Hmm... I use Gentoo too and am downloading the binary right now on my cable modem (peaked at 308KB/s).
The parent troll makes me think that someone probably should write an ebuild for this binary, but more importantly, they could incorporate bittorrent into the portage system. As the burdens on gentoo mirrors grows, perhaps it would be helpful to allow gentoo users to optionally donate a certain amount of bandwidth per day to the gentoo community via bit torrent uploading.
I was fortunate enough to get in on Planetside's beta. While sparse, I thought the dev's comments in the forums were somewhat informative and helpful.
However, the game itself lacked any depth. There were about 20 or so of us coming from Infantry, another (not good, IMO) SoE game, and by the release date we had had enough. We formed an outfit a month or so before release, had 50 members, a fairly active message board with 6 or so people on most of the time, and after release, exactly nobody bought the game that I'm aware of. There was 0 message traffic on our boards.
I'm glad they appeared to listen to the user feedback regarding a lattice system (is that still in the game?). However, the game seemed to lack any long term rewards. I am curious now, after it has been released, why do people keep playing? Do they go for battle rank or commander rank or continent lock or is there something more?
Infantry drove me absolutely insane because there seemed to be next to nil developer feedback, and the game (zone I played, at least) was stagnant.
Have you actually seen SCOX today? It went up $1 from yesterday, and now is still up around 5%.
I wonder how many people who buy SCOX think it will crash but are just trying to capitalize on everyone else seeing "ooh! SCO's report says they made a profit"
Well I don't know if you are serious, but I know there are still people out there who seem to think any kind of learning for fun or learning things not out of necessity seems incomprehensible. And learning alternate letters is hardly a straining task.
I think there was a story on slashdot recently about how information acquisition releases dopamine. I do think I am an info-junkie.
In my lectures, I see 50-100 other people that look as though they're half-passed-out. It has been said the brain can process 600 words per minute, while lecturers can only speak at 150 or so. So what if I am a little more ambitious with my free brain cycles than others who are wasting away in boredom?
People think I have no life or something, even if I tell them I learned this while multitasking with something else that is mundane. But I am just making more out of my time. If that qualifies me as an uberdork, so be it, but I have to question the standards of uberdorkiness.
Yeah, I know. But if you tell people you write in tengwar, they just go "whaat??" I have told people, and written them something, and then they say "oh, you write in elvish".
School lectures are boring. To keep myself awake, I tried writing with my left hand, writing upside down, upside down and backwards, or the same with my left hand. I memorized pi to 210 digits over a few days' lectures.
Then I met a girl (that's right, someone of the female persuasion) who writes all her notes in Tengwar. I liked the way the letters worked so I learned it and I was hooked.
So I bought a calligraphy pen and took it to all my classes. My notes for my entire 4th year of university classes are written in Tengwar. (With the exception of numbers and math/programming symbols...doing them would probably have caused me to fail from not being able to read my notes very quickly.) I found it to be a creative/artistic outlet in all my dry technical courses.
I'm not a Tolkein geek (never read the books), but now the girl is 2000 miles away, and when people find out I write in elvish, some say "you must have a lot of time on your hands" and think I'm some sort of uber dork (maybe they're reading this). C'est la vie I guess.
Why pick gzip over BZip2? BZip2 is patent-free, seems to have a significantly higher compression ratio, and libbzip2 is released under a BSD style license. AFAIK, libbzip2 is portable, (I'm using a port for WinCE).
Perhaps I am a cynic but I can't help wonder if you (or a typical American) would come post "The reason the American guy won was *luck*" if your guy had won.
(This came to my mind because I remember when Donovan Bailey beat Michael Johnson in some stupid 1 on 1 100m challenge, but what was really stupid was some American being interviewed saying "oh for sure Michael Johnson is the superior athlete and should have won". Granted, she did seem like a funny middle-aged woman who probably had no good reason to not have total blind belief in her heroes.)
I don't mean to flame or troll, but I'm just curious where the motivation of your statement comes from.
I agree that randomization would be a good idea for several reasons. But if it is rock-paper-scissors, would randomization really help? Perhaps it would allow adaptive intelligence to shine, which might be a good idea.
It so happens that the earth is stopping on its axis, although if you are sure you don't have a gas problem, I'm sure you would be welcome should you decide to immigrate to Canada, although it is good to have people like you south of the border too.
Sound as a brutal weapon
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The following article describes using sound as a lethal weapon in the form of an invention by Norris called "Hypersonic sound".
