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Perhaps you should take a look at NetHack, if you're into adventure-type games. For a long while it was text-only but now it has non-animated graphical tiles. It is IMHO the most intricate, most entertaining, and most addictive game that I have ever played. It is still being updated (the current version is 3.3.1) but most updates have focused on adding more classes, more items, more text, and the like. The other Roguelikes (Angband, Moria, Adom, etc.) may be worth a look too.

Play nethack, or a similar open-source game. This is a game that in order to get good at, you'll need to spend time wading through the source. It's well written, and you can generally find the right piece of code using "grep". As you become more familiar with it, you can experiment making changes and enhancements to the game.

Oh, and you'll have fun playing a great game while you're at it :-)

Also, if you're interested in learning more about programming UNIX, I heartily recommend Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens. It takes you through just about every UNIX system call and explains not only what it does, but how it works. This is the sort of book you'll still be pulling off the shelf to reference years down the road.

The most important thing is to keep at it; read, tinker: learn.

The more you do, the more you'll learn, and the more you learn, the more you'll be able to do.

This just sounds like a text based game competition. Contrary to popular belief, text based games are alive and well.

The mud connector has a listing of over 1500 mu*s, which, to the uninformed, is a Multi-User Whatever, normally Dungeon/Domain, but has grown to include Mushes etc. In a mud, everything is text based, and multiuser is the norm. On mud I used to play on had around 100 people on it at a time at its most popular (around a year ago). For the serious, I recommend a good mud client, Zmud seems popular (windows and shareware though), but any telnet client will do.

Also, games like Nethack are still being maintained and expanded. Pure text (although a QT interface is out there), for single player, but Nethack will always be on the top of any gaming list for me due to the style of gameplay.

Ah, textbased. Sometimes (as in the case of many muds), it has the habit to be bad. In other cases (yah, nethack!) it can be the best gaming out there. Then again, blowing someone's head off, such as in quake or doom, is satisfying, and no mud will every match the visual appeal of 8 wolves chasing you, a single halfling, to the guards (a scene I've seen from Everquest).

Danny ("thinking of Maud, your mind turns in upon itself")

Exaxtly. My friends and I used to call the first Diablo 'Nethack 4.0'... Although, now that I scratched my D2 play disk, now I'm back to playing Nethack. By the way, I know it's been out for a while, but if you haven't checked out the latest version of Nethack, You really should. The gameplay has been improved drastically.

Well, personally, yes, I could get rid of windoze. I do all of my work in Linux.

There's only two uses for the copy of Win98SE I have on my machine: One is Pinnacle Studio, a video recording and editing program (I'll try to get Linux video capture with Broadcast2000 to work soon - xawtv already works =)

The other, of course, is games - something that Windows is actually good for. I don't play much games, though, and Nethack is available for Linux too... And today I had even less reasons to use Linux when I got new version of xconq - and I'm desperately waiting for the Linux port of Alpha Centauri =)

As I see it, there are two types of games out there-- those to make a profit, and those because the designer was having a bit of fun.

The problem is that companies are trying to get the most profit that they can. For a flight sim, they've got to get everything right, or some anal retentive bastard's going to bitch that the lever to control the landing gear's in the wrong place.

It's not so bad with fantasy games, where you can make up whatever you want, and well, that's just how it is. [which is why Halflife starts getting lame when you're on alien worlds -- it's so much cooler to see how well they got the human reactions and such]

Some games are fun in a more nostalgic way... I'll go back and play Quake once in a while, or Duke3d, when I'm in the FPS mood, but QuakeII....I don't think so. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a good game of C&C or WarcraftII. [Although, after playing it for so much, I guess I have to admit that AOE and AOK aren't bad games, either]

You still get people working on text based muds....not for the profit, but for the fun of it. [okay, and I know a few that are just there to be fascist bastards, but that's another story] People still work on NetHack. I think I remember seeing on slashdot a while back mentioning Trade Wars. Hell, there's even a sequel to Dark Castle coming out.

Good games are still out there, even if they're not coming from the companies who can afford the multi million dollar ad campaigns.

Why do we need a cheap knock-off like D2?

Instead of supporting Blizzard and their franchise, you could check out some great opensource projects that Blizzard basically repackaged, made real-time, added fancier graphics, and sold to Joe Consumer.

Rogue is the grandaddy of everything. Including Diablo. See where it all began.

Angband is my favorite Rogue-like. It has incredible depth, hundreds of monsters, and hundreds of magical items. #angband on Othernet usually has at least one developer in it.

