Netrek Information Archive
(I've retired).
31 October 1994: the FTP site on gs69 has gone away. The AFS
version is being kept around as a service to the community, but is no
longer being updated. One of the mirror sites might take over as the
new official home.
This is an archive for information of interest to the Netrek community.
The original source was the andrew.games.xtrek bboard at CMU; later
items came from the
alt.games.xtrek newsgroup, and now the
rec.games.netrek newsgroup.
The archive was maintained by
Jonathan Hardwick.
The WAIS index was
maintained by spot@cs.cmu.edu.
Most of this page is just a listing of the archive contents.
If you're new to netrek, try jumping to the beginners section.
If you want to see where the information came from and other ways of
accessing it, jump to the information sources
section.
Contents
The information files are:
- ChangeLog
- Update history of the files
- README
- Plaintext version of this file
- README.html
- This file
- art-of-war
- The classic essay on war by Sun Tzu
- beginners
- Red Shirt's advice to beginners
- borgs
- Aka cyborgs - what they are, where you can get them
- bot-busting
- How to kill robots
- client-patches
- Correcting various infelicities in the standard client
- definitions
- The meanings of various game terms
- dogfighting
- Lance puts it all into one easy-to-read file
- enl
- The European Netrek League and mailing list
- frequent-suggestions
- Commonly-proposed changes to Netrek, and their faults
- game-facts
- An analysis of the rules and parameters of the game
- help-sheet
- A one-page summary of the game commands
- hints
- Huge collection of random game hints
- hockey
- How to play Netrek hockey
- humor
- Murphy goes to war, top-10 lists, deteriorata, and more
- maintainers
- Who is responsible for this outrage?
- nbr
- Current proposals for the Next Big Release of the client
- net-behaviour
- Find out what Netrek does to networks, and vice versa
- ogging
- What it is, how to do it, how to avoid it
- opening-screen
- A three-page summary of game commands and strategy
- personae
- Does Netrek bring out the schizophrenic in you?
- planet-taking
- Hints from Grey Elf, a master of the art
- playing-as
- How to play an Assault Ship, by Todd Williamson and Bert E.
- playing-bb
- How to play a Battleship, by Tom Holub
- playing-ca
- How to play a Cruiser, by Andrew Markiel
- playing-dd
- How to play a Destroyer, by Robert Hill
- playing-dd-alt
- Alternative guide to playing a Destroyer
- playing-sb
- How to play a Starbase, by Craig Boas
- playing-sc
- How to play a Scout, by Bert Enderton
- proverbs
- Nuggets of Netrek wisdom, by Bert Enderton
- rsa
- The new RSA-based blessing method, and how it works.
- server-patches
- What to apply if your server doesn't work
- server-secrets
- How to bring up a Netrek server
- ship-facts
- The capabilities of the various ship types
- ship-opinions
- One person's opinions of the different ships
- short-packets
- Definition of the UDP short packets
- strategy
- Common strategies used in INL games
- starbases
- How to play them and how NOT to play them
- udp
- Information on Andy McFadden's UDP client
- xtrek-vs-netrek
- A comparison of the two games, plus where to get xtrek
- xtrekrc-hints
- How to customize your display and keyboard mappings
- xtrekrc-sample
- Some sample .xtrekrc files
In the code subdirectory I've stuck the following
big chunks of code and/or text:
- 6x10italic.tar.gz
- X11 italic (actually, underlined) 6x10 font in pcf and bdf
- beef.readme
- Leonard Dicken's information borg
(beef.howto,
beef.shar.gz, and
beef.bitmaps.shar.gz)
- bitmaps.Iggy.README)
- Bitmaps to give Iggy his own ship type
(bitmaps.Iggy.h)
- bronco.final.tar.gz:
- Rerence Chang's last release of the Bronco server source
- ck_players.readme
- Program to list the players on a server, by Ivan Vazquez
(ck_players.tar.gz)
- recorder-patch
- Julian Ho's patch to let a client record a game
- scoredb.bronco.gz
- Bronco player database when Terence left
- scoredb.rwd4.gz
- Rwd4 player database when it went down
- ship-table.ps.gz
- Table of all the ship statistics; useful for quantitative
comparison, and fits on one printed page!
(also ship-table.dvi.gz)
- xtrekguide.ps.gz
- Player's guide for Xtrek, the granddaddy of Netrek.
Included for historical interest, and to stop people
hosing the Japanese site which is its other source...
(also xtrekguide.dvi.gz and
xtrekguide.tex.gz)
You should start by getting the Netrek FAQ, server list, and FTP sites list
from the rec.games.netrek
newsgroup. You should then read beginners,
opening-screen, and maybe
help-sheet.
This is more than enough to get you playing, and doesn't take long to read.
The contents of this archive are also mirrored by:
Before HTTP crushed WAIS under the weight of worse-is-better, this archive
used to be indexed
on the WAIS system.
It would give you indexed access to all the text in the
archive: you gave it a word, and it returned a list of all the articles
containing that word, sorted by score.
Now we have Google.
(:source
:version 3
:ip-address "128.2.206.11"
:ip-name "almond.srv.cs.cmu.edu"
:tcp-port 6000
:database-name "netrek-ftp"
:cost 0.00
:cost-unit :free
:maintainer "spot@cs.cmu.edu"
)
It is also available via AFS in
/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/jch/netrek/index.html.
If your site has AFS, your WWW client should already be using it to view
this file.
There was an informal competition to see who has AFS access over the
furthest physical distance.
The winner was Kristian Ejvind, in Stockholm, Sweden.
If you have neither AFS, WAIS, HTTP, nor FTP access, keep banging those rocks
together.
I will cheerfully ignore any flames, attributions or corrections,
because I've retired.
Spaceman Spiff. Last updated 31 July 1996