Table of Contents

The main objective of this game was for me to learn more about PHP and MySQL, sure, I had been programming in PHP for a long time before I started this project but with a language as vast as PHP you cannot know everything. I continually have the PHP reference manual open when programming, because you might know what the function call is, but you have either forgotten what parameters the function takes, or you forgot what the function returns on failure, is it a FALSE or a 0?

That was in the beginning, but soon The Merchant evolved from a simple project to an online game with an appeal to many gamers. The Merchant 2 now contains many fixes to the code and might be considered the first version of the game to be a full production version. Time will mostly be spent on bug fixes and developing the community, we are not going to immediately start on the next version as I have done in the past, we will first make this version completely bug free before we move on to the next version of the game.

The new objective of this game is now to become the most played online space RPG game on the net, this is a huge goal to work for, but it is something that can be accomplished.

The development team for The Merchant is highly motivated and willing to aim for the goal of being the best.

The game was first thought of by Stephen Eyre, about 3 years ago. The game hadn't even been coded, only a user system had been done with a few graphics and site layouts. The project went dormant for a few months before I came along and asked Stephen if I could help with the project. Development of the project restarted and a few new scripts were developed, we had an image creator script working and a universe within to fly. But then we both lost interest in the project.

About 7 months ago I was bored one day and had a look at the old code for The Merchant, being a more experienced developer at that time I could see where all my faults were. At that point I decided to restart the project (again...) and see if we can make an actual game from it. Stephen was keen and contributed a few ideas, but he himself could not participate in the coding of the project.

The Merchant beta 1.0.0 was soon available for download and it had been running on a test server for a while when it was decided that TM needed a new interface, this interface then stuck with the project until the version you see before you came out with a more game-oriented interface. The template for the old interface is still kept in the distribution but will soon be removed.

Just a few days after the announcement of development on TM 2 was made on the public server (2 April 2006) Tyler Van Hensbergen joined the project team to help in the development of The Merchant 2 and have it ready by the end of the rounds at that time (17 May 2006).

• Project Admin Shaun Steenkamp (Deiphos)
• Developer WolfShine (WolfShine)

• Totally
• SpaceDoG
• Gandrak

Many other people have contributed to the project in the form of beta testing and reporting bugs, I would like to thank all of those people but I am sorry that I cannot list you here, there are simply too many ;)

rar Files
rar files are no longer released by The Merchant team, we have moved over to tar.bz2 files because of their cross-platform compatibility and superior compression.
WinRAR can be used to unpack these files.

tar.bz2 Files
Using a free tool called IZArc ( http://www.izarc.com ) you can decompress these files in much the same way you would use Winzip or WinRAR.
WinRAR can also decompress these files.

rar Files
As stated with windows unpacking, these files are no longer distributed by The Merchant team, you can use the following command to unpack the file.

rar x themerchant-NNN.rar

tar.bz2 Files
These files can be extracted using the following command

tar xvfj themerchant-NNN.tar.bz2

Installation of The Merchant should work on any system regardless of which OS or hardware configuration you have. The only software that has to be on your system is listed below:

• Apache 1.3 +
• PHP 4.3.11 +
• MySQL 3 +

The reason we suggest a version of PHP greater than 5 is because The Merchant was coded using PHP 5, we have not provided for backward compatibility.

Before you do anything to do with setting up the game you should first create a database called 'themerchant', this will ensure that no SQL errors are generated when you go to the administration panel.

Using phpMyAdmin you can easily create a database.

The wizard is pretty selfexplanatory, but there are a few things that should be mentioned that we have noticed either people overlook or don't understand what we mean by certain things.

Firstly, to get to the installation, just go to the directory in which you extraced The Merchant on your webserver. The script will then do a check to see if it is installed, if not it will direct you to the installation script. Here you will see a few checks on your system, if everything is reported as being Ok, then you can proceed, the only setting that can show as Problematic is the php setting for 'register_globals'. If it is on, then it will tell you so, this shouldn't pose a problem to the game, but it is better to turn it off so that there is no security hole in the game.
One of the errors thay may occur is your configuration file, if it is not located it will report as Failed, subsequently the next check, which checks to see if the file is writeable, will also fail, you can ignore these problems because the script will create this file on its own.

Step 1 is pretty easy, just fill in the form so that the game will know which settings to use to be able to connect to the database server. Note that at this time, the table prefix setting does not work, there has been no request for it, it is only there in case it is ever needed in the future.

Step 2 will inform you if there is a problem connecting to the database, not much you can do here.

Step 3 will only write everything to the configuration file, all you can do here is click the next button.

Step 4 will populate the database, again, nothing to do here.

Step 5 is where you configure your first game zone, please read the instructions at the top of the page, they contain details about the fields you must complete, they are not going to be repeated here.

Step 6 just shows you what you entered for the game zone, you cannot do anything here, if you made a mistake you will have to fix it in the database itself. Note the tick time shown on this page is in seconds, so if you chose a tick time of 60 minutes, it will show you 3600 seconds.

Step 7 asks you for information on your initial galaxy, there are notes on this step that tell you what each field is, it also has a set of defaults, if you don't want to customize anything, these defaults should suite your needs.

Step 8 simply displays your settings, and it shows the progress of the creation of your galaxy.

Step 9 is where you will create the first account for The Merchant, this account has admin rights to the game and moderator status for the first game zone. Since you are the admin, you will be able to remove yourself as a moderator of the games and only act as an admin, but it is not necessary to do so.

Step 10 is actually quite useless, but it does tell you that everything went well, your game should be running now.

NOTE! Your server is set up by default to be a beta server, which means that you will not be able to create an account without a beta tester password, the password is 'nbetap' by default. You can go to the Sign-Up page and enter this password and then you will be able to create an account.
If you have a mail server set up, you will then receive an email containing an activation code, you can then activate your account like normal.
If you don't have an email server, all is not lost, just go into the database, in the 'users' table you should be the only entry, simply edit this record and set the 'activated' option to 1.
You will now be able to log into the game and play.

Now that the game is installed, it is recommended that you either delete or rename the installation script, it is not password protected like the other universe creation scripts are, so it could pose a security problem for your game.

Support for The Merchant can be found on our IRC channel, there usually is someone there that will be able to help you, the following conventions are used in the channel:

• Op (@)
  These people are usually the developers of the project, they are quite busy with the coding of the game, but can sometimes answer your questions.
• Half-Op (%)
  These people are the official support team for The Merchant, they will always be able to answer any question you have about the game, it can be game-play or even setting up your own game server. Some of these people may also be game admins.
• Voices (+)
  This is an honourary token given to all people that have contributed significantly to the project, they could have contributed ideas, or brought more people to the game. Some of these people have even been with the game since the beginning, so you could also ask them questions about game-play, though they won't be able to answer questions on the physical coding of the game.

Our channel is located here:

IRC Server: irc.hypermutt.com
Port: 6667
Channel: #TM

One final note, if you have any questions that are already answered in this guide, you will simply be referred to it. If you don't understand something mentioned in this guide, we will be glad to help you.

Our forums are located at http://forums.the-merchant.co.uk All categories have a description, otherwise you simply follow normal etiquette as you would on other forums.