Decwar
Encyclopedia
DECWAR is a multiplayer computer game first written in 1978 at the University of Texas at Austin
for the PDP-10
. It was developed from an earlier two-player version, WAR, adding multi-terminal support for between one and eighteen players. WAR and DECWAR are essentially multiplayer versions of the classic Star Trek
game, but with added strategic elements. The game was later used, by scrubbing copyright notices and replacing them, as MegaWars on CompuServe
and Stellar Warrior on GEnie
. Both versions ran for years.
. In Star Trek, a single player would hunt around the galaxy looking for an invasion force of Klingon
warships, and return to a number of starbases to refit and repair. In WAR, the starbases were replaced by planets that either player could capture after attacking them, turning them "friendly". The game ended when one user captured all of the planets and destroyed his opponent's ship. The 6600 supported only one operating terminal, so the players had to take turns entering their commands.
During a port to the PDP-10, the game was more heavily modified and became DECWAR. The game was no longer run as a single instance, but instead as a number of programs (or "jobs"), one for each user, communicating through a shared memory
. This allowed the players to join or leave the game as they wished, the other players continuing to see the map as it was before. Another addition was a single computer-controlled Romulan
ship, who would be spawned into games with less than full players in order to give the humans someone to fight. When the roster filled with players (the number depended on the version) the Romulan would not be re-spawned after being killed.
Version 1.0 of DECWAR was released in August 1978. The University would send out copies on tape for the nominal fee of $50, and it soon appeared on PDP-10s around the world. The greatly updated 2.0 was released in July 1979, and another major version, 2.3, on 20 November 1981.
. He purchased a version in 1982 and turned it over to the programmers at Kesmai
, who wrote many of CompuServe's games. They found that the copyright said nothing about commercial uses, and quickly produced a new version that removed any potentially lawsuit-friendly names from the Star Trek universe with more generic versions.
The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players. Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR.
Kesmai also worked on an extensively updated version to be known as MegaWars II, the original retroactively becoming MegaWars I. Among other features, MegaWars II was able to run in a client–server mode and was intended to be used with graphical front-ends running on a variety of popular home computer
s. However, the imminent release of MegaWars III
ended these plans, and MegaWars II was abandoned.
In 1985 Louden left CompuServe to form GEnie
at General Electric
. Kesmai re-scrubbed the system for use on GEnie, producing Stellar Warrior. Like MegaWars, Stellar Warrior ran for years, and was finally killed when GEnie was shut down in 1999.
Players could join either the Federation or Klingon Empire, although the difference was purely cosmetic and each side had identical ships. In games where one team had too many players, new players would be forced onto the smaller team. When joining, the player was presented with a list of ships on each side that were not currently being played, and could re-enter the game in the same ship if they were killed. Each ship was equipped with warp and impulse engines, photon torpedoes, phasers, deflector shields, a computer, life support, sub-space radio, and a tractor beam. Each ship started with 5000 units of energy, 2500 units of shield strength, and 0 units of damage. If a ship receives 2500 points of damage it is destroyed, and a ship that loses all of its energy is likewise "dead". In addition to total damage for the ship as a whole, each hit would do damage to a part of the ship, which would be rendered inoperative if this reached 300 points.
Another change from Star Trek was that fully charged and operative shields would deflect torpedoes completely, whereas in the original they often overwhelmed the Klingon ships with a single shot. This forces the players to first reduce the enemy's shields with phaser fire before finishing them off with a torpedo. Players could also shoot at stars with their torpedoes, causing them to go nova and destroy any nearby ship.
The bases were the key strategic element of the game, allowing allied ships to be repaired and rearmed. The game ended when one team destroyed all of the opposing ships, bases, and captured their planets. Bases will fire on enemy ships within four sectors, and had massive phaser and shield power. Neutral planets were essentially small bases with a range of two sectors and less power. Bases and planets could be easily reduced by staying slightly outside their firing range; torpedoes, for instance, had a range of ten sectors.
Although, like Star Trek, each user interacted through a turn-based command line, the game as a whole was essentially real-time because any user could enter commands at any time and update the global game state. This gave the advantage to players who could interpret output and enter commands faster. To improve performance, DECWAR had three different levels of "detail" in commands and output, with the tersest mode condensing commands into a code-like format. Command structure was similar to the command structure of TOPS-10
, the operating system for the PDP-10; commands could be abbreviated to their most simple and unique form. DECWAR allowed the user to enter coordinates in absolute, relative or computed format (one position +/- another). Finally, commands could be stacked on a line, allowing a list of commands to be executed at once. If the user wanted, the last command line could be re-entered by simply pressing the escape key.
On May 27, 2011 the University of Texas published the source code of Decwar.
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
for the PDP-10
PDP-10
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...
. It was developed from an earlier two-player version, WAR, adding multi-terminal support for between one and eighteen players. WAR and DECWAR are essentially multiplayer versions of the classic Star Trek
Star Trek (text game)
Star Trek is a text-based computer game that puts the player in command of the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships...
game, but with added strategic elements. The game was later used, by scrubbing copyright notices and replacing them, as MegaWars on CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
and Stellar Warrior on GEnie
GEnie
GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
. Both versions ran for years.
