Decwar

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The Decwar game, produced in the late 1970s, was one of the historic first "multiplayer" games, in which users would compete with each other on a computer. DECWAR was the first game to get exposure at multiple sites including corporations and many university campuses.

DECWAR was a sophisticated real time space battle game designed to be played by 1 to 18 players. It was written at the University of Texas at Austin. The game was originally based on a very limited, single job, single terminal, two player Star Trek type game known as WAR. This game came from the CDC-6600/6400 system at the University of Texas at Austin.

The game was rewritten, and then transferred to the PDP-10. In the transfer process, the game was renamed to DECWAR, largely re-designed, and almost entirely re-written, so that the current version bears little resemblance to the original. Almost all the commands were added once the game was on the PDP-10, as well as the basic concept of separate jobs controlling each ship, and most of the other features that make the game challenging, exciting, and enjoyable. The first version was installed on the PDP-10 in August 1978. After several revisions, the greatly enhanced and improved game, version 2.0, was finally installed in July 1979.

DECWAR was unique in that it used a command line for input. 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. 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.

Output for DECWAR was also elegant. Output could be either in long, medium or short format, so power users could get more information in a shorter amount of time. The output could be in absolute or relative format or both.

Each player commanded a ship. Each ship had several devices, including: warp engines, impulse engines, photon torpedoes, phaser banks, deflector shields, 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. Other objects in the 75 x 75 universe included: Federation and Empire ships, computer controlled Romulans, Federation and Empire bases, Federation and Empire planets and black holes.