Slashdot Mirror

I think the project you are lookingfor is mAngband (multiplayer Angband). It is an expanded and refined rougelike game that has been extensively rewritten for mutiplayer play. Specifically Angband is based or Moria and uMoria which was based off Rouge. I believe Nethack forked off from Moria as well so it could go a different direction. The official site for vannila Angband is http://rephial.org/play [rephial.org] An out of data page with a number of Angband variant listed is at http://thangorodrim.net/ [thangorodrim.net] and http://www.mangband.org/ [mangband.org] is the homepage for multiplayer Angband

What I saw...

blah blah blah blah ROUGE blah blah blah blah ROUGELIKE blah blah blah blah

ROGUE DAMNIT! ROGUE!

Angband is awesome. Because the text display is rather simple, it allows the developers to focus on the game play. There are even text animations when throwing a ball of fire. Unfortunately it's difficult to play Angband on Slashdot because of all the input filters :(

#####
#.>.#
#....
#.@.#
#####

I think the project you are lookingfor is mAngband (multiplayer Angband). It is an expanded and refined rougelike game that has been extensively rewritten for mutiplayer play. Specifically Angband is based or Moria and uMoria which was based off Rouge. I believe Nethack forked off from Moria as well so it could go a different direction. The official site for vannila Angband is http://rephial.org/play An out of data page with a number of Angband variant listed is at http://thangorodrim.net/ and http://www.mangband.org/ is the homepage for multiplayer Angband

Angband Borg: http://www.thangorodrim.net/borg.html

I used to play Moria and later Angband. Although it is text-based, the source code is several hundred thousand lines! On the other side there are the old proprietary games which you can now get for a low price. I think it may be easier to differentiate your product by developing for J2ME mobiles. Event then competition will be very hard.

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.

What about Angband?

I have this as my laptop's screensaver.

I dunno, he did make a rather popular movie trilogy based on the game Angband.

Personally I'd like to see the exact opposite -- PC gaming that is more appropriate for a PC. For instance windowed gaming:

The only game I can think of at the moment that really makes use of a windowing environment is Angband. Ironically, most versions use ASCII graphics.

The basic versions I've seen tend to have one 80x24 window for the map, another for the inventory, etc.

Angband: http://www.thangorodrim.net/, runs on almost anything. You can save, but that can't save you from death. (Well, you could cheat with savefile scumming, or go in to Wizard Mode.)

Requires concentration. No matter how bad the day, you can get in there for 5 or ten minutes, or hours if you prefer. You just have to concentrate. Low memory and processor overhead so you can let your compile or burn, render or download continue in the background.

Coffee is the drug of choice at work, but Angband gives you 5 minutes to switch moods. (Did I mention you have to concentrate?)

Angband/Moria/NetHack has had me coming back for decades now. --Xan

That's one reason why I bought Virtual PC for Windows.

- the graphics "degrade" - not really, but old games used to engage us with no problems, and the graphics were still amazing every new generation of games... go back a few generations and the graphics just plain look "bad", even though they haven't actually changed

Hey, I still play Angband, and the graphics still look OK to me....

- gameplay becomes simplistic - yes, it was great at the time, and some games were pioneers and are true classics.

...which is one of the reasons I tend to buy either used or clearance. If you wait a year or three, rather than having the latest and greatest, the hardware requirements are a lot cheaper to meet, the frame rates are better, and the bugs have (almost) all been patched out.

I suspect the game industry needs to learn more about the handling of "back titles" from the movie and publishing industries... hopefully, more from the latter.

Another roguelike game that I have found very entertaining, despite the lack of graphics. Sooner or later, you will become that @ sign...

Screw Nethack. Try skill based angband instead. Or any of the variants on thangorodrim.

or there is always mud.rocke.org:4000

Moria and Angband have had hallucination status flags a decade before Nintendo submitted this patent. It wasn't a variable effect, but when something triggered hallucinations it caused you to see all sorts of things that weren't there and couldn't be acted on.

Of course, since those are free, open-source games, nobody saw the need to patent features like that.

Oh yeah. Hard to work your way through anything too involved when you've got a family who, for some unfathomable reason, wants to spend time with you.

It's much harder to find "pick-up-and-play" PC games these days that fit into the highly fragmented gaming schedule that you (and I) occupy. Funny you should mention Moria; I've recently picked up Angband http://www.thangorodrim.net/ as a good candidate. It's a bit easier on the consoles; I have an XBox and things like Worms 3D and the various racing games work out wonderfully. My little spud loves watching Burnout 3, so we're doing things "as a family" so to speak.

Why bother when you can play Angband?

Try angband http://www.phial.com/angband/Please don't link to that page, it's well out of date by several years.

Instead, link to http://www.thangorodrim.net/.

Angband's a great RPG. Although it's more for D&D freaks.. :D

Now, maybe someone could create a knoppix type distro that has some super cool video game that only works on linux.