(This has been discussed on slashdot before, twice.)
Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times article:
"It gives you the equivalent of an intense migraine headache," said Elwood G. Norris, the company's chairman and inventor of the device. "It's just totally disabling."
Vicarious liability, for one reason. Your employer (in most jurisdictions) is at least partly responsible for your actions whilst you are in their employ, and on their time. It hardly seems fair for them to be expected to assume liability without having the capacity to mitigate it, does it?
IANAL, but why not just claim the individual, and not the company, is the one who is submitting the bugfix/improvement to the open source project, and not the company, so that liability rests upon the individual?
Right.... I don't understand this "hope" that these engineers have in hoping AI will just emerge. Isn't the point of engineering to know that what you are doing is going to work?
Seems to me this is the current overall strategy for the described and many other projects:
1. Give robots algorithms to calculate the causal relationships between its actions and sensory input. 2.... 3. "Hello, Mr. Anderson."
If anything, I think they have seen the Matrix too many times. True (or humanlike) AI often seems to have a mystic aura as something that will just pop up some day.
From my humble studies of artificial neural nets, engineering, and psychology, I don't think we will see human-like AI until we make the leap of discovering principles of fundamental brain dynamics and can begin to construct artificial minds as dynamical (living) cognitive systems (with emotion and self-awareness), and not just neural nets that do pattern recognition computations.
I am currently actively studying this, using newly developing principles of psychology, personality (my primary expertise), parallel emotional dynamics, and cognition-emotion relationships to determine the computational fundamentals of human's higher concept-handling thought processes.
I am excited at what I am discovering, and am looking for people or groups who are studying this line of thinking as well. I have looked at many projects, but it can be difficult to find any that aren't just fancy low-level neural net process subgroups. (Levy's virtual rat hippocampus looks promising.) If you are interested in this kind of thing, feel free to send me an email at ebchang @ yahoo . com.
If you are looking for a logical language, you may want to check out lojban, which "is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication."
Re:Not to be a troll here but...IN SOVIET RUSSIA
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
That does not compute. By those definitions, "United States of America" is actually short for "United States of United States of America" and so on.
Another reason your claim is brain-damaged, at least in a logical sense (not that language is or has to be logical): North America would then be a region that contains "America", which happens to contain a northern region that could be called North America, which is not the same as the first North America.
Perhaps you are saying they got the name of the country wrong, and that it should have been called "United States of the Americas"? I don't think so.
Face it, USA has more or less hijacked the name "America". If there had been another notable country in the Americas, such as say "Jean's Stagnant Tyrrany of America", perhaps the shortened "America" would be more contested and not have become accepted as a short form for USA.
America may not be one of the continents, but it is still a region, just like Eurasia is a region but not a continent.
But if you consult a dictionary, we are both right in that there are two different meanings of the word "America" in use today.
Regarding the Superbowl, I thought it was mostly pretty dull, despite being pretty high scoring, although I am biased towards Canada's more open and faster paced version of the game.
Where is the next-gen netrek game?
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 1
Oh the memories...I first played netrek in 1994, and have probably logged a few thousand CA hours since then, and a few hundred in other ships (yeah, I'm still a newbie).
Anyway, although I grew tired of netrek a year or so ago and moved on to more other things, I still haven't found a game that I like better, nor have fellow netrekkers been able to point me to any game they like better. The intense teamwork, strategy, tactics, and action that netrek offers is something I have yet to see anywhere else.
Someone said the dogfighting system is simple, but I think it is quite a delicate and complex masterpiece, especially when compared to alternative 2D space combat. It takes years to become a decent dogfighter - it is almost a virtual martial art. In no other game I've played do you have to aim and fire torps, phaser, dodge, pressor/tractor, change speed, det, keep track of enemy damage (to cripple) all at the same time. And even if you can do those 7 tricky things at once, you will help your team to get genocided if you do not also pay attention to the big picture and read messages, pay attention to the galactic map, and the strategic importance and status of 15 ships besides your own. I challenge anyone who thinks dogfighting is simple to see if they still think the same after 10 dogfights with me;)
As for netrek as a whole, it is more of a sport than a game.
When its players aren't being "old farts" or "arrogant children", netrek also has quite a strong social aspect to it. In many games, there are so many people that it is difficult to play with people and get to know them, or there is no real point in talking. But in a sport like netrek, you build trust among your teammates - you learn their escort style, their capabilities, their personality/loyalty to you and your team, and factor all of this into the many strategic decisions you have to make. (And then you must also know your enemy.)
