From owner-freebsd-current Sun Oct 24 15:57:49 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from palrel3.hp.com (palrel3.hp.com [156.153.255.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3F85E15141 for ; Sun, 24 Oct 1999 15:57:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from darrylo@sr.hp.com) Received: from postal.sr.hp.com (root@postal.sr.hp.com [15.4.46.173]) by palrel3.hp.com (8.8.6 (PHNE_17135)/8.8.5tis) with ESMTP id PAA08391; Sun, 24 Oct 1999 15:57:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mina.sr.hp.com (root@mina.sr.hp.com [15.4.42.247]) by postal.sr.hp.com with ESMTP (8.8.6 (PHNE_17190)/8.7.3 TIS 5.0) id PAA06394; Sun, 24 Oct 1999 15:57:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (darrylo@mina.sr.hp.com [15.4.42.247]) by mina.sr.hp.com with ESMTP (8.8.6 (PHNE_17135)/8.7.3 TIS 5.0) id PAA21562; Sun, 24 Oct 1999 15:56:45 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199910242256.PAA21562@mina.sr.hp.com> To: Matthew Dillon Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: trek73 Reply-To: Darryl Okahata In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 24 Oct 1999 11:21:01 PDT." <199910241821.LAA01257@apollo.backplane.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.108) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 15:56:44 -0700 From: Darryl Okahata Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Matthew Dillon 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message