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

Netrek has had lots of influence and history.

[Unbeliever]

Wow. Netrek made it to the front page. Took long enough *grin*

Netrek has had quite a bit of history and influence on many. Not only has had a long history since Empire as listed in the above history link, it has had many of its programmers and players go on to bigger and brighter things.

For example, Kevin Smith, one of the 2 original writers of the modern netrek client now works at TiVo, and Dave Taylor (of id, Crack.com and now Transmeta) did a lot of borg writing.

Netrek has also been used as a model for other games. Most recent was when Quake was opened up and people were trying how to prevent cheaters. A few groups came to the Netrek community to ask about our "blessed client" models. And Netrek was even used as prior art to convice a stupid patent holder that they shouldn't pursue litigation. Dave Ahn and I (as current developers) consulted with the defendants on a case where somebody tried to patent client/server game communication with information hiding.

I've been playing Netrek since Summer of 1990. I discovered Xtank and Netrek at the same time, but Netrek had the staying power. Its a game with so many levels, from deep strategy, to mindless fun, all in the same session. Although I never got into Paradise or Chaos, I found ample time to waste on Bronco and Hockey.

There are 2 active leagues(INL, WNL), 1 draft league, and 2 leagues on hiatus (A hockey league and a Euro leage). Games usually have players from all around the world.

Its a fun game! You should all try! Just be patient enough to get over the initial learning curve. For more info go to www.netrek.org or rec.games.netrek.

Overview of Netrek

[mooredav]

After 5 years of playing Netrek, it is now my sole computer recreation. Netrek liberated me from any desire to play other video games such as Civilization, Warcraft II, etc.

In my opinion, the primary reason why Netrek hasn't grown in the past 5 years is simple: nobody has written a comprehensive tutorial to the game (a useful one that actually answers the correct questions). It could be easy to learn, but the casual newcomer will inevitably hit a learning roadblock. Consequently, everyone who plays now was introduced by a mentor.

The main activity during play is "visual planning". You look at a strategic map that overviews the positions of all players and planets. Then you surround and trap enemy ships. Or you set a screen for a friendly ship to pass through (much like basketball). Or you escort a fellow ship through enemy space. The best strategy depends on the particular circumstances of the situation. Unlike most computer games, it is never redundant.

The combat system rewards the first person to the action, so anticipation is crucial. The combat itself is minimalist, but fun. For example, there are tractors and pressors that push and pull ships in an equal and opposite reaction. Push your enemy into your teammate's torpedos, or pull a friend out of harm's way. Or push a friendly ship from behind to speed his progress.

Player's personalities are remarkably transparent. e.g. there are selfish players, and there are cooperative ones. The friendly players are the ones who win games.

Re:Overview of Netrek

[Rogerborg]

• It could be easy to learn, but the casual newcomer will inevitably hit a learning roadblock. Consequently, everyone who plays now was introduced by a mentor.

There's a whole pile of things wrong with Netrek now:

• Non-intuitive default keymap.
• Horribly complex .rc file (which turns Windoze users right off)
• No basic tutorial: there are plenty of FAQ's and strategy guides, but they're aimed at veterans and developes. There's no ten-point howtos for your first session.
• Abusive players.

This last one is what will kill Netrek. Cooperation and communication is core to the game, and one idiotic abusive player (no matter how good) is a liability. For example, I jumped into a pickup game a few months back. As Ensign Rogerborg, I made a point of reading the message board, watching the galactic, and detting like a bastard. One guy on my team picked armies, then flew around for close to ten minutes, screaming for help for most of it. He received escort after escort, but never made a drop. Eventually he went too far, screamed again, and cloaked. I came in (alone) at warp 9, saw an enemy ship firing torps near his cloaked position, and smacked it with a torp volley. The explosion took him out.

Can you guess the response? "fucking twink, he was out of fuel fuck off and get a clue"

It gets worse. When I questioned what I'd done wrong, he got more abusive and the rest of the team backed him up and told me to shut up and get a clue. None of them told me what "get a clue" meant, or what I'd done wrong.

Thing is, I hadn't done anything wrong. The ship was torping when I came on screen, so it wasn't out of fuel. The carrier was cloaked and moving at warp 1 or 2, so the situation was critical. I took out the enemy with a single torp load, which wasn't (granted) my intention, which had simply been to get his attention.

The reason that I knew all this was because I played Netrek for 5+ years, captained an ENL team for two, and wrote a fully featured RSA-busting borg. I know Netrek, and I know that when an Ensign receives abuse for reading the message board and being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing (with an unlucky result) then we can basically give it up and go and wait for Doom3. The good coop players are all playing FPS team games now; all Netrek has left are a (very few) old men and a bunch of arrogant children.

It's sad to acknowledge that a much loved game has died through neglect, but Netrek should really get its tombstone carved.

Incidentally, for those putting their faith in the RSA check, it's easy (not trivial, but easy) to get around. Compile a client, add the server socket.c code to it so that it opens a listening socket, forward all packets from the client and "server" sockets, and connect a blessed client to the "server" socket to perform the cluecheck for you. The trick is that the RSA response has the result of a "getpeername" encoded into it. There are plenty of ways to trick this. Hack your kernel, write a wsock32.dll that passes through everything except getpeername to the real dll, -assert your own .so under Solaris, or (d'oh) just change the FQDN name of your machine to match the server.

The RSA scheme was a good attempt. but the real strength of the netrek network architecture is information hiding. Even a near-robot client gives you very few benefits. Vector torps are practically a liability against clue players, and you need low lag to be able to use perfectly aimed phasers. The biggest benefits of a borg are info features (like watching army pickups and tracking carriers) and that's just replacing the clue that comes with experience. The netrek model of information hiding should be required reading for anyone writing a network game.

Re:Overview of Netrek

[Rogerborg]

• Problems with abuse are typically over-reported.

Way to miss the point. Your suggestion is to ignore the abuse and stick with it. Bzzzt, wrong. That attitude will kill Netrek stone dead. The learning curve is steep enough as it is; when nobody is willing to teach you, only to heap abuse on you, what exactly is your incentive to stay? In case you'd missed it, there are a lot of network games out there these days.

One big problem with Netrek is that new players can see that they're clueless. It's not like many FPSers or pickup map-based RTS's, where you can find twinks to play against, or you can convince yourself that you got unlucky or your opponent is cheating. With netrek, you feel overwhelmed. At that point, if someone heaps abuse on you, why on earth would you stay and discover what a great game it really is? Especially with the rest of your team just telling you to shut up and either play better or get lost.

If you don't believe me, try starting an Ensign (and playing like one) and asking questions in pickup. When I played back in the early-mid 90's, people would happily mentor ensigns in pickup. Now as soon as it hits T, everyone seems to go red mist, and either shouts at or just plain ignores newbies in favour of desparately scumming every last previous planet. Rest in peace, Netrek.

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