Original versions
The original game that led to DECWAR was WAR, a two-player version of Star Trek for the CDC 6600CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
. In Star Trek, a single player would hunt around the galaxy looking for an invasion force of Klingon
Klingon
Klingons are a fictional warrior race in the Star Trek universe.Klingons are recurring villains in the 1960s television show Star Trek: The Original Series, and have appeared in all five spin-off series and eight feature films...
warships, and return to a number of starbases to refit and repair. In WAR, the starbases were replaced by planets that either player could capture after attacking them, turning them "friendly". The game ended when one user captured all of the planets and destroyed his opponent's ship. The 6600 supported only one operating terminal, so the players had to take turns entering their commands.
During a port to the PDP-10, the game was more heavily modified and became DECWAR. The game was no longer run as a single instance, but instead as a number of programs (or "jobs"), one for each user, communicating through a shared memory
Shared memory
In computing, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Depending on context, programs may run on a single processor or on multiple separate processors...
. This allowed the players to join or leave the game as they wished, the other players continuing to see the map as it was before. Another addition was a single computer-controlled Romulan
Romulan
The Romulans are a fictional alien race in the Star Trek universe. First appearing in the original Star Trek series in the 1966 episode "Balance of Terror", they have since made appearances in all the main later Star Trek series: The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager...
ship, who would be spawned into games with less than full players in order to give the humans someone to fight. When the roster filled with players (the number depended on the version) the Romulan would not be re-spawned after being killed.
Version 1.0 of DECWAR was released in August 1978. The University would send out copies on tape for the nominal fee of $50, and it soon appeared on PDP-10s around the world. The greatly updated 2.0 was released in July 1979, and another major version, 2.3, on 20 November 1981.
Commercial versions
One customer was Bill Louden, in charge of games at CompuServeCompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
. He purchased a version in 1982 and turned it over to the programmers at Kesmai
Kesmai
Kesmai was a pioneering game developer and online game publisher, founded in 1981 by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. The company was best known for the combat flight sim Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, one of the first graphical MMOGs, launched in 1987...
, who wrote many of CompuServe's games. They found that the copyright said nothing about commercial uses, and quickly produced a new version that removed any potentially lawsuit-friendly names from the Star Trek universe with more generic versions.
The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players. Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR.
Kesmai also worked on an extensively updated version to be known as MegaWars II, the original retroactively becoming MegaWars I. Among other features, MegaWars II was able to run in a client–server mode and was intended to be used with graphical front-ends running on a variety of popular home computer
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
s. However, the imminent release of MegaWars III
MegaWars III
MegaWars III was a massively multiplayer empire building game written by Kesmai and run continuously on CompuServe between 1984 and 1999. It was one of CompuServe's most popular games throughout its lifetime, and was only shut down because they switched to their web-based "CompuServe 2000"...
ended these plans, and MegaWars II was abandoned.
In 1985 Louden left CompuServe to form GEnie
GEnie
GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
at General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
. Kesmai re-scrubbed the system for use on GEnie, producing Stellar Warrior. Like MegaWars, Stellar Warrior ran for years, and was finally killed when GEnie was shut down in 1999.
Description
The basic aim of DECWAR was take control of a "universe" consisting of a 79 × 79 "sector" grid (in v2.3, it was smaller in earlier versions) containing a number of planets, bases and black holes. One change from the original Star Trek were the planets, which could be captured and fortified to create additional bases.Players could join either the Federation or Klingon Empire, although the difference was purely cosmetic and each side had identical ships. In games where one team had too many players, new players would be forced onto the smaller team. When joining, the player was presented with a list of ships on each side that were not currently being played, and could re-enter the game in the same ship if they were killed. Each ship was equipped with warp and impulse engines, photon torpedoes, phasers, deflector shields, a computer, life support, sub-space radio, and a tractor beam. Each ship started with 5000 units of energy, 2500 units of shield strength, and 0 units of damage. If a ship receives 2500 points of damage it is destroyed, and a ship that loses all of its energy is likewise "dead". In addition to total damage for the ship as a whole, each hit would do damage to a part of the ship, which would be rendered inoperative if this reached 300 points.
Another change from Star Trek was that fully charged and operative shields would deflect torpedoes completely, whereas in the original they often overwhelmed the Klingon ships with a single shot. This forces the players to first reduce the enemy's shields with phaser fire before finishing them off with a torpedo. Players could also shoot at stars with their torpedoes, causing them to go nova and destroy any nearby ship.
The bases were the key strategic element of the game, allowing allied ships to be repaired and rearmed. The game ended when one team destroyed all of the opposing ships, bases, and captured their planets. Bases will fire on enemy ships within four sectors, and had massive phaser and shield power. Neutral planets were essentially small bases with a range of two sectors and less power. Bases and planets could be easily reduced by staying slightly outside their firing range; torpedoes, for instance, had a range of ten sectors.
Although, like Star Trek, each user interacted through a turn-based command line, the game as a whole was essentially real-time because any user could enter commands at any time and update the global game state. This gave the advantage to players who could interpret output and enter commands faster. To improve performance, DECWAR had three different levels of "detail" in commands and output, with the tersest mode condensing commands into a code-like format. Command structure was similar to the command structure of TOPS-10
TOPS-10
The TOPS-10 System was a computer operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation for the PDP-10 mainframe computer launched in 1967...
, the operating system for the PDP-10; commands could be abbreviated to their most simple and unique form. DECWAR allowed the user to enter coordinates in absolute, relative or computed format (one position +/- another). Finally, commands could be stacked on a line, allowing a list of commands to be executed at once. If the user wanted, the last command line could be re-entered by simply pressing the escape key.
On May 27, 2011 the University of Texas published the source code of Decwar.