There is also psychological warfare (which is easier to manipulate in pickup), and almost always a need for leaders who know how to direct and encourage the team.
Anyway... the question I want to pose is: why haven't the superior aspects of netrek's gameplay been recognized and incorporated into modern computer games? I have played games like Subspace, Infantry, Cosmic Rift, etc., and although they have thriving communities, I found them very lacking compared to netrek's gameplay. And in 3D space combat and FPS games, gameplay on the same level as netrek doesn't seem feasible. Has the advancement of 3D technology been so seductive that the majority gamemakers have lost sight of the fact that gameplay is the biggest factor in what makes games fun? Perhaps the problem is that the commercial interests who govern what games are made are posing the question 'what makes games sell?' Perhaps there has to be another serious grassroots game production that is by gamers, for gamers (who enjoy gameplay), as opposed to the masses of casual/unintelligent gamers who are just looking for a cool even if mindless way to waste time.
For about 7 years now, about as long as I have known about netrek, I have thought about creating a modern and extensible successor to netrek. Although the developer base for netrek has largely seemed to have grown up and moved on, I believe that there is a younger untapped volunteer coding/development talent out there that would be willing to revamp netrek for the 21st century. I have seen and been a part of other large scale projects that accomplished some really substantial things. I think the biggest root cause of netrek's dwindling health is a lack of enthusiasm among netrek server/client developers and especially would-be developers.
I have recently begun some initial technical design and coding on a new endeavour, and I am curious whether there are any serious gameplay loving gamers out there who have seen the light in netrek and also have something to offer to a for-real development project. I'm not talking about a interactive tutorial, hacking the client to make it look pretty, or providing a better netrekrc file. Nor am I talking about making a 3D version of netrek in visual basic or a 'learning how to program in C++' experiment. I'm talking about a new and committed professional but grassroots movement with new momentum to create a modern bronco netrek based upon a highly extensible and maintainable client/server framework.
In 4-12 months or so I intend to formally launch a new project to take on this endeavour. If anyone thinks they may be interested in being a part of such a project (especially visionary gameplay designers and architectural design experts at this point) or wants to be kept informed of the project's development, should it get off the ground, feel free to drop me a note at mawen@thirsk.yi.org.
I don't think that's necessarily a stupid comment. Locale can be important for the psychological considerations that influence decisions. People often take pride in their home and associate with the large companies around them. If you're next door to the giant Microsoft, it may seem safer and perhaps more patriotic than to go with some little new guy out of Finland that you know nothing about except FUD. The company would probably be much more open to Linux if it was located in Finland, for example.
Having said that... Never underestimate the power of the Dark Side of the Force.
I'm under 20, part of the "flash and trash" generation, but I strongly believe in gameplay over graphics.
I have been playing a game called netrek for about 6 years now, and I still have yet to come across anything better.
Netrek is something like 16 years old, with roots back to Empire (which is even older), but it is still by far the best game I have ever played. You pretty much need 1024x768, but I was happily playing for several years with a 4 or 5 color client (prettier ones do exist).
It's not just a game, it's a sport. It's an art in that it takes years to master. These are two things I have not been able to say about any other game.
Description of netrek ripped from FAQ:
Netrek is a 16-player two-dimensional graphical real-time battle simulation with a Star Trek theme. A game is divided into two teams of 8 players (or fewer), who dogfight each other and attempt to conquer each other's planets.
Netrek is the probably the first video game which can accurately be described as a "sport." It has more in common with basketball than with arcade games or Quake. Its vast and expanding array of tactics and strategies allows for many different play styles; the best players are the ones who think fastest, not necessarily the ones who twitch most effectively. It can be enjoyed as a twitch game, since the dogfighting system is extremely robust, but the things that really set Netrek apart from other video games are the team and strategic aspects. Team play is dynamic and varied, with roles constantly changing as the game state changes. Strategic play is explored in organized league games; after 6+ years of league play, strategies are still being invented and refined.
One reason it is such a masterpiece is that it was built and fine tuned by gamers for gamers, and not driven by the desire to soak $$$ from a mass-market (10-15 y.o. flash and trash goobers). Netrek demands a lot of intelligence, skill, and attention span - things that not just everyone has a lot of, and therefore doesn't make a lot of money.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... I use Gentoo too and am downloading the binary right now on my cable modem (peaked at 308KB/s).
