Slashdot Mirror

http://www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=1 TomeNET is a multiplayer fantasy dungeon exploration game based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a game that emphasizes intricate, challenging, and varied gameplay over graphics. Hundreds of different monsters in randomly-generated, unpredictable dungeons will strive to slay you by various means, and you counter - if you survive - by developing the skills of your choice and wielding mighty artifacts. TomeNET was originally based on Mangband 0.7.0, and it is now the leading multiplayer Angband variant! The current server is TomeNET.net, select it when the client asks you which server you want to use. TomeNET was formely known was PernMangband, but the name was changed due to copyright issues.

TOME is a very good game as well, if you can handle totally keyboard interfaces. It is similar to nethack, but has more of the things you'd expect from a typical modern RPG. It has a (very dated) graphics mode or text. Only problem is probably the difficulty, you'll die a lot first starting out. Enable the cheat death option until you get the hang of it; it'll make the game much more fun.

I know it's been mentioned before, but here are the actual links to the game and the literally hundreds of variants.

A couple of notable features are the AI is very good and the game has the only truly fully random number generator in it that I know of, so every game really is unique and odd things can occasionally happen.

My son plays it and has been known to hit the screen in frustration. :) Not bad for a game that will run on most any machine out there. There are also versions that run as a self-playing screen saver. Quite possibly the most interesting screen saver that I know of.

http://www.thangorodrim.net/
Older files, but then again, not much has been changed in the last few years, either.

http://www.zangband.org/
The most popular variant out there that I know of.

http://www.simugraph.com/simutrans/iso_angband/download.html
3D isomorphic version.

http://rephial.org/
This was mentioned before. Get the newer version here, though you likely will have to compile it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToME_(video_game)
http://www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0
The most recent surviving variant. Well worth your time to read these pages and ask around on the forums.

Personally, I love both Nethack and Angband. Why limit yourself to just one? ADOM deserves mention here, too, as do the *band variants (ToME, ZAngband & Enteroband are all personal *band variant favorites).

There's no reason you can't play them all. Some, like ADOM, are very well-developed. It has the most 'plot' of them all, IMHO. But I wouldn't want to be limited to playing just one of them!

So far, I've beaten everything except Angband (unless you count watching that Borg winner, but the Angband Borg is another story, and a very cool bit of AI!)

I linked all those variants up for you because I want to encourage people to play these games. And if you're stuck, I like to read spoilers. Some people help that, but they REALLY help you appreciate the depth of the games, IMHO. If you don't like that, though, don't read them. But there are lots of crazy things about what resistances you need, or what gear is important, or even what to wish for that are really hard to figure out. I mean, how many would notice that herbs grow in a pattern according to Conway's game of Life? That's important if you want to farm them (what did you think farmers were good at, other than polearms?).

Anyhow, these are rich & fun games that shouldn't be ignored just because you think text based interfaces are too retro. Good times, all around :)

Very true, an I can't believe your comment was the first I read here that said that. Levels are a _good_ thing for most games, be they direct or contrived. I will not ever generally save in the middle of a firefight in a FPS or other game, because I'm playing it right now, and it's a dumb time to save. No one wants a game that is 100% action throughout for 24 hours plus (I think). Levels are also analogous to time dependent events in lots of games - it's harder to describe World War II if the player has to play through 6 years of a game (less if you're American obviously ;))

I made a similar point about this a while ago - Why do console titles always place save points immediately prior to dangerous sections? The obvious reason is that people can save and reload and try again, and don't have to worry about dying. In game characters dying is par for the course nowadays - people expect to die loads of times. I personally think that games haven't got easier (I think games have generally got a lot tougher), but games have introduced save/reload as a required feature.

I also personally _love_ Angband and its variants. My favourite two are Zangband and TOME

You should at least be able to get to the castle (killed by a drawbridge lately?) often. Although, sadly, I often don't make it through the gnomish mines. Once I make it through there, i'm usually in for a good long game.

My favorite character is a valkyrie. Gauntlets of Power + Mjollnir == serious ass kicking.

Although I don't play Nethack anymore. I'm a total ToME convert.

-matthew

I think the next evolution of Rogue-like games is the MMORPG. You can quote me on this: we will see a Rogue-like MMORPG before the decade is done. Not a MUD, mind you, a real Rogue/NetHack-ish MMORPG, possibly with PvP. Take that, WoW!

There's an isometric graphical version out there on the *almost* latest edition.

I've been playing NetHack since the late 80's (1988 to be exact) and still have it installed on several computers (including the PocketPC version for my phone). It is a great time waster that has had me hooked for almost 20 years.

This is great news! First NetHack for the 770, and now this! What else could a person need?

Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!

Consider the following points:

* I think that a lot of people that want to write games are younger folks -- the idea of writing a game is one of the things that I remember people doing in high school when they learned to code. These folks have less experience to draw on, and possibly a harder time with project management issues. If a project is your first, you have to make all your stumbles and do your learning on it...and so there are probably a lot of games out there that go unfinished. Also, a lot of these folks go off to or leave college, and it drastically affects their schedule.

