NASA may be cutting back, but don’t let that stop you from celestial crusading. In the multi-player space combat game Conquest, players on four teams – Federation, Orion, Romulan, and Klingon – fly around in a ship, conquer planets, and fight other players.
Conquest was originally written by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres in a language called RATFOR (RATional FORtran) for the VAX/VMS platform in 1983-84 timeframe. The original source code was distributed with a collection of free and open source software on 9-track tapes by DECUS, and licensed with an MIT-like license.
Jon Trulson came across Conquest a few years later in college, where he found it running on the academic computing center’s VAX-11/780. He spent so much time playing it over serial terminals with his buddies in the college’s computer labs that, after he graduated and began running Unixware (SVR4.2) at home, he rewrote the game in C for Unix systems. By 1996 he had it ready to play with a couple of friends. He had to set up two modems on his system for his friends to log in to his machine, because he had no home Internet access yet.
Eventually Trulson rewrote parts of the game to act as a client-server application that could be played over the Internet. He added an OpenGL client, then sound, plus myriad other enhancements over the last 16 years. A few years ago he move the code from his home web server to SourceForge.net to take advantage of the source code repository and file distribution network.
Trulson says the next major revision of Conquest will use a new network protocol that corrects some deficiencies, along with a general reworking of the networking architecture. “I’d also love to redo the Federation, Klingon, and Romulan ship textures the way I did the new Orion ship textures – rendering them as models in Blender, lighting them, and then using that to create the ship’s textures. Blue sky, I’d love to eventually make it a full 3-D simulator (but not a flight simulator-type game) using real models, lighting, and 6-DOF, rather than texture-mapped images on a 2-D plane as it is now.”
If you’d like to help with any of tasks, you can join the project’s mailing list or send Trulson patches directly.