Netrek

R Jason Valentine writes "Before Ogg was an encoding standard it was a verb. Before the internet enabled the masses to play against each other in Quake and Ultima Online, there was a cross-platform multiple player interactive online game called Netrek. Netrek can trace its history back to 1972. It's an interesting, though incomplete, read, that includes travels through places like Berkeley's XCF. Netrek generally peaked in play in the early 90's, from about 1992 to 1995 or so, and was popular enough to even get an article in Wired. With this explosion of players, several variations on the original style, called Bronco, emerged. These were Chaos (similar to bronco), Paradise, and Hockey. The Chaos and Paradise variants are all but dead, mostly due to lack of players and an expired Paradise-capable client for Windows. A Bronco pick-up game still occurs daily, and usually once or twice a week, there is a hockey game. League games still exist, and this is the 10th year of league play, with around 200 players registered for the 2002 draft league."

Valentine continues: "Though the graphics are subspectacular, gameplay is enveloping. Like chess, the rules are simple and comprehendable within the first hour of play, yet the game is difficult to master. After a 5 year hiatus, I returned to the game and found play still engaging with a healthy, though small, active community. The clients haven't had a major upgrade in years, and recent rebuild attempts remain unfinished. The development slowdown can be attributed to a decrease in interest and the aging of the original programmers, who now hold steady jobs and don't have an itch to update stable clients. If you've played before, but not in a long time, the game is worth revisiting. If you've never played, and don't have the latest greatest hardware to play the latest installment of the tired FPS genre, check out Netrek. Minimum system requirements are a graphics card that can do 256 colors at 1024x768 and an internet connection."

Comments

Paradise was...Paradise

[Dixie_Flatline]

I remember coming in on HOLIDAYS so I could play. I missed entire days worth of classes to play. Netrek was so engrossing, even if you were only mediocre.

I always liked Paradise the best, though. You had high warp engines, better ships (does anyone else remember the Assault Base?) really well maintained statistics (I was the Kamikaze champ for about 6 months running, mostly due to my inability to pass up ogging opportunities) and far more interesting game play dynamics because of the system layout (ie. Suns and solar systems and whatnot.) Splashing a Jumpship or a Warbase was always the high point of a game, and I was one of those crazies that would ogg the base in just about anything. Scout, DD, BB...it didn't matter. Warp drives to full, and drop that torp load!

When Paradise died, I basically stopped playing. I occasionally miss it. If you've ever played a network FPS and liked it, check out Netrek, ESPECIALLY you Tribes fans out there.

New clients for Netrek

[tap]

It's not quite true that there have been no client changes in years. My client has had new versions come out every few months since 1999, with lots of new features in each version. A new version of a windows client just came out too, but it's not nearly as nice as my client.

<plug mode>
You can read more and download the software from my web page for Paradise 2000, the ultimate Linux netrek client.

It has a nice sound system and can use IBM's ViaVoice for linux to do speech synthesis of messages and macros. Getting the IBM ViaVoice TTS package for linux is hard now, maybe /. should do a story on that.
</plug mode>

One problem Netrek has right now is lack of servers. The one popular server is often full. It also has had bad lag for most people recently, since it is a redhat and openoffice mirror, both which have released major new versions.

I learned network programming from Netrek

[Joe Rumsey]

Netrek taught me all of the basics, and some not-so-basics, of network game programming:

Sockets
TCP
UDP
Client-server network models
Dealing with packet loss

and more.

I can honestly say, and have said before, that I owe my career to Netrek more than anything else. I work professionally as a game programmer, primarily writing network code. Without Netrek, I don't know what I would have wound up doing, but probably not that.

I wrote a large chunk of code for the Amiga client eons ago. I wasn't the original author of that port (that would be Randall Jesup, who worked for Commodore) but I did spend far too much time in which I probably should have been studying (though in retrospect, it was probably the right thing to have been doing with my time after all!), poking and prodding at that thing until I knew basically all there was to know about it. I eventually wound up porting the Paradise version of the client to the Amiga, and contributing code back to the main Paradise branch (Please note however: Paradise was for twinks. I just ported it because I wanted to see it for myself. :-) as well as a little bit back to the Vanilla server (if you look for CLOAKER_MAXWARP, that's my invention. It's why you don't ever see incorrectly cloaked or uncloaked ships on modern netrek clients/servers. The FEATURE_PACKETS system that let us do that without breaking older clients was also my idea, but to give proper credit, Tedd Hadley helped write it too.)

Maybe twice a year I'll still get on a netrek kick for a couple of days. It's still just about the best internet team game out there, however graphically primitive it might look compared to modern games. It is not primitive at all under the surface, and was way ahead of its time in many ways.

-Ogre

Re:I learned network programming from Netrek

[jesup]

I indeed did write the Amiga client, which was a pretty cool trick for the day, since the Amiga didn't run X11, and all the clients were Unix/X at the time. Win32 came much later (after Win95, of course). This was around 1990 or 1991. I just wrote wrapper routines for every X11 call made in the program (and all the input focus stuff).