* One of the largest motivators for open source is that a hacker is building something that *he can use*. Yes, peer approval and resume-building and a feeling of helping someone out or fighting against an objectionable closed-source company are all nice, but at the end of the day, there are a *lot* of (and really good) development tools written by open source folks, and few educational games for five-year-olds (yes, I know that there are some projects along those lines). Many, many games can be played through once or twice, and then the replay value fades. As this happens, the hacker can't enjoy using the software that he's writing, and his interest fades.

The open source games that have done well have one very noticable characteristic -- they all have extremely high replay value, much more so than almost any commercial games. People can and have played games like NetHack or ToME for far more hours than just about any commercial games. There are open source card games, and board games. Most open-source games have a randomized element, or are played against other players, so that they continue to be a challenge. I can think of almost zero plot-based open source games that have done well (text-based interactive fiction being a notable exception, and I think that this is more due to the large pool of potential IF authors and the reduced amount of content that must be produced). Plot-based games lose much of their charm after the first time through, so OSS folks can't really enjoy their own game.

* Artists aren't rich. Programmers are, by and large, currently in heavy demand. This means that they can get away with working shorter hours and making plenty of money. They have more potential free time to run out and simply give away on free games.

If you do graphics work, things are, as I understand it, more competitive. One (traditional media) artist that I know of has to work a number of jobs to make ends meet -- I'm sure that if she didn't have to take care of her expenses, she'd love to donate her time.

I've no idea where sound engineering work comes in.

* Game content is less fun than game code. This is a guess on my part, but if I wanted to do some graphics work, I think that I'd rather try out a bunch of my own ideas. It has to be much less fun to, say, draw fifty frames of some character to obtain smooth animation.

Hence, we have plenty of OSS game engines, but less free content.

* Game content is less interchangeable than game code. OSS projects generally have code contributions from many, many people, and are patched together by a maintainer. People lose interest or have increased time demands and stop working on the project, and other people become interested or have a use for the code and start contributing patches. This works well for code. The user doesn't know how many people have worked on the code, because the coders don't have a user-visible style. I don't know whether Joe Hacker has a clever strategy for traversing linked lists when I use software. As long as my softwar

Or, more recently I've been playing ToME, a very addictive roguelike.

Additionally, I'd like to recommend a modern version of Elite, Oolite (for Mac/Linux/Win).

Try TomeNET, a multiplayer variant of ToME.

If you take a look a TomeNet, you get a MMORPG open engine. The sad thing is, you must go to the forums to learn anything about it because the website isn't updated often.

TomeNet is a roguelike multiplayer online rolepaying game based on Tolkien's work. The single player game is also getting closer to version 3.0, with a revamped game engine (open, with source code available). Great game and great community.

If you take a look a TomeNet, you get a MMORPG open engine. The sad thing is, you must go to the forums to learn anything about it because the website isn't updated often.

TomeNet is a roguelike multiplayer online rolepaying game based on Tolkien's work. The single player game is also getting closer to version 3.0, with a revamped game engine (open, with source code available). Great game and great community.

If you've played NetHack and its family of games, you're familiar with the gameplay -- objects can interact in many sophisticated ways, the game is fast and lighthearted, and death may often come randomly.

I generally like Angband and its family of games more than the NetHack family. Objects can interact in fewer ways, the game is generally more serious and takes longer, and the emphasis is on the incredibly vast array of items and powers that you can acquire (and must use cleverly to win the game). ToME is like Angband, but much, much worse.

I prefer Angband-derivatives. Try ToME.

Linux is no drop-in replacement for Windows. You cannot get the style of gaming that you get on Windows on Linux. Period.

On the other hand, if you're a Linux user looking for entertainment, there really is no shortage. On your base Gnome system, you've "sol", which is a scalable vector graphics Solitaire with about eight bazillion Solitaire games more than Microsoft's SOL.EXE. If you can live without graphics, many years of improvements and coding have made ToME one hell of a roguelike (with, admittedly, one hell of a learning curve). Diablo was derived from these things, but lost all the sophistication of the game.

If you love strategy, check out Battle for Wesnoth, which is a polished strategy game in the hex-wargame genre, or FreeCiv.

If you've never played interactive fiction, it's another text-based genre that's a lot of fun, and deserves a shot. Get yourself a copy of TADS and a copy of Babel, or if you want an adult game, try Ideal Highschool.

If you want a vertical shooter, check out Chromium B.S.U..

The multiplayer FPS that most people seem to be playing on Linux is a tank game called BZFlag.

If you're looking for more, try hitting up HappyPenguin and sorting by rating, which will pretty consistently give you decent stuff.

