
*** NUTS 3 readme file ***

Well , only 1 person bothered to test the alpha release for me and he
didnt have time to do much of that so if there are still bugs in this
final release blame yourselfs. I've got rid of all the bugs I can find but
the program still needs and effective soak test with many users. The user
data files are incompatible with the alpha release by the way. If you have
a problem with that, well its just tough titties.

From a initial glance this version of the talker looks pretty similar to all
the other versions. Up to a point this is correct, after all there are only
so many things you can do with a talker to make it look original and 
different, espcially a text based one. However, under the skin things are 100%
new. The entire code has been rewritten and a number of major new features 
have been added (one has also been removed - the atmospherics, no one liked
them or used them so I dumped them) including the biggest new feature of all
which is having networked talkers, ie you can log into one talker and wander
into another talker simply by typing "go <room name>". This will be explained
more clearly in the documentation in the DOCS directory so now I will turn
to the more prosaic field of compilation and how to get started...

Compiling...

This particular version of the software was developed in parallel on 
HP-UX 10.01 using the ANSI compiler and Linux 1.2.13 using gcc 2.5.8 so 
there should be no probs with either of these. The talker should also compile
fine on AIX and OSF/1 (I hope).
	Generally you'll just need to enter "cc nuts300.c" to compile though
for HP-UX you need to type "cc -Ae nuts300.c". 
Please note that you NEED the ANSI compiler for HP-UX, the bundled K&R one
is useless.

Running...

The talker comes with a config file ready made (datadir/config) which will
be a good starting point for you. There are some network addresses in there
but they are more of a guide as to how to set up talker links rather than
being genuine links themselves. 
	To start the talker just type "a.out" and it will boot and 
automatically run itself in the background. All its actions are written to the
syslog file. To log in you then just telnet to port 7000 and log in as "fred"
with the password "test" as this is an account set up with GOD status.

I have included a 2nd config file called config2. This is so you can set up
another talker (by copying the files from this current one) and have them
link together. The only file that need to be different is the config file.
Move config2 into the 2nd datafiles directory as config and run the 2nd 
talker.

More detailed information is in the specific documentation in the DOCS
directory.

Neil Robertson , March 1996