The parent troll makes me think that someone probably should write an ebuild for this binary, but more importantly, they could incorporate bittorrent into the portage system. As the burdens on gentoo mirrors grows, perhaps it would be helpful to allow gentoo users to optionally donate a certain amount of bandwidth per day to the gentoo community via bit torrent uploading.
I was fortunate enough to get in on Planetside's beta. While sparse, I thought the dev's comments in the forums were somewhat informative and helpful.
However, the game itself lacked any depth. There were about 20 or so of us coming from Infantry, another (not good, IMO) SoE game, and by the release date we had had enough. We formed an outfit a month or so before release, had 50 members, a fairly active message board with 6 or so people on most of the time, and after release, exactly nobody bought the game that I'm aware of. There was 0 message traffic on our boards.
I'm glad they appeared to listen to the user feedback regarding a lattice system (is that still in the game?). However, the game seemed to lack any long term rewards. I am curious now, after it has been released, why do people keep playing? Do they go for battle rank or commander rank or continent lock or is there something more?
Infantry drove me absolutely insane because there seemed to be next to nil developer feedback, and the game (zone I played, at least) was stagnant.
....Right, because when the power is out, those power lines sure generate a lot of interference.
Have you actually seen SCOX today? It went up $1 from yesterday, and now is still up around 5%.
I wonder how many people who buy SCOX think it will crash but are just trying to capitalize on everyone else seeing "ooh! SCO's report says they made a profit"
Well I don't know if you are serious, but I know there are still people out there who seem to think any kind of learning for fun or learning things not out of necessity seems incomprehensible. And learning alternate letters is hardly a straining task.
I think there was a story on slashdot recently about how information acquisition releases dopamine. I do think I am an info-junkie.
Well we were never serious candidates for each other. Makes my geek story sound good though, no?
Well you are certainly entitled to your opinion.
In my lectures, I see 50-100 other people that look as though they're half-passed-out. It has been said the brain can process 600 words per minute, while lecturers can only speak at 150 or so. So what if I am a little more ambitious with my free brain cycles than others who are wasting away in boredom?
People think I have no life or something, even if I tell them I learned this while multitasking with something else that is mundane. But I am just making more out of my time. If that qualifies me as an uberdork, so be it, but I have to question the standards of uberdorkiness.
Yeah, I know. But if you tell people you write in tengwar, they just go "whaat??" I have told people, and written them something, and then they say "oh, you write in elvish".
School lectures are boring. To keep myself awake, I tried writing with my left hand, writing upside down, upside down and backwards, or the same with my left hand. I memorized pi to 210 digits over a few days' lectures.
Then I met a girl (that's right, someone of the female persuasion) who writes all her notes in Tengwar. I liked the way the letters worked so I learned it and I was hooked.
So I bought a calligraphy pen and took it to all my classes. My notes for my entire 4th year of university classes are written in Tengwar. (With the exception of numbers and math/programming symbols...doing them would probably have caused me to fail from not being able to read my notes very quickly.) I found it to be a creative/artistic outlet in all my dry technical courses.
I'm not a Tolkein geek (never read the books), but now the girl is 2000 miles away, and when people find out I write in elvish, some say "you must have a lot of time on your hands" and think I'm some sort of uber dork (maybe they're reading this). C'est la vie I guess.
Why pick gzip over BZip2? BZip2 is patent-free, seems to have a significantly higher compression ratio, and libbzip2 is released under a BSD style license. AFAIK, libbzip2 is portable, (I'm using a port for WinCE).
Am I missing something?
If you can get around this by using a massive switch statement, what's the point of this limitation?
Perhaps I am a cynic but I can't help wonder if you (or a typical American) would come post "The reason the American guy won was *luck*" if your guy had won.
(This came to my mind because I remember when Donovan Bailey beat Michael Johnson in some stupid 1 on 1 100m challenge, but what was really stupid was some American being interviewed saying "oh for sure Michael Johnson is the superior athlete and should have won". Granted, she did seem like a funny middle-aged woman who probably had no good reason to not have total blind belief in her heroes.)
I don't mean to flame or troll, but I'm just curious where the motivation of your statement comes from.
I agree that randomization would be a good idea for several reasons. But if it is rock-paper-scissors, would randomization really help? Perhaps it would allow adaptive intelligence to shine, which might be a good idea.
Truly remarkable!