You can make some pretty consistent general statements about open-source games. They are usually uglier/less flashy than their closed-source equivalents, because there are few artists working on open-source projects (maybe art just happens to be such a competitive field that nobody can spare the time and fund a hobby with their day job -- dunno). They tend to have a much greater degree of replayability than commercial releases, since the developer wants to play it too -- you could easily play most open-source games for ten years and still continue to enjoy them. Many (though certainly not all) open-source games have a strategic element to them, or something that requires the application of the brain a bit, and less pure twitch. Very few open source games have cutscenes or cinematics (though they do exist). Some open source games have been around for many years, and have a very high degree of complexity and sophistication -- closed source games don't have a development cycle of this length, and the ability to keep adapting to trends in playing. With a few exceptions (I really like Battle for Wesnoth's music, for instance), sound and audio is limited and low-quality compared to commercial games. Globulation 2, for instance, is an RTS with essentially *no* audio.

It's a definite case of prior art. I'm not sure if it was introduced into roguelikes with ToME or not (could be in a later version of Angband than I've played), but there it is.

So because it is hard today, you support something that would make it even harder?

May I suggest ToME?

Time wasters... yup ! :-) But don't waste your money !! Take a look at the open source ToME: Troubles of Middle-Earth. It's based on Angband. It also has a Multiplayer Online version, but not as mature as the single player mode.

Time wasters... yup ! :-) But don't waste your money !! Take a look at the open source ToME: Troubles of Middle-Earth. It's based on Angband. It also has a Multiplayer Online version, but not as mature as the single player mode.

T.o.M.E is my favorite roguelike.

Try ToME. It's an Angband variant that features a world map with multiple dungeons, quests, a skill system, a huge set of available races and character classes (and variants thereof) and, best of all, a Lua interpreter so you can write new items, spells, and whole new variants.

Nethack is fun, but it gets dull just going down and down and down. In ToME you can recall to town (Bree, say, or Lothlorien), sell treasure you've found, buy some new equipment with the money, and return to the dungeon to continue exploring.

(No, I'm not one of the developers or anything. I just play it a lot.)

If you like Angband, you should try ToME. It has an actual world map (all of Middle Earth, not just that one-screen town), a skill system a bit more like D&D, and some other niceties.

ADOM... pffftthh. Try ToME!

A little off-topic... but worthed to /. readers, a mature Open Source game based on Tolkien's world: Troubles of Middle-Eearth. ToME has been improved over several years. It is based on the venerable Angband rogue-like game. There's a lot of Angband variants. There's even a Multiplayer ToME in development.

ToME is great for being very faithful and compliant to Tolkien's world. Ok, maybe it's not Middle-Earth Online, but it's free and honestly, this game is freaking addictive ! :-) Do not forget to set graphics "on"... even if they're not that good.

A little off-topic... but worthed to /. readers, a mature Open Source game based on Tolkien's world: Troubles of Middle-Eearth. ToME has been improved over several years. It is based on the venerable Angband rogue-like game. There's a lot of Angband variants. There's even a Multiplayer ToME in development.

ToME is great for being very faithful and compliant to Tolkien's world. Ok, maybe it's not Middle-Earth Online, but it's free and honestly, this game is freaking addictive ! :-) Do not forget to set graphics "on"... even if they're not that good.

Have you tried ToME?

I learned to touchtype (not perfectly, but pretty darn well) by playing the Rogue-like game Angband, based (extremely loosely) on the works of Tolkien. It's a lot of fun, and you use every key on the keyboard that has a symbol on it for some action or other (most have at least 2 actions, some have 3: normal keypress, Shift, and Ctrl)

It's a somewhat unorthodox, but highly addictive, method of learning to touchtype. My current favourite variant is T.O.M.E., Tales of Middle-Earth, formerly PernAngband (until Anne McCaffrey got mad :-P)

Dan Aris

Troubles of Middle-Earth is an open source multiplayer online game based on Tolkien's work. Ok, no great graphics, but the game is quite fun and complete.

Ever try to read the Silmarillion ? It's full of tons of different names and places and all kinds of stuff, and it can be tough to wade through it. But after playing Angband for a while, so many things were taken from the Silmarillion, when I finally read the book, the names had a familiarity to them as I try to connect them to what I saw in the game, and in the process, the very dry book becomes interesting. And when I played T.o.M.E., the geography of Middle Earth became much more interesting, because I had to navigate it myself in the game.

Another example: Robo Odyssey. This game was written back in 1984, and it teaches the player about logic gates and electronics design. I wish there were a more modern implementation of something similar (anyone out there know of anything similar?) that let you wire with logic gates to solve puzzles, but it really got me interested in doing logic design. I never did beat the game, and it had bugs, but the concept is great for teaching logic and electronic design.

Heh, the Known Bugs page on the Online TOME website is, itself, bugged. http://t-o-m-e.net/bugs.php?tome_current=1 Think that one is known?

Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.

Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.

Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.

Lets consider some others:

zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...

Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.

Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:

Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.

Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.

Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.

There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)

Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.

While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.

There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)

Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.

There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.

Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.

Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...

These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.

Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot :-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.