BlackNova Traders - Readme

BlackNova Traders is a web-based, multi-player space exploration game inspired by the popular BBS game of TradeWars. It is coded using PHP, SQL, and 
Javascript.

Version 0.663 / http://www.blacknova.net

Copyright (C) 2001-2014 Ron Harwood <harwoodr@blacknova.net>, and the BNT development team.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under 
the terms of the GNU Affero Public License v3 (see license or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html)

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU Affero Public License for more details.

Requirements: 
- MySQL version 5.5.3 minimum is required (needed for utf8mb4 schemas).
- PHP's mbstring extension must be installed (used in common.php)
- PHP's pdo extension must be installed (used in create_universe, and soon the rest of the game)
- Web browser - Recent versons of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are best, but we also support Internet Explorer 9 or above - Older versions of Internet Explorer will have degraded functionality.
- Apache version 2.2.22+ is supported, we have not determined a required minimum.
- IIS is not supported, and BNT will likely not work correctly on it in future versions.
- Development "Snapshots" are intended only for developers that are actively involved in the development process, and require additional effort to work (composer, etc)
- PHP version 5.5 is suggested. PHP 5.3 is end of life, and no longer supported by the PHP team. Despite those issues, it is possible to run BNT on 5.3.7 and above.
(For Smarty, password_hash for login, directoryIterator, and many other features). Any version below 5.3.7 is not supported and is unlikely to work.

Download:
    You can get the newest version at http://sourceforge.net/projects/blacknova/

Credits:
    This work is based on the old BBS games that went by many names
    (Tradewars, Galactic Warzone, Yankee Trader, Ultimate Universe, and
    many other names like this) but shares no code with them.  It is
    written 100% in PHP/HTML/SQL.  

    Please refer to the docs/devcredit file to see
    the current list of developers.

Installation:
    Please see the docs/install file.

Upgrades:
    As is typical with releases, we highly recommend a fresh install. Upgrades are not supported at this time.

ChangeLog:
    Please see the docs/changes file.    

Documentation:
    See the docs/ directory.

Updates:
    Join the blacknova forums (http://forums.blacknova.net) to stay informed about updates, patches 
    and new releases.

Enjoy,

Ron Harwood <harwoodr@blacknova.net>

PS:  I would appreciate both an e-mail (if you are running BlackNova
Traders on your site) and a link back to the main blacknova site http://blacknova.net