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 at 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