Or better yet: make it yourself

As for cool videogames, ever tried Angband? It doesn't _only_ work in linux though, so maybe this is not what you mean. Maybe Tux Racer is more to your liking :)

While that is somewhat true, remember: we're not necessarily talking about Half-Life 2 or anything here. I'm thinking of games more along the line of, say, Scorched Earth or something like that. After all, if you could play a spiffy-fun game written in assembler or C back in the days of the 486, then *surely* we can run a spiffy-fun game written in Java on your 2Ghz+ system, even if you burn a few cycles in the process. And there were some fun games. The one which immediately comes to mind for me is Inner Space- that game ROCKED, and it was incredibly smooth: even on my 486SX (33Mhz).

And some games, like Angband, never needed zippy-fast rendering performance.

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.

Try another roguelike game that is less randomly wierd. I recommend Angband or one of its variants. I'm a total addict. Yesterday my favorite character died, one i had been working on for five months. Mostly my own stupidity. I almost cried :(

Kind of holding the unregistered players in low regard, are we?

(For those not familiar with roguelikes, the acronym means, "Lrg Nabgure Fghcvq Qrngu." NetHack's the most infamous for the concept.)

If NetHack seems too insane, you could try Angband. It's not any easier, but it's much more rational.

Well, if there's a graphical display, which do I prefer to look at- some cute/hot chick, or a big muscle-bound he-man? Sure, it might be fun to think of yourself as the guy with muscles, but playing with a girl on the screen is significantly more... aesthetically pleasing. :)
Of course, this is a different matter for games where you have a first-person view or in which you have a first-person view, or good old-fashioned textmode RPG games (Angband anyone?) I don't really care.
and in the case of Virtua Figher 4, I play Pai almost exclusively due to her attack set. It's fast, it's got quick counters, and it's not too hard to execute the manuvers.

[TOPIC] Luc: #angband: the self-help no-relationship support group. playing angband optional. (FFTA, on the other hand...)

If you do end up using WorldIRC, just connect to one of their servers- the randomizing server (irc.worldirc.org) has a tendency to route you over to another IRC network (Infomatrix or something like that).

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

Every single app that I would want to run is already available and runs under Linux natively. For example:

mozilla, neverwinter nights(w/ expansion pack), gcc, gdb, make, gnuplot, bc, gimp, icebreaker, valgrind, electric fence, Crossfire, LyX, angband, Nethack (falcon's eye), vim, XFree86, pekwm and netpbm.

There are few apps that I run that are not on that list. Really, if you think about it. On any computer system the top 90% of the apps you run could probably be counted on one hand.

But I'm one of those unusual people who has his laser printer working in Linux and only has a windows box to test the software I write. I compile the windows version on Linux of course. (using these scripts to build the cross compiler).

A "game" gets Linux support! Whoa! I must buy that "game" just to convince the "games" publishers that Linux is an OS worth supporting! Woohoo!....... then again I could just download Angband or NetHack and f**k the publisher :o)

Foolish cowards! Think your Nethack ascii is pretty cool, eh? Well, Angband has supported the Radeon 9500 ASC since it's initial release! Seriously, Angband is a MUCH better game, especially if you can hunt down a copy of AngbandTk. AngbandTK has the same INCREDIBLE gameplay, just with almost real graphics. Angband is based on Tolkien's books.

The Angband-page moved some time ago. The new URL ist www.thangorodrim.net. Another really good Angband-page is http://angband.oook.cz/.

Oh, and I've been playing Angband. Almost as addictive, but it doesn't require as much adrenaline. I've do play other games; it's not like Diablo is the only game in town...

My friend got me into Gran Turismo about four years ago, and since then, I've put more time and effort into it than any other game, even Angband, in which I spent countless hours death-mold-farming for experience and demon-killing for special items. So yes, now I have Gran Turismo, and put countless hours into that instead. So what about real life? It turns out the skills I've learned in GT3 about how to handle cars do actually apply in real life. I took several second places and a couple of first places last year in local SCCA autocross events. And that's me driving my Saturn against a bunch of much more powerful, agile Eclipses and Hondas in my class (STSN). I wouldn't have had the skill necessary to do so well in the class if it hadn't been for learning how to find the limits of cars so well in GT3. I suppose my driving has also gotten somewhat more aggressive, but hey, I've put 63,000 miles on my car without a single accident, so I'm sure I'm still a decent driver.

Games with full-screen character graphics are called "roguelike", after the 1980's game "rogue". IMHO, they're much deeper than most modern so-called RPGs.

Some of my favorites are angband, mangband, slashem and omega.

For general information, try this or that.

And yes indeed, raw pointers are a fundamental problem when compiling C/C++/etc for the JVM. Personally I would work around the problem by virtualising the memory used by the C program. Imagine a java class with, say, a peek method, a poke method, and a member variable containing one huge buffer (actually that's not sophisticated enough, but should convey the general idea). If the code is compiled to use this class as memory, rather than directly accessing the JVM's memory, then suddenly it can do pointer arithmetic to it's hearts content, without being thrown out of the JVM, and without compromising any sandbox.

You now have a PC running a virtual machine which is itself running a virtual memory manager. This notion is going to make some people cringe, especially those who think that Java is already slow. I agree that this solution would only be fast enough to work for legacy code, but if we suppose that you are already serious about moving to the JVM platform, then hello, wake up, your existing code is already legacy anyway.

Personally I can see it working. When I can run Angband (a game written in *very* portable C) in a Java applet I'll be satisfied... or maybe that just goes to show I'm crazy.