scott@sting.Berkeley.EDU (Scott Silvey) (07/18/90)
The best version of xtrek I've ever seen is available through anonymous ftp from scam.berkeley.edu. We've been running it here for a couple years now. You can grab binary clients which will connect to our game here on sequent, or you can grab the code and try to get your own game going. I warn you though, there isn't much support or documentation. Also, it hasn't been touched up. You can't move windows in R4, but that is easily fixed. Nobody here really has the time to clean it up the way it should be done. Some of the features include X-less (TCP/IP) networking (hence the name "NETrek"), a competitive scoring scheme with ranks, multiple ship classes, plasma torpedos, tractor/pressor beams, and starbases which you can dock to and repair/refuel. We also have a "design your own interface" night or two where we allow people's custom clients to connect. These front ends have features like auto-evade, auto-attack, sophisticated message command parsing (responds to and acts upon messages sent to it through the game's communication system), etc ... People are really having a great time writing robotic front ends ... some of these even rival the game's standard robots even though they have all the limitations a human player has. The idea of having a generic networking interface is that we (actually Kevin Smith did ... I only helped with the concept) were able to design an extremely efficient protocol, minimizing network loading. Also, theoretically, anyone can write an interface and play on any sort of machine (Macintosh, Suntools, etc) since the only requirement is to have TCP ... it is no longer strictly "X"trek. For questions, or help, mail to trek@scam.berkeley.edu. Scott