Freelance Traveller

Traveller By the Byte

In January 2015, we introduced a new feature, “Traveller By the Byte”, inspired by the original print JTAS “Using Your Model/1bis”, briefly resurrected in Challenge as “Using Your Model/2bis” and “Electronically Exploring the Traveller Universe”: The source code for a small (well, “Electronically Exploring…” got up to medium-sized) Traveller-related program is printed, free to readers to use. Because Freelance Traveller is not imposing a restriction on the language used, a functional explanation of the code presented should be included as part of the article.

Anyone may submit an article for this feature. There are no restrictions on what language may be used for the code, but the intent is that the reader should be able to “edit-and-run”, much like was possible when using BASIC on an Apple II (the target of the JTAS/Challenge articles), without having to purchase expensive development environments or licensed run-time modules, or go through multiple edit-compile-debug cycles (obviously, the code as presented should be ready to run). Submissions should have four elements: A brief summary of what the code does as a whole; identification of what supporting software is needed, what environments it runs in, and where to get the supporting software; the code itself; and an analysis of what the code does, functionally (you don’t have to break it down line by line; just look at the high-level ‘chunks’).

Different publishers have different licenses for fan materials; please be certain that the fan license for the version of Traveller you’re writing code for allows the distribution of that code—it is known that at the present time, the Mongoose license does not. It is fully the intent that Freelance Traveller stay within the bounds of such licenses, so if you’re not sure, ask the licensee and/or publisher.

• The Traveller APL Workspace (Jeff Zeitlin) An ongoing project in APL, handling multiple aspects of setting up and running Traveller
• Vilani Speech Synthesis with SSML (Jeff Zeitlin) Getting your computer to talk to you