Starsiege: Tribes

Starsiege: Tribes is an online first person shooter created by the now defunct Dynamix, released on November 30, 1998.

Re-release
On April 9, 2004, Vivendi Universal announced that they would release Tribes and Tribes 2 for free on May 4, 2004 on a DVD-ROM with Computer Gaming World magazine and on FilePlanet.com. This was to promote the release of the upcoming sequel, Tribes: Vengeance. It can also be downloaded directly from Vivendi Universal's web-site. However, the installed version of the game is only patched to 1.8, not the most current version, 1.11. The patch can be found in varying locations online, including FilePlanet, though the patch program has been known to fail completely on certain systems. There also exists an unofficial "1.30 Last Hope" patch which makes the game compatibile with all 1.11 (and previous) servers, as well as special "Last Hope" servers which employ certain anti-cheat measures. Since the "patch" is simply a replacement of the Tribes executable it can be used in instances where the official patch fails.

Alvy Elna
Scott Youngblood, one of the level editors from Dynamix, created a tribute to his grandparents, who died during the development of Tribes. He put their names in the terrain of a game level called Broadside. On a hillside it says "Alvy Elna." (This is most easily seen while flying.) A picture of Alvy Elna on Broadside

Community support
Since the initial release of Tribes, and even more so since the closing of Dynamix, the many members of the community have made mods, maps, scripts, HUDs, new interfaces, and external programs to support the game and provide various other useful functions. Programs like Hudbot give Tribes support for 8/24/32-bit TGA textures, a dramatic improvement over the game's existing texture colour limit. (In the area of 128 colours per texture). LastHope patched Tribes against a cheat that allowed players to see other players through walls. Another program, Tribes Live! (no longer exists), provided players a way of supplementing Tribes with updates provided by the community. A Tribes Repack, containing an updated Tribes with various mods, has been released by phantom.

As the official master servers went down, members of the community have stepped up to replace them with their own master servers. These provide the same function, listing game servers to players, but must be configured manually by players and server hosts (although they are configured by default in the Tribes Repack).

System Requirements
(From the back of the original Tribes CD case)

WINDOWS 98/95/NT 4 with Service Pack 3 CD-ROM

Minimums:

Pentium 166, 32 MB RAM with 3D Graphics Accelerator

Pentium 200, 32 MB RAM without 3D Graphics Accelerator

Hardware Requirements: LAN Card or Minimum 28.8kps modem, 4X CD-ROM. 2D Graphics Card: DirectDraw compatible card (minimum SVGA 640x480@256 colors). 3D Graphics Card: 3Dfx Glide compatible 3D accelerator (recommended). Sound Support: DirectSound compatible sound card. Peripheral support: Mouse, keyboard.

Network support: Internet, TCP/IP, IPX.