It so happens that the earth is stopping on its axis, although if you are sure you don't have a gas problem, I'm sure you would be welcome should you decide to immigrate to Canada, although it is good to have people like you south of the border too.
The following article describes using sound as a lethal weapon in the form of an invention by Norris called "Hypersonic sound".
(This has been discussed on slashdot before, twice.)
Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times article: "It gives you the equivalent of an intense migraine headache," said Elwood G. Norris, the company's chairman and inventor of the device. "It's just totally disabling."
IANAL, but why not just claim the individual, and not the company, is the one who is submitting the bugfix/improvement to the open source project, and not the company, so that liability rests upon the individual?
..and get sued under the DMCA.
Perfect!
Right....
...
I don't understand this "hope" that these engineers have in hoping AI will just emerge. Isn't the point of engineering to know that what you are doing is going to work?
Seems to me this is the current overall strategy for the described and many other projects:
1. Give robots algorithms to calculate the causal relationships between its actions and sensory input.
2.
3. "Hello, Mr. Anderson."
If anything, I think they have seen the Matrix too many times. True (or humanlike) AI often seems to have a mystic aura as something that will just pop up some day.
From my humble studies of artificial neural nets, engineering, and psychology, I don't think we will see human-like AI until we make the leap of discovering principles of fundamental brain dynamics and can begin to construct artificial minds as dynamical (living) cognitive systems (with emotion and self-awareness), and not just neural nets that do pattern recognition computations.
I am currently actively studying this, using newly developing principles of psychology, personality (my primary expertise), parallel emotional dynamics, and cognition-emotion relationships to determine the computational fundamentals of human's higher concept-handling thought processes.
I am excited at what I am discovering, and am looking for people or groups who are studying this line of thinking as well. I have looked at many projects, but it can be difficult to find any that aren't just fancy low-level neural net process subgroups. (Levy's virtual rat hippocampus looks promising.) If you are interested in this kind of thing, feel free to send me an email at ebchang @ yahoo . com.
If you are looking for a logical language, you may want to check out lojban, which "is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication."
That does not compute. By those definitions, "United States of America" is actually short for "United States of United States of America" and so on.
Another reason your claim is brain-damaged, at least in a logical sense (not that language is or has to be logical):
North America would then be a region that contains "America", which happens to contain a northern region that could be called North America, which is not the same as the first North America.
Perhaps you are saying they got the name of the country wrong, and that it should have been called "United States of the Americas"? I don't think so.
Face it, USA has more or less hijacked the name "America".
If there had been another notable country in the Americas, such as say "Jean's Stagnant Tyrrany of America", perhaps the shortened "America" would be more contested and not have become accepted as a short form for USA.
America may not be one of the continents, but it is still a region, just like Eurasia is a region but not a continent.
But if you consult a dictionary, we are both right in that there are two different meanings of the word "America" in use today.
Regarding the Superbowl, I thought it was mostly pretty dull, despite being pretty high scoring, although I am biased towards Canada's more open and faster paced version of the game.
Dude, I think someone slashdotted your brain
Oh the memories...I first played netrek in 1994, and have probably logged a few thousand CA hours since then, and a few hundred in other ships (yeah, I'm still a newbie).
;)
Anyway, although I grew tired of netrek a year or so ago and moved on to more other things, I still haven't found a game that I like better, nor have fellow netrekkers been able to point me to any game they like better. The intense teamwork, strategy, tactics, and action that netrek offers is something I have yet to see anywhere else.
Someone said the dogfighting system is simple, but I think it is quite a delicate and complex masterpiece, especially when compared to alternative 2D space combat. It takes years to become a decent dogfighter - it is almost a virtual martial art. In no other game I've played do you have to aim and fire torps, phaser, dodge, pressor/tractor, change speed, det, keep track of enemy damage (to cripple) all at the same time. And even if you can do those 7 tricky things at once, you will help your team to get genocided if you do not also pay attention to the big picture and read messages, pay attention to the galactic map, and the strategic importance and status of 15 ships besides your own.
I challenge anyone who thinks dogfighting is simple to see if they still think the same after 10 dogfights with me
As for netrek as a whole, it is more of a sport than a game.
When its players aren't being "old farts" or "arrogant children", netrek also has quite a strong social aspect to it. In many games, there are so many people that it is difficult to play with people and get to know them, or there is no real point in talking. But in a sport like netrek, you build trust among your teammates - you learn their escort style, their capabilities, their personality/loyalty to you and your team, and factor all of this into the many strategic decisions you have to make. (And then you must also know your enemy.)
