looking for a program - last gasp questions

[Bob Smith]

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
>