There are also a number of Angband variants such as Zangband and Pernband. Zangband even includes a multitude of quests, for those who like a little story-line to their dungeon crawls. These can all be found at the Angband link above. Graphical Tcl versions of Angband also exist, for the graphics-needy.

Others include Nethack (a light-hearted, often humorous Rogue-like), ADOM , and Moria

So, instead of marching to your local EB, why not download one of these (I heartily recommend Angband) free games and save the 40$ that Diablo 2 would cost you? You could even contribute to the project, play with the source, or add your own monsters, items, and spells. Have fun!

FreeCiv, NiL, Pingus, XPilot, NetHack, Crystal Space, GFingerPoken, Koules, Liquid War, XConq, WorldForge, SpellCast. To name the tip of the iceberg; I don't have time to do this all day :)

Or, in other words: The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.

Cheers,
Daniel

Open source development is, by nature, a form of distributed work. It's rare that open source software would be written by only one person, and nobody else would ever contribute, unless of course the project is utterly useless. :)

Programming is a task very well suited for distributed processing; you can have clearly defined tasks (to the point of individual APIs) and overall functionality is usually split into components. Form and function aren't exactly tied together in programming - ugly code can accomplish the task just as well and coding style doesn't necessarily show up at all in the end product.

In game art, however, form and function are generally very close to each other. Suddenly consistency of style has great impact across the project as well as individual imaginations on what the product should look like, regardless of how good the sketches were. It's important to note here that you can't generally plan consistent art by verbal description only, and still your plans are limited to bits and pieces open for artistic interpretation. If you turn it into paint-by-numbers, where's the art?

This isn't to say that distributed art is impossible, just that it's more difficult to find good artists that would effectively contribute to an open source game project. Open source art today seems limited to skins for various UIs and gadgets, and it can be argued that most of them are not art at all.

As for open source games, Nethack is certainly one of the games I have spent a lot of time in my life playing. I've always known I have access to the source, but I've never looked. I could have always uncovered every bit of the game, but I chose not to. Why?

Simple - it's hard to keep enjoyment unspoiled if you see the source. This is why game development feels like actual work and not like playing around - most of the people who make games don't play their creations nearly enough. They would simply not enjoy a game they know everything about, unless they weren't actually defining the gameplay itself.

Here's where it gets interesting: if you manage to separate tool development (engine, content converters, editors, ...) from content development (gameplay, levels, story, ...) you have a solid platform for open source game development. Coders have fun coding, but ALSO playing through the content put together by some artistic and creative minds on the other side of the team. Obviously, the core game engine itself wouldn't have to be freeware or even open source, it could be a commercial product and you just create art, scripts and objects...

... and suddenly, with a small leap, we find ourselves in the game mod development community. It takes a small bit of imagination and a bigger bit of work to close this circle. Who says open source games have no future?

Jouni
--
Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

While waiting for a Linux port for Diablo II, which may or may not happen, you might want to take a look at the inspiration for Diablo: a game that IS available for Linux (both as binary and source code), is free, fairly stable in design and coding (DevTeam thinks of everything), and perhaps best of all ... PK-free!

And people thought the system requirements for Diablo II were un-demanding ... this game can (almost) practically run on a floppy! Save your 500+ MB of HD space for your MP3s and your CD-ROM for the music CDs you *gasp* actually buy/burn yourself!

NetHack 3.3.0 ... available at www.nethack.org

Oh yeah... now I can make that PSX port of NetHack.

Probably not too many worth mentioning...

I have seen a game of nethack played on the side of a building using an LCD projector... I suppose that you could play many games like that, but the guy playing this one (at night, at a University) was actually getting advice by passers-by...

1) Any roguelike. Angband seems to be my favorite
Amen, comrade. I firmly believe in NetHack's superiority, though. I love the game, and at the same time hate it because I can spend two hours playing and not notice the passage of time! It's so bloody addictive!
Behold, from the nethack site:
quote {
"Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself."
-- USENET posting, author unknown
}
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"

I guess this means that I can finally give up on porting nethack to my TI-89 calculator!

On the other hand, the PDA's handwriting recognition could mistake one of the single-letter commands for another, with disastrous results... (No, no! I said to 'z' the wand, not 'a'!!!)

-Hypr Geeque

P.S.: I actually was contemplating doing that... (I just discovered the game a week ago and boy is it addictive... I'm starting to dream in nethack!)

I wish I never found it year ago on the Amiga. Every couple of months I come back to it only to find it consumes more of my time than I shoudl let it. I WILL get that stupid Amulet if it's the last thing my character ever does! Oh, wait...

That's up to the devteam. Check http://www.nethack.org periodically or rec.games.roguelike.nethack for up-to-the-minute nethack info.