I added one feature still missing (I think) from all others: it would read all the messages to you so that you didn't have to look down at the message window. Important when dodging torps! The Amiga speech device made it easy.

One of the great thing about the game was that it rewarded a number of different strategies and playing styles. Also, league play was and is VERY different than pickup.

At first at Commodore we had no net connection, so we played internally Mondays at 5:30pm. After we got a 64K link, I and 1 or 2 others would play on the net (3 was about the limit). I joined a league team (the Buddies) and played for a couple of years.

As mentioned, we were one of the first to make use of signed clients and things like that (the wonders of RSA).

I can't imagine the number of hours I spent playing, often coming in for 8-16 or more hours on weekends to play.

Every once in a while I'll fire up a client. One additional problem last time I looked was that the metaserver (again, greatly predates gamespy/etc) moved or was down.

-- Randell Jesup, ex-Amiga OS group

Re:I learned network programming from Netrek

[fadden]

Wow... this is turning into a class reunion. :-)

There's a little more to the history pages, most notably a timeline of events, that gives you a little more detail.

It's times like this that I'm sad I never finished the original Netrek history document. I still have a few megabytes of material archived, and actually pulled it out to help defend a patent-infringement lawsuit. (Mpath Interactive was suing another company over a multi-player gaming patent. Kevin Smith and I contributed statements and code samples that demonstrated that Netrek was doing what their patent claimed *years* before Mpath even existed.) Someday I may pull out the history stuff and finish the job.

I also learned a lot from Netrek. The UDP code in Netrek was, to the best of knowledge, the first time UDP was used for an Internet game. I didn't think it would make a difference. :-) Everything that followed used UDP instead of TCP -- you didn't have to look very hard to see the advantages.

Netrek is probably the only game that uses both UDP and TCP for game state updates. It remains the most salient example of why that approach is a bad idea. :-)

I remember using Netrek as a system diagnostic tool. If there were hiccups in the OS or network, you'd notice them almost immediately. There as a router outside KSU that was reloading its routing tables periodically, causing a small network storm, that was spotted by Netrek players who were stalling briefly at fairly precise intervals.

I learned a trememdous amount about RSA encryption and the difficulty in making a game tamper-proof. We kept trying to find ways to keep people from cheating, but there's always another approach when you don't control the target system. It's fun to watch game companies struggle with that even now.

It also taught me a lot about game balance, and how a simple change to the way score (DI) is computed can change *everything*. People want solitary goals, and will pursue them even to the detriment of others (substitute Quake "campers" for Netrek "DI scum"). Netrek had so many opportunities for tweaks that we needed a separate FAQ for Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions (FOCS) just to keep the newsgroup sane.

I miss playing Netrek almost as much as I miss writing code for it. How many games can programmers say that about?

-- Andy McFadden (ShadowSpawn)

heheh

[Xzzy]

> Minimum system requirements are a graphics card
> that can do 256 colors at 1024x768 and an internet
> connection.

These are the EXACT same requirements to play you needed ten years ago.

Problem being I only had a 486 at the time (bit less than 10 years ago I guess) and it simply wasn't capable of pushing 1024x768. The sheer amount of jockeying I had to do with the interface to squeeze all the important stuff into 800x600 was near epic. ;)

I couldn't understand why anyone made the game like that, because at the time, that kind of resolution was unimagineable to me.

Then a few months later I got my foot into the IT industry, sat at my first Sparc station, and learned why. ;)

Ahhh, yes I remember Netrek

[Anonymous Coward]

The greatest of all computer games has to be Netrek. I was first introduced to it at my first co-op job. Lunch breaks consisted of about 30 mins of Netrek, than 45 mins, then 90 mins, then 2 hrs of Netrek, followed by another half hour of "debriefing" where both teams discussed strategies and conquests. I still remember the "cloak" tactic that I developed when I realized you could sit quietly off on the side of the screen in an cloaked assault boat and wait for the other team to forget about you...only to sneak in and bomb the hell out of their home planet.

Alias, our old Netrek days came to an abrupt end when we "invited" a local university crew to the office to have an all out "Netrek" fest. Late that night we snuck a bunch into the office, and preceeded to beat the pants off of them. Lucky for us the next day when management found out about it we all weren't fired.

Death of Trek....

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just a 'lack of players' that has lead to
netrek's demise. The gameplay has become
monotonous and static -- all the remaining
servers have exactly the same gameplay.
Boring.......

(BTW -- just a year or two ago, somebody
launched a netrek server with different play
rules and robot players. It was fun. It soon
became the most popular netrek server and
the number of players was increasing for the
first time in ages. The 'old-guard' netrek
players saw this as a threat. They got so
upset by it, that one of them launched some
kind of computer attacks against it, and it was
closed. Facists. Netrek pretty much deserves
to die at this point. Long live Half-life....)