;)

Other changes are detailed in a story over on Linuxtoday.

Well, not quite tradewars, but completely rewritten for the Internet. Check out starshiptraders.com either using a web browser, or, for you original BBSer's, telnet straight in to port 23.

The SST design is derived from Czarwars, one of several tradewars-genre BBS door programs from the '80s. SST has been online in various forms for three years and is still in beta testing. It's pretty solid but remains in testing due to endless feature creep. ;)

We are currently running 10 games in an on-going ladder-style tournament. The games all reset on Thanksgiving (Thursday) and each has room for a few hundred more players. There are usually about 500 active players (well, active ships -- it's hard to tell how many actual people log in). The web mode serves about a half million pages a week and accounts for 75% of the traffic -- with the remainder of the activity being through telnet.