$Id: README,v 2.3 1995/07/08 11:02:14 children Beta $

		Welcome to pei - Perl Empire Interface

                *** THIS IS A BETA RELEASE ***
                ***  USE AT YOUR OWN RISK  ***

If you have never used pei before, then you should find out how to
install pei and run it by reading the file called "INSTALL".

The major changes in the upgrade from 1.8 to 2.3a are:

* pei ie now fully asynchronious, supporting the FLASH and INFORM protocols
  of the new server.  To learn more about the new server, connect to
  empire.net 7778 1-10/1-10 and type "info Empire2" and "info toggle"

* If you're in INFORM mode (see "info toggle") then you'll get beeped
  whenever you receive a new telegram.  If you don't like this, put
  $beep = 0 in "~/.peirc".

* Fixed output redirection for tools (e.g. "simu > foo" works now).

* Wrote a C program highlight.c to which you can pipe the output of "sect"
  to get highlighting to work with pei (see the comments at the top of
  highlight.c for installation instructions).

* "history" command now takes an argument (for number of lines you want
  to see)

* Changed the socket read routines to detect server timeout and EOF.

* Coded a complete overhaul of the interrupt handler (what happens when
  you type ^C).  It should now recover much better than before.

* Changed environment variables EMPIRECOUNTRY and EMPIREREP to
  COUNTRY and PLAYER to make it compatable with the standard client.

* I have removed readline because it couldn't work with asynch communication.

The latest version of pei is available on the Planet's Empire
Archives:
  http://www.empire.net/~children/PEA/player/clients/
  ftp://ftp.empire.net/pub/empire/player/clients/
