Trek, a Guildhall games applet

This game is inspired by the old text console game Trek. A buddy (Scott H) and I spent far too much time trying to beat it at the highest level. We did finally succeed, and accepted its parting challenge. To that end, we began writing our own version in UCSD Pascal. We got pretty far along, achieving a playable version before graduation intervened. We didn't have source, so we wrote everything from scratch. Over the years I've ported it to the Apple /// (also in UCSD Pascal), to Mac Pascal, to Mac in C++, and finally to C++ running in the Guildhall environment. Pretty much all that remains of our early efforts are the algorithms. Since it seems that the original source for the game is now available, I hope eventually to take a look at that and tune our algorithms to match the playability of the original, as it was rather fun.

In the meantime, here's the state of play.

The basic data structures are present and a first attempt at an interface is in place. The game retains its console driven form. I'm thinking there will be a user interface for every command element, but if that component of the ship is damaged, well, back to the console for manual tinkering. And I did have fun with using speech synthesis to enable a most sarcastic ship's computer.

Next Steps

Trek isn't a high priority, but from time to time I'll get one of the commands working.

• Complete ship movement and energy costs
• Implement phaser fire and enemy weapons

Notes

According to Wikipedia [Star Trek (1971 video game)], Trek has a long development history. It isn't clear which game Scott and I played around 1980 on the PDP-11. Perhaps I'll figure it out when I research the available materials.