There is also psychological warfare (which is easier to manipulate in pickup), and almost always a need for leaders who know how to direct and encourage the team.
Anyway... the question I want to pose is: why haven't the superior aspects of netrek's gameplay been recognized and incorporated into modern computer games? I have played games like Subspace, Infantry, Cosmic Rift, etc., and although they have thriving communities, I found them very lacking compared to netrek's gameplay. And in 3D space combat and FPS games, gameplay on the same level as netrek doesn't seem feasible. Has the advancement of 3D technology been so seductive that the majority gamemakers have lost sight of the fact that gameplay is the biggest factor in what makes games fun? Perhaps the problem is that the commercial interests who govern what games are made are posing the question 'what makes games sell?' Perhaps there has to be another serious grassroots game production that is by gamers, for gamers (who enjoy gameplay), as opposed to the masses of casual/unintelligent gamers who are just looking for a cool even if mindless way to waste time.
For about 7 years now, about as long as I have known about netrek, I have thought about creating a modern and extensible successor to netrek. Although the developer base for netrek has largely seemed to have grown up and moved on, I believe that there is a younger untapped volunteer coding/development talent out there that would be willing to revamp netrek for the 21st century. I have seen and been a part of other large scale projects that accomplished some really substantial things. I think the biggest root cause of netrek's dwindling health is a lack of enthusiasm among netrek server/client developers and especially would-be developers.
I have recently begun some initial technical design and coding on a new endeavour, and I am curious whether there are any serious gameplay loving gamers out there who have seen the light in netrek and also have something to offer to a for-real development project. I'm not talking about a interactive tutorial, hacking the client to make it look pretty, or providing a better netrekrc file. Nor am I talking about making a 3D version of netrek in visual basic or a 'learning how to program in C++' experiment. I'm talking about a new and committed professional but grassroots movement with new momentum to create a modern bronco netrek based upon a highly extensible and maintainable client/server framework.
In 4-12 months or so I intend to formally launch a new project to take on this endeavour. If anyone thinks they may be interested in being a part of such a project (especially visionary gameplay designers and architectural design experts at this point) or wants to be kept informed of the project's development, should it get off the ground, feel free to drop me a note at mawen@thirsk.yi.org.
Peace out,
Mahalalel - (aka jared, Hyperphase, -Classified-, Mifiq)
I don't think that's necessarily a stupid comment. Locale can be important for the psychological considerations that influence decisions. People often take pride in their home and associate with the large companies around them. If you're next door to the giant Microsoft, it may seem safer and perhaps more patriotic than to go with some little new guy out of Finland that you know nothing about except FUD. The company would probably be much more open to Linux if it was located in Finland, for example.
Having said that... Never underestimate the power of the Dark Side of the Force.
...In other news, Slashdot proofreader their fires.
I have been playing a game called netrek for about 6 years now, and I still have yet to come across anything better.
Netrek is something like 16 years old, with roots back to Empire (which is even older), but it is still by far the best game I have ever played. You pretty much need 1024x768, but I was happily playing for several years with a 4 or 5 color client (prettier ones do exist).
It's not just a game, it's a sport. It's an art in that it takes years to master. These are two things I have not been able to say about any other game.
Description of netrek ripped from FAQ: Netrek is a 16-player two-dimensional graphical real-time battle simulation with a Star Trek theme. A game is divided into two teams of 8 players (or fewer), who dogfight each other and attempt to conquer each other's planets.
Netrek is the probably the first video game which can accurately be described as a "sport." It has more in common with basketball than with arcade games or Quake. Its vast and expanding array of tactics and strategies allows for many different play styles; the best players are the ones who think fastest, not necessarily the ones who twitch most effectively. It can be enjoyed as a twitch game, since the dogfighting system is extremely robust, but the things that really set Netrek apart from other video games are the team and strategic aspects. Team play is dynamic and varied, with roles constantly changing as the game state changes. Strategic play is explored in organized league games; after 6+ years of league play, strategies are still being invented and refined.
--
Since it's free, you can check it out at this URL: http://www.netrek.org
One reason it is such a masterpiece is that it was built and fine tuned by gamers for gamers, and not driven by the desire to soak $$$ from a mass-market (10-15 y.o. flash and trash goobers). Netrek demands a lot of intelligence, skill, and attention span - things that not just everyone has a lot of, and therefore doesn't make a lot of money.
Mawen