are you thinking of conquest? https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest
conquest Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres. I spent incredible amounts of time playing this game with my friends in the terminal labs at college, and when I actually had a multi-user system running at home (Unixware) I decided to try and translate/port the code to C in Unix. This was in the early to mid 1990's. Of course, over the years many things have changed. Today, Conquest is a true client/server game. The client uses freeglut, SDL 2.0 (for sound) and OpenGL. It uses C++11 to build, though for now it's "C software with some C++ containers and constructs". The curses client is no longer provided. On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 12:00 PM Dr Iain Maoileoin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > Not star-trek.... > > I am trying to track down the source of a unix game ..... > > Years and years ago - 1980s - I was in the Computing Science Department > at Strathclyde Uni. and we had a bunch of BSD4 systems running on VAXen. > > I have memory of - but have never located - a curses based 24 x 80 > display - multi-user "space-war" game that allowed you to navigate > around a 3D universe with the 24 x 80 giving you a full screen view of > the universe.. > > In the game you could > > * hunt the universe for aliens (like "shankers" I cant remember the > others), > * other players - you saw them as they saw you > > you could also team up with other players to have more firepower and > call for help using a 1-line on screen chat/broadcast system, > there were planet(s) scattered about - that you could hide behind. > > The students and I modified the program with some "special features". I > cant remember if the name of program was changed too ;-( > > Anyway we knew the game as "search", it was written in C - it was a good > test of serial output capability of the VAXen - it was also a great way > to teach students about the VI keys - since hjkl worked as expected for > movement (at least that was out excuse to the prof when caught playing > the game during the day). > > From my poor description can anybody tie down what I am looking for? > > Appreciated > > Iain >