Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 15:56:44 -0700 From: Darryl Okahata <darrylo@sr.hp.com> To: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: trek73 Message-ID: <199910242256.PAA21562@mina.sr.hp.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 24 Oct 1999 11:21:01 PDT." <199910241821.LAA01257@apollo.backplane.com>
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Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
> Hmm... it looks like the one I have is older. It looks like Jeff had
> made a huge number of enhancements between 1985 and 1988! Pretty cool,
> actually, though neither game is multi-player.
Well, for multi-player, we had the most fun with "xtrek" (the early
version -- not the later, ultra-enhanced releases). For those of you
too young to remember ;-), xtrek was an X11, multi-player (up to 16?),
real-time game where you flew a ship (e.g., Federation, Klingon,
Romulan, or Orion) and tried to kill the other players. You could also
conquer your opponent's planets, but few people did that, as it was much
more fun to go after other players. The view was 2D/top-down, looking
down into a flat map of the universe, upon which your ships flew.
Back around '88 or '89, we used to have a fair number of people
playing after-hours. Although it had very primitive graphics by today's
(or even yesterday's) standards, xtrek was easy-to-learn, easy-to-play,
and a blast to play. It was extremely maddening to watch your opponent,
who you were sure was toast, due to the massive photon torpedo burst you
sent his way, deftly weave and avoid the torpedos, and kill you with a
point-blank phaser blast. For all it's simplicity, skill played a
significant part.
We only stopped playing xtrek when I foolishly upgraded to one of
the latest-and-greatest, ultra-feature-burdened versions. No one played
it, as it was too difficult to play, and the play was unbalanced.
One thing about the early xtrek: it was a funky program, as it
wasn't client/server-based (later versions were, but they weren't as
much fun to play). It was basically a single program/server, which
opened up a window on each player's display. Still, performance was
pretty good (on a *local* LAN), even on ten-year-old RISC hardware.
--
Darryl Okahata
darrylo@sr.hp.com
DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the
little green men that have been following him all day.
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