Netrek Software Development
Netrek software is the result of years of contributions made by many individuals. If you are interested in being part of this grand tradition by helping with continued growth and development of Netrek software, read on for developer resources. We don't just need coders, by the way; we also need people to help with promotion, and with web page and doc editing.
General Info and Getting Involved
- The netrek-dev mailing list and the #netrek IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net are the main developer hangouts, including folks doing web pages and promotion.
- Notes are kept on the developer wiki.
- For source code, see the Developer Wiki source code control page for where to find source code for various Netrek programs.
- For binaries and maybe some source code, see the main download page, the full client list download page, the website files repository, and the old ftp archive.
Future Directions
- Multiple Roles,
Multiple Teams, Dynamic Environment: Autonomous Netrek Agents
This is a paper written by Marcus Huber and Tedd Hadley on AI agents. It was published in ACM's "Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 1997," pages 332-339. The article is available from the ACM Digital Library if you are a subscribed ACM member (or you can simply use CiteSeer). - Netrek
Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions (FOCS)
The same ideas get proposed over and over by people trying to enhance Netrek, and the same discussions come up again and again. The FOCS is an attempt to stem the flow by presenting old discussions and arguments against the ideas. It's a bit out of date; check the dev mailing list and wiki, and the netrek irc channel for an idea of what mods folks are up to now.
Archival Information
- Netrek
Game Design
1997 document describing the major Netrek design changes over the years. - Netrek
Server Secrets
(a bit outdated (1993), but interesting). An archive of little known facts, bugs or features of servers from yesteryear. - Also see the history section.
Projects
Current projects include:
- The Vanilla Server, game server for Bronco, INL, Hockey, Sturgeon, etc.
- The Metaserver
- The main windows client, Netrek XP 2009
- The main Macintosh client, MacTrek
- COW, the most advanced open source unix client
- netrek-client-pygame, a new client written in Python using the pygame library
- BRMH, a unix client with lots of ports available, including OS X
- TedTurner is a Paradise client for unix, including OS X. If anyone ever wanted to play Paradise on a Mac, dusting off this with a build against more current OS X might be nice.
- The Netrek Paradise server is the only game server not unified into the Vanilla server.
- Netrek XP Mod, a Windows client which formed the basis of XP 2006. It is expected that the 4.4.0.4 release from the spring of 2006 will be the final release.
- There were a bunch of developmental projects that formed the path from the unix clients to the Windows clients. These included a COW port to windows and Netrek:1999.
- trekhopd was written to allow Netrek play over TCP from behind a dual-homed firewall.
- pledit was written to edit player lists, but was obsoleted by LTD-style statistics.
- glTrek was a project to write a client in Java. It reached Alpha release in summer of 2003.
- JTrek was a project to write a client in Java. It reached Alpha release in Fall 1998.
-
Netrek: The
Next Generation, was a project by
Mats Olsson
to do a complete rewrite of Netrek in Java. Project died out in 1999.