jay@sri-unix (06/09/82)
About a year ago I played a fairly complex 'Star Trek' type game called 'Universe'. This game ran on a VAX 11/780 under VMS. According to the game's rules, it was written in FORTRAN by a couple of people at MIT-Lincoln Labs and requires large amounts of memory. If anyone has any information regarding this game I would appreciate it. A copy of the source would be especially nice as I would like to try to port it to C and UNIX. Jay Phillips ...ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!jay
bcw (06/15/82)
From: Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University Re: Universe game As a matter of fact, I had quite a fascination with the Universe game described by Jay Phillips. The code is (as mentioned) is ALL in Fortran and does require a LARGE amount of memory (the first time I tried to bring it up I discovered that our VAX wasn't gen'd with large enough process sizes to allow it to run -- it needs something on the order of 4 mb process space. We fixed THAT rather quickly!) The program is EXTREMELY inefficient (ie it only uses about 1/8 of that space AT ALL, let alone efficiently). For a while I was even playing around with translating it to C and cleaning it up sufficiently to make it run on a pdp-11 (I see no basic reason why it couldn't be done, the old version was SO sloppily written...), but it was such a mess that I never got very far with it. For those who haven't seen this game, it is a Star Trek game similar to many others, except that the area around the Enterprise is shown as something of a circle (rather than various crude hacks like squares or something), and the diameter of the circle depends on the state of repair of your sensors; one moves in a more-or-less natural fashion through the universe (no distinction between sectors and quadrants like in some Star Trek games, though of course the universe is two-dimensional which isn't fully realistic). It has things like food and energy which you have to replenish from time to time; space warps; super novae; and black holes. There are *lots* of different aliens which you can run into -- looking at the code I *still* haven't run into all of them and I've played it for *many* hours. In addition, you can allocate the crew of the Enterprise to different tasks -- for example if you want to get something repaired more quickly you can just allocate more of the crew to repairing it. It has a number of rather nice touches although some portions of it have a rather crude user interface (many numbers require periods after them or they will be taken as 0 for some reason). All in all, it's probably the most interesting Star Trek game I've played. If anyone is interested, send me mail and we'll see what we can work out. If anyone has already moved it to Unix I don't want to re-invent the wheel; be forewarned that in its current incarnation it will NOT run on a PDP-11 (even on RSX), and that it will probably NOT run on a VAX running Unix since it uses some special things in the Fortran compiler (shouldn't be too difficult to fix however). Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University